Bellocchio Revolution, curated by Anton Giulio Mancino
Marco Bellocchio’s creative universe—spanning cinema, television, and theater, fiction and documentary, analogue and digital—has revolutionized not only the history of Italian cinema since the mid-1960s but also the broader international cultural and political landscape. From I pugni in tasca to Kidnapped, his work represents a continuous rewriting of expressive codes, deeply intertwined with a transgressive and revolutionary relationship with History. “Imagination is real,” claims a character in Good Morning, Night, encapsulating the revelatory essence of Bellocchio’s inspiration. Bellocchio’s vision of cinema, recognized with the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the Venice Film Festival in 2011 and the Honorary Palme d’Or at Cannes in 2021, is a creative engine in perpetual motion—constantly “imagining” the world with an upward, relentless drive. Through a series of “inner images,” his work reaches, in unconventional and unsparing ways, the heart of truth—probing both individual and collective psyches, while confronting the deepest secrets of an Italy whose enduring shadows stretch across the world, much like those cast in a dark movie theater.
Bellocchio is, therefore, always an antagonistic filmmaker—armed with “lucid madness” and irony—to criticize and self-criticize both private and public spaces. He targets institutions such as the Family, Marriage and Couples, the Church and the Military, Psychiatry and Asylums, Politics and the State. Every one of his films, series, or documentaries is thus a unique “debut work”—unpredictable and striking—which questions established audiovisual languages and revises shared certainties. His work endlessly crafts new, provocative questions that remain open, challenging the present and the past, rather than offering easy or comforting answers.
REVIEWS
The career of Marco Bellocchio has been extensive, fertile, and constantly capable of taking us unawares. (...) His manner is restless and impatient, full of stop-start rhythms, and of characters who coil themselves up in rumination and then, without warning, lash out or lunge across the frame.
Anthony Lane in The New Yorker
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-must-see-films-of-marco-bellocchio
Bellocchio’s career, between then and now, can be seen partly as a chronicle of disillusionment, as revolutionary ardor gives way to irony, compromise and defeat. His many films about Italian public figures and institutions — Mussolini; the violent, far-left Red Brigades; the Roman Catholic Church; and the Mafia — are also family stories, attentive to intimate nuances of power and emotion.
A.O. Scott in The New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/14/movies/marx-can-wait-review.html
Bellocchio has always been looking for a sign that would certify God's presence in the world. Theological questions do not interest him; he simply asks for a manifestation. His cinema is not about waiting, silence, or questions directed at the void (a cinema, we might say, following Bergman’s style), but is, on the contrary, full of provocations and invocations, of mouthing, slapping and sneering.
Roberto Manassero in Cineforum
https://cineforum.it/focus/Cannes-76/Rapito-di-Marco-Bellocchio
What makes Bellocchio’s films unmissable is the constant sense of unpredictability that permeates the entire dramaturgical structure: at any moment, anything can happen, from an embrace interpreted as attempted murder to nightmares of unspeakable brutality, to a Christ who nonchalantly comes down from the cross to go who knows where. Yet another confirmation of an inexhaustible author.
Giuseppe Mattia in Drammaturgia
https://drammaturgia.fupress.net/recensioni/recensione1.php?id=8606
Marco Bellocchio's cinema modifies the relationship with memories, whether public or private, because through art it intersects the gestures of mnemonic operation with linguistic choices capable of selecting images and reviving them, not only by preserving them but also by transforming them.
Marina Pellanda, Declinazioni autobiografiche nel cinema di Marco Bellocchio, in "Bianco e nero" 2-3/2015, p. 46
“Following Marco Bellocchio's cinema takes you, with each new film, always towards destinations different from those you thought you had already reached and discovered. An indefatigable walker, a ferryman of ideas, an explorer of the unstable boundary between himself, cinema, and history, he has used as his map the world that begins beyond the borders of visible reality (and within the unconscious). In doing so, he has found the most vital forms of expression and 'sensibilities' to convey the urgency of knowledge, both individual and collective, that has been weakened or lost."
Marco Müller at the awarding of the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement in 2011, source: Il Sole 24 Ore
https://st.ilsole24ore.com/art/cultura/2011-05-08/leone-carriera-marco-bellocchio-161924.shtml?refresh_ce=1
