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BELLOCCHIO ON BELLOCCHIO
Italian director Marco Bellocchio comments on the key films in
his 40-year career
BY DEBORAH YOUNG
Fists In His Pocket (1965)
"The great advantage of first films is that you're nobody and you have no history, so you have the freedom to risk everything, you have nothing to lose. My name may remain linked to this film above all. The anger that turns into the murder of a mother and a brother was very much in sync with the times and with the things that were exploding and about to explode. The film is actually about the nihilistic fervor of a youth, while the early phase of the post-'68 movement, the one I liked, was libertarian: empowering the imagination, the non-violent challenging of fathers and professors, and so on. Then things changed."
In The Name of the Father (1971)
"I attended a Catholic boys' school for three years, but I remember the experience as more normal and mediocre than sadistic. The film was conceived in images transfigured through cinematic and pictorial expression; the story came later. I love the film visually, but at the narrative level there were some weak passages. When the film was shown at the New York Film Festival, the New York Times critic noted that the structure was weak. I came home and we cut ten minutes out, making it sharper."
Leap Into the Void (1980)
"This morbid story was supposed to be my last film about the family, but the theme turns up again in The Eyes, the Mouth and The Religion Hour. An artist's incoherence is normal! There's also a change in film language. Images dealing with the past appear not as flashbacks or dreams, but erupt in the form of visions, intrusions of past on the present. Philippe Noiret was originally cast to play the Piccoli role but had to bow out due to other work commitments."
The Eyes, The Mouth (1982)
"We were considering entirely different actors - Roberto Benigni, Michele Placido, even Massimo Troisi. In the end Lou Castel played himself. He created a funereal, depressing character; he lacked the vivacity and mad folly of the first film. When you decide to go back to a subject, you need to change the team."
The Religion Hour (2002)
"This is the film that really represents a radical break for me. It marks a step to liberation in regard to the persecuting ghost of my first film. It's always very important to see how a film is born. For mysterious reasons, the nucleus was the image of a middle-aged man who discovers his mother is being made a saint-something totally paradoxical and absurd in the context of his life. It's as though he intuits that the family from which he thought himself completely separated has returned for a final attack. As a layman and an atheist he becomes an important pawn, because if he converts it would help the process of canonization."
Good Morning, Night (2003)
"The theme is space, a typical apartment which is occupied by the Red Brigades and by a fake couple who pretend to be a family. In cinema, the family is defined, first of all, visually by where they live. My memories of family life and all its meanings are also present here. The kitchen, the corridor, the bathroom· The apartment was very carefully constructed at Cinecittà, just as the apartment in Leap into the Void had been at De Paolis studios."
Deborah Young is Variety's Rome correspondent.
© 2004 by Deborah Young
