Word: bellocchio
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Director Marco Bellocchio's family name means "beautiful eye"- and European cinema buffs are satisfied that it is a highly suitable patronym. On the basis of only two films, they are already hailing Bellocchio as Italy's brightest movie light since Antonioni. The 28-year-old son of a lawyer from Piacenza, Bellocchio won the Silver Ribbon, Italy's Oscar, with his very first effort, Fists in the Pocket (1965). His China Is Near (1966) won the special jury award at last summer's Ven ice Film Festival. Both films are now being released...
...Bellocchio put up most of the mon ey for Fists in the Pocket himself, cast it with friends and beginners willing to take a chance, and shot it at a villa that belonged to his mother. The stark, Faulknerian story of Fists in the Pocket is so gruesome that it often seems faintly ridiculous. In a decaying country house lives a blind woman with two epileptic teen-age sons and a neurotic daughter-all supported by her oldest son, who has a job in a nearby town and wishes he could afford to get married. It looks...
...frustrated rage and alienation of adolescence is the real point and power of Fists. Bellocchio, who wrote his own script, may have personally identified with Alessandro's rampage, but he keeps his distance; the film has the detached quality of a series of animated tableaux. The actors however perform with great competence-especially Lou Castel as the matri-fratricide, Paola Pitagora as his sister, and Ciliana Gerace as the mother. The tableaux are often visually stunning, in the best tradition of Italian neorealism: the ennui and self-contempt of family meals at which the cat steals food from...
Graffiti & Time Bombs. In China Is Near, Bellocchio abandons adolescent hostility for political disdain; the film makes fun of the full range of Italian leftist politics, from the filo-cinese (the sinophiles of the left) to the moderate Socialists, with their progressive pretensions and bourgeois attachments. China's political satire kicked up a furor in Italy. But U.S. audiences are likely to be more amused than annoyed by this story about a rich, bumbling professor who campaigns for local office as a Socialist, while his equally ridiculous Maoist brother harasses him and his colleagues with graffiti, time bombs...