Bellocchio’s Histories, Personal and Public

Abstract

In The Traitor (2019) and Exterior Night (2022), Marco Bellocchio revisits traumatic and violent episodes in Italy’s recent past. The first is a feature film about the round-up of Sicilian mafia members in the 1980s and their retaliatory attack on the Italian state. The second is a six-part television series about the abduction and murder in 1978 of politician Aldo Moro as lived by his family, political colleagues and the terrorists who captured him. Bellocchio’s nonfiction Marx Can Wait (2021) also evokes a trauma, in this case a personal one: the legacy of his twin brother’s suicide in 1968 on himself and his family. This article examines Bellocchio’s techniques of incorporating archive images and footage, including from his own earlier films, as well as his use of dream and fantasy sequences, as ways of situating himself as an older man in relation to that past and of processing traumatic memories.