Representing the un(re)presentable: Homosexuality in Luchino Visconti's Rocco and His Brothers

Abstract

ABSTRACTThe representation of homosexual desire in Luchino Visconti's films has been consistently neglected by critics, who have justified their disinterest by arguing that Visconti's homosexuality is a personal matter of little or no relevance to the study of his oeuvre. Challenging such a position, this article argues that the representation of homosexual desire is a central problem in Visconti's films. In representing homosexual desire, Visconti encounters issues of repression both at the collective level (the homophobia in Italian culture and society) and at the personal level (Visconti's deep ambivalence about his own homosexuality). In this context, denial and disavowal play a key role in the development of a highly indirect cinematic language in which words and images are charged with simultaneously hiding and disclosing that which cannot be named/shown. The discussion focuses on the short sequence in Rocco e i suoi fratelli/Rocco and His Brothers that concludes the ‘Simone’ chapter and presents the meeting of Simone with his boxing manager Duilio. Simone has asked to see Duilio because he needs money, and accepts an invitation to the latter's apartment. Once there, the conversation quickly degenerates into a brawl, which ends when Simone is knocked to the ground. In film, this kind of violence is a common means of releasing sexual tension that cannot be acknowledged, but in Rocco the sexual element is ‘elaborated’ on no less than three levels of representation: in the dialogue (which barely alludes to homosexual desire and primarily by indirect denial); in the physical interaction between the two characters (which Visconti goes to great lengths to disguise under the rhetoric of boxing); and finally and most unexpectedly in the uncanny images appearing on the brightly lit television screen that is at the centre of many of the shots. These images and their strange behaviour intimate to the spectator that this is not a banal homosexual encounter, but a crucial moment in the tragedy of Simone (and Rocco) and in the attempt by Visconti to forge a cinematic language adequate to that tragedy.