A Conversation with Marco Bellocchio

Abstract

It is difficult to believe that Marco Bellocchio, enfant terrible of Italian cinema, will turn 50 this year. The original impact of his Fists in the Pocket and China Is Near remains so fresh in the memory, and the films still so powerful on subsequent viewings, that it is easy to forget that they were made almost a quarter century ago. Bellocchio has never been the kind of comfortable artfilm director, like a Truffaut or a Fellini, say, once so popular with a certain American film-going public, and he has been only intermittently in evidence in the years since his early triumphs. Nor, apparently, is his popularity about to improve. In recent years, in fact, his films, still as confrontational as ever, have become increasingly elliptical in narrative structure, and perhaps even more obsessively personal. Bellocchio followed up his early successes with another brilliant, challenging film, In the Name of the Father (1971), an examination of the typical Bellocchian themes of institutional repression and sexual power in the context of a boy's school. Throughout the 1970s, he was occupied with films that have rarely been seen here. Several of these films were made with political collectives-films such as Paola (1969), Sbatti il mostro in prima pagine (1972; roughly, Throw the Monster on Page One) and Matti da slegare (1974; Crazy People to Set Free). The last, originally shot in 16mm, argues for the de-institutionalization of the insane. Bellocchio has said that, despite the parody of the Maoist group in China Is Near, he made these films with avowedly Marxist-Leninist political groups because in the wake of '68 he was looking for a revolutionary perspective that was more scientific and less frivolous than that of the student groups he had been a part of. In any case, he has always insisted that any eventual revolution must be accomplished on two levels at once, the personal as well as the political, and it is the personal, clearly, that has come to dominate his work. The more commercial but hardly mainstream Marcia trionfale (1976) followed these more overtly political films. A disturbing Oedipal drama of infidelity and murder set this time in an army barracks, it explores yet another site of institutional repression. Turning next to Chekhov, Bellocchio filmed The Seagull (1977) for Channel One of the RAI, the government television network. He has said that he continues to involve himself intimately with the theater, both in stage productions as well as adaptations, so that he will never be taken as a one-film-per-year kind of director with a certain identifiable personal style that makes him predictable and easy to categorize. Throughout the eighties, Bellocchio's films have had somewhat more success with an American audience, but that audience has sometimes seemed largely confined to the island of Manhattan, and even there critics have been harsh. He continues to worry the problem of the bourgeois intellectual-unlike his nearly exact contemporary, Bernardo Bertolucci, who seems to have stopped worrying about anything-and the obsessive themes remain. Sexuality, madness, and repressive power-and their multiple permutations, which