Even after the radical shift in register with his collaboration with Massimo Fagioli, everything still holds up: the essence of historical struggle remains the true core of Bellocchio’s cinema, whether it is the student movement of the late 1960s or the intricate psychological explorations of the 1980s. The rebellion against the fathers is the pivot around which his cinema revolves in all its possible facets.
* * *
Amid the major directors that emerged from the crowded landscape of postwar Italian cinema, Marco Bellocchio (b. 1939) stands out as an atypical figure.
Still active after more than sixty years of career, he continue to experiment with the media, and collecting awards in the process. That being said, the unevenness of his “zigzag” career, as he has described it, never truly achieved definitive recognition across the Atlantic – as, for example, did that of his contemporary Bertolucci – and even lacks the cult status that many other directors from that generation have deservedly earned.
Moreover, the unmistakable aesthetic and theoretical signature of filmmakers such as Pasolini and Fellini, whose names can become adjectives for denoting a precise and coherent style – a Felliniesque dream sequence or a Pasolinian body, for instance – does not hold in Bellocchio’s case. This resistance to critical classification can pose difficulties for critics and historians attempting to analyse and organise the vast totality of his work.
And yet an ideological undercurrent seems to characterize Bellocchio’s vast oeuvre. Though shaped by a Marxist-Leninist background, his political vision frequently dissolves like smoke in the wind at the moment of mise en scène, in the crystallisation of the cinematic image.
It is precisely this “coherent incoherence” that becomes the true mechanism running through a career as vast as Bellocchio’s – a continuous and unrelenting engagement with history, which repeatedly translates into a disenchantment with the processes that political history is supposed to bring about and that private history is supposed to bear. Is it this disillusionment, this loss of faith in the student movements and the eventual recognition of rebellion’s impossibility, that forms the true authorial question in Bellocchio’s cinema?
Alessandro and Giulia at their mother’s deathbed – Pugni in Tasca (1965)
The director’s debut, Pugni in tasca (Fists in the Pocket), dates back to 1965. Set in his native Bobbio, a small town surrounded by the Apennine Mountains in northern Italy, Fists in the Pocket can be considered one of the purest examples of a Nouvelle Vague à l’italienne, in which an existential nihilism looms large over a petite bourgeois family in the Italian provinces.
Three brothers and a sister live with their elderly blind mother in a villa nestled among the hills. Due to a lack of funds, the film’s interiors were shot entirely in the actual house of the director’s mother – a telling sign of how the biographical element, from the very beginning, becomes an essential prerogative in Bellocchio’s work.
Of the three brothers, Augusto, the eldest, is the only one with a job and the only one able to hold the family together, assuming the traits of a paternal figure otherwise absent from the household. The true protagonist, however, is Sandro, played by an iconic Lou Castel, here at the first chapter of his long collaboration with Bellocchio. His entrance is as impactful as it is emblematic: perched in a tree outside the frame, Sandro leaps down into the shot, as if violently carving out a space for himself within the landscape of Italian cinema. A solitary and withdrawn young man, Sandro harbours in his room morbid and dark fantasies, soon brought to light in his failed attempt to drive himself and his entire family off a cliff. This death drive becomes reality, though, when the young protagonist finally finds the strength to push his elderly blind mother into a ravine, in a scene where the beauty of the Apennine landscape, filtered through Bellocchio and Maramma’s icy black-and-white cinematography, becomes a territory of anguish, a presage of death.
Alessandro guides his mother towards the ravine – Pugni in Tasca
The director captures a generational rage and attacks bourgeois ennui, yet one can already sense how his pessimism exceeds any possibility of positive rebellion, how the negative establishes itself as the foundation, the structural pillar of his future work.
The film’s powerful ending confirms, with brutal clarity, the intrinsic link between rebellion and suicide: Giulia, the sister, paralysed after a fall down the stairs caused by Sandro himself, can do nothing but watch her brother perish during an epileptic seizure.
Fists in the Pocket is a blind scream against the petite bourgeoisie and, even if driven by nihilism, a radical act of accusation. As the film and literary critic Goffredo Fofi wrote, with this pre-1968 debut, the young Bellocchio “had deluded us with a radicalism that he did not, in fact, possess” (Fofi 2016). And indeed, the radicalism announced by this debut seems paradoxically to fade precisely during the height of the years of political contestation, when one might instead have expected a clearer political consciousness, and a possible channeling of Sandro/Lou Castel’s rage into a constructive drive.
In the years surrounding 1968, Bellocchio directed two works: a feature film, La Cina è vicina (China Is Near), winner of the Leone d’Argento together with Godard’s La Chinoise; and a short film entitled Discutiamo, discutiamo (Let’s Discuss, Let’s Discuss), released in 1969 as part of a collective film that also included shorts by filmmakers such as Bertolucci, Pasolini, Godard, and Carlo Lizzani.
It is important to note that in those years Bellocchio was very involved in the student movement developing in Italy. Although already nearly thirty, he took part in the student occupation of the University of Turin in 1967, and he was a member of the Union of Italian Marxist Leninist Communists, for whom he helped shoot, in 1969, two documentaries, Paola (Il popolo calabrese ha rialzato la testa) (Paola [The Calabrian People Have Raised Their Heads]) and Viva il 1º Maggio rosso proletario (Long Live the First of May, Red and Proletarian). In these works, however, he largely limited himself to executing the party line, without leaving, by his own admission, any distinct personal artistic or ideological imprint.
Nevertheless, in their first relevant appearance in Bellocchio’s cinema in La Cina è vicina, students are portrayed as spoiled young people, their political actions reduced to adolescent pranks, childish games that already conceal a clear class hypocrisy. For Bellocchio, China and the Maoist movement are not “near” Italy at all, still bound instead to the mechanisms of provincial farce.
Bellocchio and the students – Discutiamo, discutiamo (1969)
With Discutiamo, discutiamo two years later, Bellocchio moves even closer to the heart of the theme of university protest, attempting to stage and lay bare the ideological theoretical structure of the student movement. In a classroom, students from the University of Rome perform a pantomime of a possible discussion between various factions of the student body, observed by a professor played by Bellocchio himself. Often labeled a Brechtian parenthesis within the director’s filmography, Discutiamo, discutiamo is constructed around the Verfremdungseffekt of the great German playwright: from the deliberately improvised acting (Bellocchio himself is often caught laughing in front of the camera) to the crude costumes (the professors’ beards are clearly fake, held to the chin by an elastic band in plain sight), everything evokes Brechtian anti-realism. Yet while in Brecht this served to remind the spectator of the fiction of the staging, Bellocchio turns the method into a parody of the student movement and its counterpart.
Certainly, Bellocchio was not the only one to cast a shadow of suspicion over the concrete political possibilities of the 1968 movement. Pasolini, for instance, famously expressed his skepticism toward the students upheaval of those years. Pasolini was nevertheless able, for a long period of his career, to outline a utopian vision, an idea of genuine rebellion, such as the sexual rebellion of subproletarian bodies. Bellocchio’s cinema, by contrast, “offers only negations; it offers no guidance on how to proceed; it offers no utopias” (Brook 2010).
Bellocchio’s two works in the years surrounding 1968 thus reveal a total demystification of the movement and more generally of the very idea of rebellion, without offering anything in return: a nihilism that leaves no room for easy illusions.
Angelo and the school students argue with the principal, Father Corazza – Nel nome del padre (1972)
It is in 1972, though, that he directs probably the film that can be considered his ideological manifesto of the period, Nel nome del padre (In the Name of the Father). Set in the 1950s within a rigid and claustrophobic Catholic boarding school similar to the one Bellocchio himself attended in those years, the film once again draws from the director’s own life.
Far from the wide hills of Bobbio, Bellocchio’s cinema becomes a cinema of interiors, rigid and dark in its articulation of space. Nel nome del padre is emblematic in this sense: almost all of its scenes unfold within the gloom of the boarding school, where three clearly distinct groups of people take shape, a fictional microcosm of society as a whole and its tripartite division into students, workers, and the ruling class.
The first group, the students, stands at the centre of the film. Forced to endure tedious and obscurantist lessons steeped in Catholic dogma, their stagnant routine is disrupted by the arrival of Angelo Transeunti (Yves Beneyton), a Nietzschean, Übermensch like figure with a Mitteleuropean physiognomy, who enters the school injecting a new impetus into the student body. Angelo, however, is not a leftist student but a pure rationalist, a forerunner of the individual subject of the neo-capitalist society that was beginning to take shape in Italy in those years. He does not seek compromise among the various groups and figures within the school; he demands instead efficiency and discipline, stripped of any trace of superstition.
The cafeteria attendants form the second group, that of the workers. Here too, Bellocchio chooses to portray them in anything but a canonical manner: the workers are not a cohesive and well-organised class of operai but a grotesque gathering of society’s outcasts, whom the priests’ administration has “saved” from asylums and other desperate circumstances. Among them reappears Lou Castel, playing a character who seems like a worn-down version of the nihilistic young protagonist of Bellocchio’s debut. Alongside him stand other bizarre figures, including Tino, a mentally ill man who believes in alien civilisations with whom he attempts to communicate.
Finally, the ruling group, composed of professors and priests at the head of the convent. Their power is archaic and decayed, clinging almost vampirically to new generations of students and carrying the unmistakable scent of death: “You keep forgetting about death, so when you remember it, you are afraid. Death is like medicine; it must be taken regularly,” preaches a priest to the rebellious student Franco (Aldo Sassi), who instead tries to break free from the funerary and religious individualism of Catholicism, seeking to establish a sort of collectivism between the students.
Angelo in his room – Nel nome del padre
Within such a carefully constructed environment, one might expect a clear political stance from a committed director – a thorough analysis of the rebellion of sons against fathers that could culminate in revolt, a precursor to organisation, or at least a violent clash with the ruling class. Yet, if such violence exists, it remains largely futile; it is exactly in Nel nome del padre that Bellocchio’s disenchantment becomes heaviest and most oppressive: a gesture shorn of any substance, a directionless impulse.
The finale stands as one of the bitterest and sharpest in Italian cinema, emblematic of Bellocchio’s fundamentally negative vision. The students’ and workers’ attempt at organisation and revolt against the clergy collapses into no concrete action: the two subordinate classes prove to be incompatible, and the bourgeois nature of most of the students emerges at the decisive moment, leading to the implosion of the upheaval. Accompanied by the deranged, gibberish-speaking servant Dino, Angelo storms out of the boarding school to topple a pear tree reputed to be miraculous, leaving no metaphysical or religious illusion unscathed by his merciless rationalist force.
After the misdeed, the pair drives away from the school along the highway, a symbol of Italy’s emerging industrialised capitalism. At first glance, this escape might seem, with grotesque optimism, like an alliance between classes, a glimmer of possibility at the end of the tunnel. Yet a closer reading inevitably reveals the scene’s marked pessimism. A clear, unbridgeable fissure exists between the two: first in their semblance and then in their very language – Tino’s nonsense stripped of meaning and Angelo’s icy, authoritarian speech – and, most importantly, in their purpose: any sense of a collective is far behind them.
With his encounter and subsequent highly debated artistic partnership with the psychoanalyst Massimo Fagioli, the late 1970s marked both a personal and professional turning point for Bellocchio: the end of the ’68 epic, alongside profound changes in Italy’s social and intellectual landscape, found expression in Bellocchio through an emerging and pronounced psychological dimension.
Above all, Bellocchio’s disenchantment evolved into what could be called a leftist melancholy, to borrow the terminology of Enzo Traverso, embodying a sense of loss and reflection that became central to his cinema in this period.
Giovanni at his brother’s deathbed – Gli occhi, la bocca (1982)
All of this finds full expression in 1982, with Gli occhi, la bocca (The Eyes, the Mouth), a gothic play of echoes and references. Giovanni, played again by Lou Castel, returns home to reunite with his family after many years in order to bid farewell to his twin brother Pippo, who committed suicide with a gunshot, the wound still visible on his deathbed temple. The rigid, decadent atmosphere of Giovanni’s bourgeois family is broken only by the presence of Wanda, a young woman of South American proletarian origins, with whom Pippo had a relationship and who is now expecting his child.
Bellocchio chooses to make a profoundly intimate film. “Marx can wait,” Pippo had replied to his brother’s urging to read Capital and take part in the political struggles of those years. Marx Can Wait would also become, many years later, the title of a documentary Bellocchio dedicated to his own brother, who likewise died young by suicide.
This weaving of biographical echoes further expands when Giovanni decides to enter a cinema to meet Wanda, with whom he has meanwhile begun a relationship. On the screen appear images from Fists in the Pocket, Bellocchio’s directorial debut, in which Lou Castel had starred in the leading role.
This additional extradiegetic reference does not pass unnoticed, but rather embodies the very essence of the film: Giovanni, after all, was once an actor, but his defiant attitude, his gaze that once conveyed the energy of the political struggles of the 1960s, is now “out of fashion.”
Giovanni watches I Pugni in Tasca at the cinema – Gli occhi, la bocca (1982)
“It is no longer the time of fists in pockets,” his father (Michel Piccoli) reminds him in a heated family argument: Giovanni’s inability to become an adult ends up referring once more to that waiting, to that perpetual immaturity of those struggles. Marx can wait, but meanwhile time has passed, leaving nothing but ghosts.
Thus Gli occhi, la bocca ultimately tells of Bellocchio’s post-1968 melancholy: the death of the brother as the infinite prolongation of a waiting for maturity, both political and personal.
As Tullio Masoni insightfully wrote, “in many authentic directors, there are breakups, turnarounds, and long lapses, but everything comes back, everything holds up” (Brook 2010).
This is certainly true of Marco Bellocchio. Even after the radical shift in register with his collaboration with Massimo Fagioli, everything still holds up: the essence of historical struggle remains the true core of Bellocchio’s cinema, whether it is the student movement of the late 1960s or the intricate psychological explorations of the 1980s. The rebellion against the fathers is the pivot around which his cinema revolves in all its possible facets.
The figure of the mother, on the other hand, is never treated by Bellocchio in an Oedipal sense. She is not a figure of reconciliation; on the contrary, she often embodies a terrifying entity, as shown, for example, by the contempt toward the mother in Fists in the Pocket, by the reprehensible maternal figure played by Laura Betti in Nel nome del padre, or even by the hate expressed by the son toward his almost-saint mother in L’ora di religione (2002).
Thus, the rebellion against the law of the fathers resurfaces in another work of the 1980s, perhaps the one most deeply marked by Fagioli’s influence, Il diavolo in corpo (Devil in the Flesh). In the final scene, during his high school oral examination, Andrea (Federico Pitzalis) reads a passage from Antigone. Among the listeners sits his lover Giulia, played by Maruschka Detmers, whose father was assassinated by the Red Brigades and who, before meeting Andrea, had been promised in marriage to a repentant member of that same terrorist group.
In the film’s closing gesture, the camera lingers in a long close-up on Giulia’s face as she breaks into tears, while Andrea explains to his teacher the passage he has just read: “In all their depth collide those who make themselves guardians of human laws and those who honour the laws of the gods and of the fathers, grounding their existence upon them.”
Final close-up of Giulia’s face – Il diavolo in corpo (1986)
The relationship between Andrea and Giulia seems to stress both the futility of revolutionary gestures against the law of the fathers and the simultaneous erosion of that very law. Throughout the film, both are portrayed as apolitical figures, suspended in a muted, monotone register. Bellocchio and Fagioli thus reread Sophocles’ tragedy through the lens of contemporary political disillusionment: the melancholy that follows the end of ideologies and the growing inconsistency of paternal authority.
The already mentioned Red Brigades, alongside the clergy, are among the most recurring group or institution in Bellocchio’s filmography. Beyond the previously discussed Il diavolo in corpo, the extra-parliamentary leftist terrorist movement is investigated with far greater attention in relation to one of the most decisive episodes in Italian political history in the second half of the twentieth century: the Moro affair, namely the kidnapping and, ultimately, the murder of Aldo Moro, the secretary of Italy’s most important political party, the Christian Democrats.
Far from coincidental, the reasons for this interest lie within the essence of the Moro case itself, in which one can implicitly find Bellocchio’s cinema in its entirety: the paternal and ecclesiastical figure of the secretary of a Catholic party; the rebellion of the extra-parliamentary left, immediately deemed by history as futile; and a violence without a clearly articulated utopia, directed against established power.
Aldo Moro played by Roberto Herlitzka – Buongiorno, notte (2003). Public domain image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
It is from these premises that one of the director’s most celebrated and debated films, Buongiorno, notte (Good Morning, Night) (2003) comes to light, a chronicle of the days fifty-five days in which Moro was kept under the control of the Brigade.
The film does not limit itself to a documentary framework but, in Bellocchio’s own words, takes on the courage to “go beyond history.” The director constructs “a moral fable on the nature and the deep root of violence” (Durst & Pezzella 2004), in which history, fiction, and the atavistic clash against the law of the fathers take on an oneiric tension with reality. As Durst and Pezzella writes, in Buongiorno, notte, “Moro becomes a ghost of the absent father, ambiguously hated and mourned” (Ibid).
In this context, the character of Chiara takes on the role of a reversed Antigone: a member of the Red Brigades and an agent of the kidnapping, she remains suspended between the sacrificial killing of the fathers and liberation from their law, between the refusal of established power and an attempt at dialogue with it.
Bellocchio’s consideration constitutes an institutional vision of the historical and dialectical process, but not a naive one. “I no longer believe, as perhaps I did at twenty five, that throwing one’s mother into a ravine can be the solution, but I do believe in a dimension of refusal that includes respect for legality” (Bellocchio 2004), he writes in an article for la Repubblica shortly after the film’s release. Bellocchio thus seems to reaffirm that “by killing the father, one enters this space without exit, a prison at once for the victim and for the executioners” (Durst & Pezzella). The element of novelty here, though, is not represented by reconciliation with the law of the fathers. On the contrary, as has already emerged in the previous analyses, it lies in Bellocchio’s recognition of a real and possible “dimension of refusal.”
Aldo Moro walks down the street after his liberation – Buongiorno, notte
The ending thus unfolds through two parallel visions. On the one hand, Moro is freed by Chiara, and the camera captures him walking through the streets of Rome, restored to a fragile and almost impossible freedom. On the other hand, the factual reality of events reasserts itself: the assassination of the Christian Democrat statesman, followed by archival images of the state funeral, at which, by the family’s request, the body was absent: a mortuary celebration of the state apparatus itself.
The force that drives Bellocchio to stage an alternative ending to the Moro affair resurfaces, with even greater clarity, in his monumental later work, Esterno notte (Exterior Night) (2022). In this nearly six-hour project, Bellocchio, unlike in the 2003 film, lingers meticulously over the unfolding of events. The expanded duration allows him to focus fully on the multiple actors involved in the almost Shakespearean historical drama, political figures and family members that were deliberately left in the shadows in Buongiorno, notte.
Once again, Moro does not die. Instead, he is shown battered and frail in a hospital bed, subjected to the gazes of the political class. Here, though, Bellocchio goes further, exposing the more radical implication of Moro’s hypothetical survival. If in Buongiorno, notte the director’s impulse was to reckon with the fathers without fully entering the political machinery of the event, in Esterno notte the perspective shifts. Bellocchio orchestrates thus a dialectical tension between the imaginary and the real, a hint of a possible uchronia where history is released from its apparent inevitability and its repressed alternatives are allowed to surface.
The stare of party leaders at Aldo Moro in his hospital bed – Esterno notte (2022)
In Buongiorno, notte, the political is almost entirely absorbed into the private sphere. The brigatistis’ discussions and ideological motivations occupy only marginal screen time; the true catharsis lies instead in Giulia’s intensely personal journey. Her recognition of the political error of the terrorist group to which she belongs emerges within an intimate framework: the memory of her partisan father, the communist singing of his former comrades on the anniversary of his death. Even the archival footage takes on a private, oneiric quality. Under the dissonant music of Pink Floyd, Chiara’s definitive moment of awakening comes when she “sees,” or rather, daydreams, archival images of the fascists’ abuses against the partisans during the war, precisely as Moro’s death sentence is being pronounced by her comrades.
As Bellocchio himself has suggested, Esterno notte functions as the countershot to this psychoanalytically inflected framing of the Moro affair. The political leader’s body, momentarily placed “outside history” as it lies on the hospital bed, merged with nearly six hours of detailed historical reconstruction, entirely absent from the earlier film, represents the first real utopian imaginary in Bellocchio’s career.
As De Gaetano observes, this introductory scene does not falsify history but rather “frees it from its inexorable closure” (De Gaetano 2022). The dreamlike final sequence in Buongiorno, notte was in fact “still under the sign of ‘hallucinatory liberation,’” a liberation from the image of the fathers and from the weight of their legacy pressing on the children. The opening of Esterno notte, by contrast, immediately clarifies the director’s intention to conceive of cinematic fiction as history’s countershot: a site for the analysis of unresolved possibilities.
Aldo Moro bears the cross for all the sins of the Christian Democracy – Esterno notte
Ultimately, the fil rouge that links together Bellocchio’s filmography can be described as the idea of history as a process of antagonisms. Neither fully dialectical nor deeply conservative, the director outlines historical and generational struggle as a necessary site of confrontation that ultimately exists for its own perpetuation. An unresolved polarity between political and private, fathers and children, the enclosed space of imprisonment and the open space of his native valleys.
In 1980, Bellocchio realises a small but crucial film for his long and acrobatic career, Vacanze in Val Trebbia, a fifty-minute hybrid between fiction and documentary, poised between realist observation and Christological symbolism. A narrative of a holiday in Val Trebbia, in the director’s native places, performed by his own family and by the director himself. During an argument with his wife, who no longer wishes to remain there and urges him to finally sell the house, Bellocchio replies “to sell … but it is not only a matter of selling, it means deciding to close with one’s past, which is one of the fundamental problems of human beings.”
This is then, ultimately, one of the fundamental conceptions through which Bellocchio’s cinematic mechanism has moved across sixty years of career: the indecision, the impossibility of definitively severing ties with the past, whether in the public or the private sphere.
Works Cited
Bellocchio, Marco. “Marco Bellocchio: Il coraggio di andare oltre la storia.” Feltrinelli Editore, September 15, 2003. https://www.feltrinellieditore.it/news/2003/09/17/marco-bellocchio-il-coraggio-di-andare-oltre-la-storia-1980/.
Brook, Clodagh J. Marco Bellocchio: The cinematic I in the political sphere. University of Toronto Press, 2010.
De Gaetano, Roberto. “Tragedia senza catarsi.” Fata Morgana, June 13, 2022, https://www.fatamorganaweb.it/esterno-notte-parte-2-di-marco-bellocchio/.
Durst, Margarete, and Mario Pezzella. “Discutono di Buongiorno notte di Marco Bellochio.” Iride 17.1 (2004): 189-198.
Fofi, Goffredo. “Il cinema del no.” Elèuthera, 2016. https://www.eleuthera.it/scheda_libro.php?idlib=588.
* * *
Unless noted otherwise, all images are screenshots from the films discussed.
