Word: bellocchio
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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POLITICS, like everything else, begin at home. Bellocchio's China is Near proposes that politics never leave home either. A transitional political film, somewhere short of where Godard cinemarxism makes its break, it is an anti-allegory, a catalogue of Bellocchio's ideological...
Though in the last several years he has received wide critical support, Bellocchio is relatively unknown in America. This may result from the acutely Italian flavor of his movies. Where the French looked to Hollywood for their archetypes and developed a narrative freedom from that base, Belocchio has turned to the Italian comic opera. China is Near has the lineality, characterization and coincidence of the nineteenth century novel, and is thus unfashionably paced. Bellocchio employs this style to internally strengthen his characterization of politics mired in conflicts between self-interest and ideals...
...pivotal character, Vittorio, is a millionaire running on the democratic socialist ticket. A moderate, pinned between his Maoist brother and his conservative sister; his campaign for an education post is a dolorous exercise. But the conflict is set only superficially in political terms. Bellocchio wrote that the film was conceived in a geometric pattern, on parallel lines. The film's structure emphasizes the interconnections between layers rather than their contribution to an overall theme. The politicial layer lies nearest the surface, but it is little more than a hand-puppet to the film's sexual politics. It is oddly believable...
...Bellocchio has compiled a sourcebook of bourgeois shennanigans and ideological muddles that illuminate the inextricable unity of personal and political consciousness. When Carlo in an opening sequence says he can't love because he is aware there are classes with better material conditions for love, he is at once rationalizing his callousness and ambition and justifying a revolution that might free him from himself...