calendario eventi  :: 

X

15/4/2014

Marco Bellocchio

The Museum of Modern Art - MoMA, New York

The remarkable career of Marco Bellocchio, director of an impressive number of features, documentaries, and shorts for both television and cinema, has encompassed a wide range of genres and subjects. Yet his work remains distinctive and personal, reflecting his uncompromising views and artistic ambition. During his 50-year career Bellocchio has questioned prevailing ideologies, confronted the church and the radical left in equal measure, and challenged notions of morality and family in a manner that has established him as one of Italy’s most important filmmakers and, along with Bernardo Bertolucci and Pier Paolo Pasolini, a leading cultural figure for successive generations of Italians.

His directorial debut, Fists in the Pocket (1965)—a major shock to both Italian cinema and society, and a prophetic precursor to the student revolutions of the late 1960s—contains many of the themes Bellocchio would explore throughout his career, and established his reputation as a controversial director, one who consistently confronts the sociopolitical issues that define a particular moment. The director has challenged the powers that be, the censors, and sometimes even audiences by confronting psychoanalysis, patriarchy, sexuality, women’s roles, the family, the church, politics, the press, the right to die, anarchy, and terrorism, among other themes—lending to each his intelligence and distinct interpretation. Clearly enamored by the possibilities of visual expression and mastering his craft, he has continued to forcefully push the boundaries of cinematic expression throughout his career.

In collaboration with Luce Cinecittà, MoMA presents new and restored 35mm prints of most of Marco Bellocchio’s cinematic productions, from his earliest films to his latest, revealing a particularly rich oeuvre in contemporary Italian filmmaking. All films are from Italy and directed by Marco Bellocchio, unless otherwise noted.

Marco Bellocchio: A Retrospective is presented by The Museum of Modern Art, New York, in collaboration with Luce Cinecittà, Rome. Organized by Jytte Jensen, Curator, Department of Film, MoMA, and Camilla Cormanni and Paola Ruggiero, Luce Cinecittà; with thanks to Dave Kehr, Adjunct Curator, Department of Film, MoMA.

The exhibition is made possible by The Junior Associates of The Museum of Modern Art.

Prints courtesy of Celluloid Dreams, IFC, Istituto Luce Cinecittà, Janus Films, New Yorker Films, Rai Cinema, Rai Trade, Ripley’s Film, Surf Film, and Swank.

Related Film Screenings

Upcoming
Film Screenings & Events
The Wedding Director. 2006. Italy/France. Directed by Marco Bellocchio. Courtesy Films Sans Frontières
Il Regista di matrimoni (The Wedding Director)

2006. Italy. Written and directed by Marco Bellocchio. With Sergio Castellitto, Donatella Finocchiaro, Sami Frey. Framed by two gorgeously choreographed weddings—only one of which might be real—the stage is set for the spectacle of a film director in rapid decline. Sergio Castellitto is perfect as the depressive director saddled with cheating colleagues and demanding fans. When he falls for a princess in a castle guarded by two dogs and a menacing father, he’ll do anything to stop her wedding. Farcical and cynical in equal measure, the film is also a heartfelt critique of the state of the Italian movie industry and, by extension, the whole society in which “the Dead commands,” and everyone else cheats, deceives, usurps, and creates bad art, accompanied by hideous pop music. The heart of the real artist comes through in the movie itself, though, with its innocent fairy tale symbolism and magnificent use of all kinds of imagery fueled by the imagination, from church and pagan ceremonies, to surveillance and photographic images, to dreams and movies. In Italian; English subtitles. 100 min.

Wednesday, April 16, 2014, 8:00 p.m., Theater 1, T1 (Introduced by Marco Bellocchio and Maya Sansa)
Monday, April 28, 2014, 7:30 p.m., Theater 1, T1

Film Screenings & Events
Dormant Beauty. 2012. Italy/France. Directed by Marco Bellocchio. Courtesy Studio PUNTOeVIRGOLA
Bella addormentata (Dormant Beauty)

2012. Italy/France. Directed by Marco Bellocchio. Screenplay by Veronica Raimo, Stefano Rulli, Marco Bellocchio. With Toni Servillo, Isabelle Huppert, Alba Rohrwacher, and Maya Sansa. The multilayered narrative of Bellocchio’s latest film is constructed around Italy’s equivalent of the Terri Schiavo case, a legal struggle around the fate of a woman, Eluana Englaro, suspended in a vegetative coma for 17 years. Each story plays out on a different stylistic level: domestic drama (a liberal senator risks losing the love of his deeply religious daughter), social realism (a young doctor struggles to save a drug addict from herself), and operatic delirium (a famous actress creates a theatrical spectacle around her own daughter, a young woman kept alive by a respirator). In Italian; English subtitles. 115 min.

Thursday, April 17, 2014, 7:00 p.m., Theater 1, T1 (Introduced by Marco Bellocchio and Maya Sansa)
Friday, April 25, 2014, 8:00 p.m., Theater 1, T1

Film Screenings & Events
Fists in the Pocket. 1965. Italy. Directed by Marco Bellocchio. Courtesy Photofest
I Pugni in tasca (Fists in the Pocket)

1965. Italy. Written and directed by Marco Bellocchio. With Lou Castel, Paola Pitagora, Marino Masé. Blending politics and psychology, Bellocchio’s first feature, made when he was 26, was among the first Italian films to give voice to the anger and alienation that would define the generation of 1968. Riding that resentment, the Dutch actor Lou Castel became a cult figure as the seizure-prone young man who unilaterally decides that the world would be better off without some members of his decaying, haute bourgeois family—including his blind mother (Liliana Gerace), whom he lures into walking off a cliff. In Italian; English subtitles. 105 min.

Friday, April 18, 2014, 4:00 p.m., Theater 1, T1
Sunday, April 27, 2014, 5:30 p.m., Theater 1, T1

Film Screenings & Events
The Eyes, the Mouth. 1982. Italy/France. Directed by Marco Bellocchio
Gli Occhi, la Bocca (The Eyes, the Mouth)

1982. Italy/France. Directed by Marco Bellocchio. Screenplay by Marco Bellocchio, Vincenzo Cerami, Catherine Breillat. With Lou Castel, Emmanuelle Riva, Michel Piccoli. Seventeen years after Fists in the Pocket, Bellocchio reunited with his star, Lou Castel, for a follow-up study of class and family relations in the wake of a failed revolution. In a role that draws on aspects of his own life, Castel plays a fading icon of the 1960s who returns to his provincial hometown to attend the funeral of his twin brother, who has committed suicide. He finds himself drawn to his dead brother’s fiancée (Angela Molina), a working-class immigrant from Latin America, even as he blames her for his brother’s death. Premiere of newly restored version by Ripley's Film. In Italian; English subtitles. 101 min.

Friday, April 18, 2014, 7:00 p.m., Theater 1, T1
Saturday, April 26, 2014, 5:00 p.m., Theater 1, T1

Film Screenings & Events
The Prince of Homburg. 1997. Italy. Directed by Marco Bellocchio. Courtesy Luce Cinecittà
Il Principe di Homburg (The Prince of Homburg)

1997. Italy. Directed by Marco Bellocchio. Screenplay by Marco Bellocchio. With Andrea Di Stefano, Barbora Bobulova, Toni Bertorelli. As comfortable with period dramas as he is with contemporary narratives, Bellocchio gave his film (based on the play by Heinrich von Kleist) the subtitle “The Morals of War.” The patriarchy of army and fatherland is vividly explored in one of the key battles of the 17th-century war between Germany and Sweden. Exterior scenes and steely prison cells are filled with sharp shadows cast by an otherworldly, luminous moon, while candlelight softens and warms the reconstructed interiors of the castle’s war room and the women’s drawing room. The prince’s struggle between his love of life—and of the young Natalie—and military codes of dignity and heroism is gorgeously expressed through Kleist’s rich language and Bellocchio’s ability to hold us at the threshold between dream and reality. In Italian; English subtitles. 89 min.

Saturday, April 19, 2014, 4:00 p.m., Theater 2, T2
Wednesday, April 23, 2014, 4:30 p.m., Theater 1, T1

Film Screenings & Events
The Nanny. 1999. Italy. Directed by Marco Bellocchio. Courtesy Luce Cinecittà
La Balia (The Nanny)

1999. Italy. Directed by Marco Bellocchio. Screenplay by Marco Bellocchio and Daniela Ceselli. With Fabrizio Bentivoglio, Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, Maya Sansa. One of Bellocchio’s finest cinematic explorations of class and women’s place in the world (both symbolically and physically), is based on the novella by Luigi Pirandello, set during the dawn of 20th-century political activity among the working classes and farmers. An upper-class couple’s pleasant-enough married life in Rome sours when a baby arrives and the mother doesn’t bond with it, or as she puts it, “The baby rejects me.” The husband goes to the countryside to hire a wet nurse, a journey that’s short in distance but, as sketched in a few unforgettable scenes, reveals an entirely different milieu. As the two women— inadvertently set against each other—struggle to find their individual roles in a society full of prejudice and turmoil, their freedom to choose their own destinies is shown to be intrinsically interwoven with that of the lower classes. In Italian; English subtitles. 106 min.

Saturday, April 19, 2014, 7:30 p.m., Theater 2, T2
Tuesday, April 22, 2014, 4:00 p.m., Theater 2, T2

Film Screenings & Events
Henry IV. 1984. Italy. Directed by Marco Bellocchio. Courtesy Luce Cinecittà
Enrico IV (Henry IV)

1984. Italy. Directed by Marco Bellocchio. Screenplay by Tonino Guerra, Bellocchio, based on the play by Luigi Pirandello. With Marcello Mastroianni, Claudia Cardinale, Latou Chardons. As befits a movie about acting, Bellocchio’s “free adaptation” of Pirandello’s 1921 play brings together two great stars of the Italian cinema: Marcello Mastroianni, as a scholar who has lived for 20 years under the trauma-induced delusion that he is the 11th-century Holy Roman Emperor Henry IV, and Claudia Cardinale, as the aristocratic woman he loved before his accident. Role-playing abounds as Henry’s psychiatrist concocts an elaborate scheme to shock him out of his medieval reverie: he’ll be forced to confront both his lady love as she is in the present, and as she was in the romantic past, as embodied by her look-alike daughter. In Italian; English subtitles. 85 min.

Sunday, April 20, 2014, 2:00 p.m., Theater 2, T2
Wednesday, April 23, 2014, 7:00 p.m., Theater 2, T2

Film Screenings & Events
Good Morning, Night. 2003. Italy. Directed by Marco Bellocchio. Courtesy Photofest
Buongiorno notte (Good Morning, Night)

2003. Italy. Directed by Marco Bellocchio. Screenplay by Anna Laura Braghetti, Paolo Tavella, Daniela Ceselli, Bellocchio. With Roberto Herlitzka, Maya Sansa, Luigi Lo Cascio. Politics, family, and the power of the subconscious again come together in Bellocchio’s disconcertingly lyrical imagining of the real-life kidnapping and execution of the Italian politician Aldo Moro. The mother-son dynamic at the center of many of Bellocchio’s films is here replaced by a metaphorical father-daughter relationship, largely imagined through dreams, between the reserved Moro (Herlitzka) and the girlish Red Brigade functionary (Sansa) who provides a middle-class front for his captors. In Italian; English subtitles. 106 min.

Sunday, April 20, 2014, 5:00 p.m., Theater 2, T2
Friday, April 25, 2014, 4:00 p.m., Theater 2, T2

Film Screenings & Events
Sbatti il mostro in prima pagina (Slap the Monster on Page One)

1972. Italy/France. Directed by Marco Bellocchio. Screenplay by Sergio Donati. With Gian Maria Volonté, Fabio Garriba, Laura Betti. Blending footage of real demonstrations with newly shot sequences, the film opens with a bang as a right wing newspaper’s headquarters are attacked by anarchists. Presaging today’s international newspaper scandals, this scathing satire of the power alliances and manipulations of the news-gathering ilk is fast-paced and often funny. The film’s narrative demonstrates how political strategy determines every inch of coverage—and once again that sex sells news. Clearly enamored by the newspaper milieu, the film’s news-czar, played by the formidable Volonté, proudly prances around his kingdom and thinks nothing of ruining or building fake reputations around any dead or living creature that comes into his orbit—all while he himself is manipulated by the money men behind the scenes. I Italian; English subtitles. 90 min.

Monday, April 21, 2014, 4:00 p.m., Theater 1, T1
Saturday, April 26, 2014, 1:30 p.m., Theater 2, T2

Film Screenings & Events
My Mother’s Smile. 2002. Italy. Directed by Marco Bellocchio. Courtesy Photofest
L’Ora di religione (My Mother’s Smile)

2002. Italy. Written and directed by Marco Bellocchio. With Sergio Castellitto, Jacqueline Lustig, Chiara Conti. A celebrated author of children’s books who also happens to be a dedicated atheist, Ernesto (Castellitto) is astonished to discover that his emotionally distant mother, murdered years earlier by his psychotic brother, has been proposed for sainthood by the Vatican. Here Bellocchio creates perhaps the most spectacular of his dysfunctional families, adding the political power of the Catholic Church to his ongoing study of Italy’s eternally oppressive institutions. In Italian; English subtitles. 105 min.

Tuesday, April 22, 2014, 8:00 p.m., Theater 1, T1
Sunday, April 27, 2014, 2:00 p.m., Theater 2, T2

Film Screenings & Events
Devil in the Flesh. 1986. Italy. Directed by Marco Bellocchio
Diavolo in corpo (Devil in the Flesh)

1986. Italy. Directed by Marco Bellocchio. Screenplay by Bellocchio, Ennio De Concini, Enrico Palandri. With Maruschka Detmers, Federico Pitzalis, Anita Laurenzi. For his adaptation of Raymond Radiguet’s classic 1923 novel Le Diable au corps, which shook the literary establishment upon its release, Bellocchio shifted the story to present-day Italy—and dedicated the film to his psychoanalyst. One of the first X-rated art films to be released in the U.S. by a major distributor, its frank sexuality is far less shocking today. The film’s bold mixture of sex and politics, however, remains highly provocative. An aimless, spoiled young woman desperately tries to find her way in a society that circumscribes her every move, while her mirror image, the supposedly engaged, politically extreme anarchist, conforms far too readily to bourgeois values when pressed. The liberating force here is passion: Andrei Tarkovsky collaborator Giuseppe Lanci’s gorgeous cinematography captures the amour fou lovemaking on pianos amid 1980s minimalist décor, and Maruschka Detmers’s lauded performance as the slightly unhinged Giulia is as raw and fresh today as it was almost 30 years ago. In Italian; English subtitles. 114 min.

Thursday, April 24, 2014, 7:00 p.m., Theater 1, T1
Wednesday, April 30, 2014, 4:00 p.m., Theater 2, T2

Film Screenings & Events
In the Name of the Father. 1971. Italy. Directed by Marco Bellocchio
Discutiamo, discutiamo (Let’s Discuss)

1969. Italy. Directed by Marco Bellocchio. In this episode from the anthology film Amore e rabbia (Love and Anger), a group of students invade a classroom spouting Maoist slogans. The short, with Bellocchio himself as the professor, makes tangible the divisive political ambitions and impotent rage of the 1968 student revolt. In Italian; English subtitles. 24 min.
Nel Nome del padre (In the Name of the Father)

1971. Italy. Directed by Marco Bellocchio. With Yves Beneyton, Renato Scarpa, Piero Vida. A repressive Catholic boarding school takes care of the errant sons of the bourgeoisie with sadistic hard hands and no pedagogically legitimate goals. When a new boy arrives and seems capable of standing up to the chaotic regime, alliances are made and hopes of freedom rise—until divisiveness and fear create new hierarchies and fearsome demagogues. 2011 director’s cut. In Italian; English subtitles. 90 min.

Thursday, May 1, 2014, 4:30 p.m., Theater 1, T1
Tuesday, May 6, 2014, 8:00 p.m., Theater 1, T1

Film Screenings & Events
The Conviction. 1990. Italy. Directed by Marco Bellocchio. Courtesy Luce Cinecittà
La Condanna (The Conviction)

1991. Italy. Directed by Marco Bellocchio. Screenplay by Marco Bellochio, Massimo Fagioli. With Vittorio Mezzogiorno, Claire Nebout. Featuring a script cowritten by Bellocchio’s psychotherapist, The Conviction’s thesis about women, men, and rape remains hugely controversial. After hours in a museum, a woman and a man are seemingly locked in. We observe a stylized mating ritual, and at dawn they leave, each with a different story. She says it was rape. He claims consensual sex. The contentious court case that follows debates the psychosexual theories of the day. Many of the film’s challenging ideas prove relevant to today’s discussions around sexual harassment. In Italian; English subtitles. 82 min.

Friday, May 2, 2014, 4:30 p.m., Theater 1, T1
Monday, May 5, 2014, 8:00 p.m., Theater 1, T1

Film Screenings & Events
Vacanze in Val Trebbia (Vacation in Val Trebbia)

1980. Italy. Directed by Marco Bellocchio. Screenplay by Marco Bellochio. This charming, seemingly improvised “home movie” featuring the extended Bellocchio clan reveals itself to be a bit more constructed than it first appears, but this doesn’t detract from the unpretentious, intimate feeling of peeking into the director’s private life. Occasionally (in between the idyllic images, elaborate performances by children and more questionable ones by teenagers, discussions between spouses, and bonfire entertainment for all), the poetic passages artfully transform into oneric, symbolic images, calling to mind several of Bellocchio’s favorite topics. Premiere of newly restored version by Ripley’s Film. In Italian; English subtitles. 52 min.

Friday, May 2, 2014, 8:00 p.m., Theater 1, T1
Sunday, May 4, 2014, 5:30 p.m., Theater 1, T1

Film Screenings & Events
A Leap in the Dark.1980. Italy/France/West Germany. Directed by Marco Bellocchio. Courtesy Luce Cinecittà
Salto nel vuoto (A Leap in the Dark)

1980. Italy/France/West Germany. Directed by Marco Bellocchio. Screenplay by Marco Bellocchio, Vincenzo Cerami, Piero Natoli. With Michel Piccoli, Anouk Aimée, Michele Placido. Judge Mauro Ponticelli (Michel Piccoli) has been living with his sister (Anouk Aimée) his whole life, but as she develops an increasingly serious mental illness he’s left uncertain how to care for her. With their relationship complicated by the introduction of a liberal young actor and an ever-present housemaid, A Leap in the Dark deftly traces the dynamics of familial and professional obligation, morality, and personal desire with a slow-burning ferocity that allows the actors to perform at the height of their power (Piccoli and Aimée both received best actor/actress prizes at the Cannes Film Festival). In Italian; English subtitles. 120 min.

Saturday, May 3, 2014, 2:00 p.m., Theater 1, T1
Monday, May 5, 2014, 4:30 p.m., Theater 1, T1

Film Screenings & Events
China is Near. 1967. Italy. Directed by Marco Bellocchio
La Cina è vicina (China Is Near)

1967. Italy. Directed by Marco Bellocchio. Screenplay by Elda Tattoli, Marco Bellocchio. With Glauco Mauri, Elda Tattoli, Paolo Graziosi. The powerful follow-up to Bellocchio’s debut proves that a trenchant critique of bourgeoisie buffoonery and the social ambitions of the working class, combined with clichéd Western assimilation of political movements in a completely corrupt political system, is plenty comical in the hands of a master satirist. This beautiful black-and-white film gleefully exposes the sorry moral and financial state of three siblings who each try to con their way through life with no particular passion or knowledge, but with the lofty goal of keeping their privileged position. They are abetted by the egotistical squabbling of the working-class friends and foes around them, endlessly scheming in love and (class) war. In Italian; English subtitles. 107 min.

Saturday, May 3, 2014, 5:00 p.m., Theater 1, T1
Tuesday, May 6, 2014, 4:30 p.m., Theater 1, T1

Film Screenings & Events
Vincere. 2009. Italy/France. Directed by Marco Bellocchio. Photo credit: Daniele Musso. Courtesy IFC Films
Vincere

2009. Italy/France. Directed by Marco Bellocchio. Screenplay by Bellocchio, Daniela Ceselli. With Giovanna Mezzogiorno, Filippo Timi, Fausto Russo Alesi. Vincere recounts, with operatic flair, the little-known story of Benito Mussolini’s first wife, Ida Dalser, from Mussolini’s first political undertakings in the 1910s to their postwar separation, which left Ida and her son in forced institutionalization. Using newsreels, flashy headlines, and archival footage to evoke the period, and shot through with severe shadows and a muscular elegance, Bellocchio’s film bursts with passion and authority—and reminds us of the brutality that often comes hand-in-hand with each. In Italian; English subtitles. 128 min.

Sunday, May 4, 2014, 2:30 p.m., Theater 1, T1
Wednesday, May 7, 2014, 4:00 p.m., Theater 1, T1

Image: The Wedding Director. 2006. Italy/France. Directed by Marco Bellocchio. Courtesy Films Sans Frontières

Department of Communications
The Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53 Street
New York, NY 10019
(212) 708-9431 or pressoffice@moma.org

MoMA
11 West Fifty-third Street - New York City

stampa

permanent link