Marco Bellocchio: The Fascination of a Filmmaker Published on iItaly.org (http://www.iitaly.org)
Marco Bellocchio: The Fascination of a Filmmaker
Mila Tenaglia and Giulia Madron (April 02, 2014)
In collaboration with Luce Cinecittà Institute, now celebrating its 90th anniversary, the Museum of Modern Art in New York presents the greatest works of Marco Bellocchio, one of Italy’s finest movie directors
Italian cinema keeps seducing the American public these days.
Only a month after The Great Beauty picked up the Oscar for best foreign language film, another venue is shining a spotlight on Italian cinema. New York’s Museum of Modern Art has organized an amazing retrospective of touchstone films by director and screenwriter Marco Bellocchio.
During his career, Bellocchio has made over 40 films, including internationally renowned productions
Page 1 of 3 Marco Bellocchio: The Fascination of a Filmmaker Published on iItaly.org (http://www.iitaly.org) such as Vincere; Good Morning, Night; My Mother’s Smile; and Fists in the Pocket. Eighteen of them will be shown at MoMa from April 16 through May 7.
Morality and Beauty
The day after the opening at MoMa, the Italian Cultural Institute of New York [2] will hold a presentation of Morality and Beauty [3], a collection of essays about Bellocchio’s significant contribution to contemporary cinema. The book was edited by Sergio Toffetti [4], director of the Archivio Nazionale Cinema d’Impresa of Ivrea and the Piedmont branch of the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia, with the participation of Bellocchio and Richard Peña, former program director of the Film Society of Lincoln Center [5]. The presentation at the Italian Cultural Institute will be followed by a screening of Bellocchio’s latest movie, Dormant Beauty, at MoMA.
Mortality and Beauty documents the entire, extraordinary artistic career of Bellocchio with on-set photographs and sketches that provide the perfect framework for understanding the hard work that goes into polishing a film. The book also explores what Bellocchio represents for Italian and American audiences.
An irreverent eye Born in Bobbio [6], Piacenza in 1939, Marco Bellocchio has had a great interest in cinema ever since he was a young man. Throughout his 50-year career, his irreverent view of clerical rules earned him a reputation for being a rebel. He has always tended to question dominant ideologies and cast a provocative eye on society and its morals, leading people to compare him with filmmakers like Bernardo Bertolucci [7] and Pier Paolo Pasolini [8], and turning him not only into one of the most important Italian directors but an important cultural figure as well.
The director’s 1965 debut film I pugni in tasca (Fists in the Pocket), about a dysfunctional family, “forms a trilogy of Sixties’ rebelliousness,” along with La Cina è Vicina (China is Near) and Nel Nome del Padre (In the Name of the Father). These films can be compared to the work of Godard during the same period. As with Godard, Bellocchio’s iconoclastic spirit led to a series of “underground” works in the late Sixties and early Seventies, works seen far too rarely in the United States, such as Fit to be Untied and The Cinema Machine.
For international audiences, especially those in the United States, Bellocchio made a triumphant return in 2002 with L’Ora di Religione (My Mother’s Smile). Graced with an exceptional performance by Sergio Castellitto [9] as an artist whose life is upended when his mother, a woman he detested, is suddenly declared a candidate for Catholic canonization, the film finds Bellocchio returning to that spirit of rebelliousness that informed his earlier work, only now in the form of a study of the many compromises people face every day.
Two later features, Buongiorno Notte (Good Morning, Night), an unsettling depiction of the kidnapping and murder of center-left politician Aldo Moro [10], and Vincere [11], the tragic story of the woman who claimed to be Mussolini’s first wife, proved that Bellocchio was one of the very few filmmakers still capable of making serious political films that could reach international audiences, according to Richard Peña [12].
A fascinating comet
“For American audiences,” continues Peña, “Marco Bellocchio has been something like a comet, a presence in the celestial cinematic heavens that we’ve always known was out there but that would always draw close enough for us to actually see his work every ten or fifteen years. As a result, we’ve had to reacquaint ourselves with him a few times, and yet although the style and some of the themes have changed, there’s also a startling consistency to all he’s done.” For Peña, fascination is the keyword to describe the influence of Bellocchio’s work on American audiences.
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Source URL: http://www.iitaly.org/magazine/events/reports/article/marco-bellocchio-fascination- filmmaker
Links [1] http://www.iitaly.org/files/main1396483801jpg [2] http://www.iicnewyork.esteri.it/IIC_Newyork [3] http://www.iicnewyork.esteri.it/IIC_NewYork/webform/SchedaEvento.aspx?id=747&citta=Ne wYork [4] http://www.imdb.com/name/nm2985682/ [5] http://www.filmlinc.com/ [6] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bobbio [7] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernardo_Bertolucci [8] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pier_Paolo_Pasolini [9] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergio_Castellitto [10] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aldo_Moro [11] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vincere [12] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Peña
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