Ricevo e volentieri pubblico
IL MOMA DI NEW YORK E ISTITUTO LUCE-CINECITTÀ PRESENTANO
MARCO BELLOCCHIO: A RETROSPECTIVE
A NEW YORK DAL 16 APRILE AL 7 MAGGIO LA RETROSPETTIVA-EVENTO DEDICATA A UN MAESTRO DEL NOSTRO CINEMA.
18 film, da I pugni in tasca a Bella addormentata in copie 35 mm, di cui alcune restaurate per l’occasione, insieme a un volume collettivo di studi, interviste e testimonianze.
E dal 6 giugno la distribuzione nelle sale newyorchesi di Bella addormentata
È già annunciata a New York come uno degli appuntamenti più attesi di primavera, la retrospettiva che Luce-Cinecittà e MoMA dedicano, presso i Roy and NiutaTitusTheaters, a Marco Bellocchio.
Una panoramica complessiva, che inaugura il 16 aprile con l’incontro con la stampa locale e la proiezione serale de ‘Il regista di matrimoni’, e che fino al 7 maggio farà il punto su un autore all’attenzione di critica e pubblico americani sin dal clamoroso esordio de ‘I pugni in tasca’, nel ’65, e che ha visto nel tempo periodici, notevoli ritorni di interesse, coincidenti con svolte espressive ma anche con i mutamenti sociali e di costume dell’audience statunitense, che hanno fatto di Bellocchio un cineasta tributario di un culto costante negli States, ma non interamente conosciuto.
Ora la grande retrospettiva al MoMA consente alla platea d’oltreoceano di contemplare e verificare la tenuta di cinquant’anni di cinema, in continuo e coerente dialogo con la Storia, la politica, la vita pubblica e l’intimo di una società che sconfina dall’attributo di ‘italiana’, per farsi vero, e raro, cinema-mondo.
Dal folgorante esordio de I pugni in tasca al recente Bella addormentata, passando dal confronto politico di La Cina è vicina, ai corpo a corpo con classici amati della letteratura e del teatro come Diavolo in corpo, Enrico IV, La balia, Il Principe di Homburg, agli exploit espressivi degli anni 2000, con capolavori come L’ora di religione, Buongiorno, notte, e Vincere, l’opera di Bellocchio si racconterà – in copie tutte 35mm – con il portato di uno sguardo preciso e mobile, corrosivo e partecipato, mutevole come il tempo che ha radiografato; il segno di un cinema eccezionalmente riconoscibile, insieme radicale e spettacolare, in cui possono convivere opposizioni come la Storia e la psiche, la lucida analisi e il gioco.
La retrospettiva, che segue i notevoli successi delle due precedenti organizzate da Luce-Cinecittà e Moma su Bertolucci e Pasolini (in una collaborazione ormai ventennale che ha visto portare a NY altri omaggi a grandi autori come Amelio, Virzì, Troisi, Rossellini, De Santis), è accompagnata da altre importanti iniziative.
Per l’occasione, Luce-Cinecittà con la Ripley’s Film di Angelo Draicchio ha curato il restauro di due pellicole: Vacanze in Val Trebbia (1980) e Gli Occhi, la bocca (1982); due episodi peraltro più che peculiari del percorso artistico di Bellocchio.
Il 17 aprile, presso l’Istituto italiano di Cultura di NY, sarà presentato il volume Morale e bellezza – Marco Bellocchio, curato da Sergio Toffetti e pubblicato da Luce-Cinecittà e Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia. Più di una guida alla retrospettiva: in italiano e inglese, intessuta di saggi storico-critici, interviste e testimonianze – di collaboratori, attori, sodali del regista – e un ricco corredo fotografico e iconografico (in cui si segnalano le riproduzioni di dipinti e bozzetti di Bellocchio) un’opera autonoma e preziosa che ripropone la vocazione multiespressivadel suo cinema, tra pittura, musica, Opera, recitazione, e autobiografia.
Infine dal 6 giugno, grazie al progetto ‘Cinema made in Italy’, nato dalla partnership tra Istituto Luce e il network Emerging Pictures, avrà inizio la distribuzione nelle sale della Grande Mela di Bella addormentata. Un’iniziativa importante di programmazione regolare, accanto e usando come volano il grande evento espositivo, per dare continuità di visione al nostro cinema nelle sale degli USA.
Marco Bellocchio sarà presente a New York il 16 aprile per l’inaugurazione della retrospettiva, insieme a Pier Giorgio Bellocchio e Maya Sansa, e all’incontro del 17 aprile all’Istituto italiano di Cultura.
Marco Bellocchio: A Retrospectiveè organizzata da The Museum of Modern Art e Istituto Luce-Cinecittà, ed è curata da Jytte Jensen (MoMA) e Camilla Cormanni e Paola Ruggiero (Luce- Cinecittà)
Il volume Morale e Bellezza – Marco Bellocchio, è curato da Sergio Toffetti e edito da Luce-Cinecittà e CSC
Screening Schedule
Marco Bellocchio: A Retrospective
April 16—May 7, 2014
Wednesday, April 16
8:00 Il Regista di matrimoni (The Wedding Director).2006. Screenplay by Marco Bellocchio. With Sergio Castellitto, Donatella Finocchiaro, Sami Frey. Framed by two gorgeously choreographed weddings—only one of which might be real—the stage is set for the spectacle of a film director in rapid decline. Sergio Castellitto is perfect as the depressive director saddled with cheating colleagues and demanding fans. When he falls for a princess in a castle guarded by two dogs and a menacing father, he’ll do anything to stop her wedding. Farcical and cynical in equal measure, the film is also a heartfelt critique of the state of the Italian movie industry and, by extension, the whole society in which “the Dead commands,” and everyone else cheats, deceives, usurps, and creates bad art, accompanied by hideous pop music. The heart of the real artist comes through in the movie itself, though, with its innocent fairy-tale symbolism and magnificent use of all kinds of imagery fueled by the imagination, from church and pagan ceremonies, to surveillance and photographic images, to dreams and movies. 100 min.Introduced by Marco Bellocchio and Maya Sansa.
Thursday, April 17
7:00 Bella addormentata (Dormant Beauty).2012. Italy/France. Screenplay by Veronica Raimo, Stefano Rulli, Marco Bellocchio. With Toni Servillo, Isabelle Huppert, Alba Rohrwacher, Maya Sansa. The multilayered narrative of Bellocchio’s latest film is constructed around Italy’s equivalent of the Terri Schiavo case, a legal struggle around the fate of a woman, EluanaEnglaro, suspended in a vegetative coma for 17 years. Each story plays out on a different stylistic level: domestic drama (a liberal senator risks losing the love of his deeply religious daughter), social realism (a young doctor struggles to save a drug addict from herself), and operatic delirium (a famous actress creates a theatrical spectacle around her own daughter, a young woman kept alive by a respirator). 115 min. Introduced by MarcoBellocchio,Maya Sansaand Alba Rohrwacher.
Friday, April 18
4:00 I Pugni in tasca (Fists in the Pocket). 1965. Screenplay by Marco Bellocchio. With Lou Castel, Paola Pitagora, Marino Masé. Blending politics and psychology, Bellocchio’s first feature, made when he was 26, was among the first Italian films to give voice to the anger and alienation that would define the generation of 1968. Riding that resentment, the Dutch actor Lou Castel became a cult figure as the seizure-prone young man who unilaterally decides that the world would be better off without some members of his decaying, haute bourgeois family—including his blind mother (Liliana Gerace), whom he lures into walking off a cliff. 105 min.Introduced by MarcoBellocchio.
7:00 GliOcchi, la Bocca (The Eyes, the Mouth). 1982. Italy/France. Screenplay by MarcoBellocchio, Vincenzo Cerami, Catherine Breillat. With Lou Castel, Emmanuelle Riva, Michel Piccoli. Seventeen years after Fists in the Pocket,Bellocchio reunited with his star, Lou Castel, for a follow-up study of class and family relations in the wake of a failed revolution. In a role that draws on aspects of his own life, Castel plays a fading icon of the 1960s who returns to his provincial hometown to attend the funeral of his twin brother, who has committed suicide. He finds himself drawn to his dead brother’s fiancée (Angela Molina), a working-class immigrant from Latin America, even as he blames her for his brother’s death. Premiere of newly restored version by Luce Cinecittà & Ripley’s Film.101 min.
Saturday, April 19
4:00 Il Principe di Homburg (The Prince of Homburg).1997.Screenplay by Marco Bellocchio. With Andrea Di Stefano, BarboraBobulova, Toni Bertorelli. As comfortable with period dramas as he is with contemporary narratives, Bellocchio gave his film (based on the play by Heinrich von Kleist) the subtitle “The Morals of War.” The patriarchy of army and fatherland is vividly explored in one of the key battles of the 17th-century war between Germany and Sweden. Exterior scenes and steely prison cells are filled with sharp shadows cast by an otherworldly, luminous moon, while candlelight softens and warms the reconstructed interiors of the castle’s war room and the women’s drawing room. The prince’s struggle between his love of life—and of the young Natalie—and military codes of dignity and heroism is gorgeously expressed through Kleist’s rich language and Bellocchio’s ability to hold us at the threshold between dream and reality.
89 min.
7:30 La Balia (The Nanny). 1999. Screenplay by Marco Bellocchio and Daniela Ceselli.With Fabrizio Bentivoglio, Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, Maya Sansa. One of Bellocchio’s finest cinematic explorations of class and women’s place in the world (both symbolically and physically), is based on the novella by Luigi Pirandello, set during the dawn of 20th-century political activity among the working classes and farmers. An upper-class couple’s pleasant-enough married life in Rome sours when a baby arrives and the mother doesn’t bond with it, or as she puts it, “The baby rejects me.” The husband goes to the countryside to hire a wet nurse, a journey that’s short in distance but, as sketched in a few unforgettable scenes, reveals an entirely different milieu. As the two women— inadvertently set against each other—struggle to find their individual roles in a society full of prejudice and turmoil, their freedom to choose their own destinies is shown to be intrinsically interwoven with that of the lower classes. 106 min.
Sunday, April 20
2:00 Enrico IV (Henry IV). 1984. Screenplay by Tonino Guerra, Marco Bellocchio, based on the play by Luigi Pirandello. With Marcello Mastroianni, Claudia Cardinale, LatouChardons. As befits a movie about acting, Bellocchio’s “free adaptation” of Pirandello’s 1921 play brings together two great stars of the Italian cinema: Marcello Mastroianni, as a scholar who has lived for 20 years under the trauma-induced delusion that he is the 11th-century Holy Roman Emperor Henry IV, and Claudia Cardinale, as the aristocratic woman he loved before his accident. Role-playing abounds as Henry’s psychiatrist concocts an elaborate scheme to shock him out of his medieval reverie: he’ll be forced to confront both his lady love as she is in the present, and as she was in the romantic past, as embodied by her look-alike daughter. 85 min.
5:00 Buongiorno notte (GoodMorning, Night). 2003. Screenplay by Anna Laura Braghetti, Paolo Tavella, Daniela Ceselli, Marco Bellocchio. With Roberto Herlitzka, Maya Sansa, Luigi Lo Cascio. Politics, family, and the power of the subconscious again come together in Bellocchio’s disconcertingly lyrical imagining of the real-life kidnapping and execution of the Italian politician Aldo Moro. The mother-son dynamic at the center of many of Bellocchio’s films is here replaced by a metaphorical father-daughter relationship, largely imagined through dreams, between the reserved Moro (Herlitzka) and the girlish Red Brigade functionary (Sansa) who provides a middle-class front for his captors. 106 min.
Monday, April 21
4:00 Sbattiilmostro in prima pagina (Slap the Monster on Page One). 1972. Italy/France. Screenplay by Sergio Donati. With Gian Maria Volonté, Fabio Garriba, Laura Betti. Blending footage of real demonstrations with newly shot sequences, the film opens with a bang as a right wing newspaper’s headquarters are attacked by anarchists. Presaging today’s international newspaper scandals, this scathing satire of the power alliances and manipulations of the news-gathering ilk is fast-paced and often funny. The film’s narrative demonstrates how political strategy determines every inch of coverage—and once again that sex sells news. Clearly enamored by the newspaper milieu, the film’s news-czar, played by the formidable Volonté, proudly prances around his kingdom and thinks nothing of ruining or building fake reputations around any dead or living creature that comes into his orbit—all while he himself is manipulated by the money men behind the scenes. 90 min.
Tuesday, April 22
4:00 La Balia (The Nanny). 1999. Screenplay by Marco Bellocchio and Daniela Ceselli. With FabrizioBentivoglio, Valeria BruniTedeschi, Maya Sansa. One of Bellocchio’s finest cinematic explorations of class and women’s place in the world (both symbolically and physically), is based on the novella by Luigi Pirandello, set during the dawn of 20th-century political activity among the working classes and farmers. An upper-class couple’s pleasant-enough married life in Rome sours when a baby arrives and the mother doesn’t bond with it, or as she puts it, “The baby rejects me.” The husband goes to the countryside to hire a wet nurse, a journey that’s short in distance but, as sketched in a few unforgettable scenes, reveals an entirely different milieu. As the two women— inadvertently set against each other—struggle to find their individual roles in a society full of prejudice and turmoil, their freedom to choose their own destinies is shown to be intrinsically interwoven with that of the lower classes. 106 min.
8:00 L’Ora di religione (My Mother’s Smile). 2002. Screenplay by Marco Bellocchio. With Sergio Castellitto, Jacqueline Lustig, Chiara Conti. A celebrated author of children’s books who also happens to be a dedicated atheist, Ernesto (Castellitto) is astonished to discover that his emotionally distant mother, murdered years earlier by his psychotic brother, has been proposed for sainthood by the Vatican. Here Bellocchio creates perhaps the most spectacular of his dysfunctional families, adding the political power of the Catholic Church to his ongoing study of Italy’s eternally oppressive institutions. 105 min.
Wednesday, April 23
4:30 Il Principe di Homburg (The Prince of Homburg).1997. Screenplay by Marco Bellocchio. With Andrea Di Stefano, BarboraBobulova, Toni Bertorelli. As comfortable with period dramas as he is with contemporary narratives, Bellocchio gave his film (based on the play by Heinrich von Kleist) the subtitle “The Morals of War.” The patriarchy of army and fatherland is vividly explored in one of the key battles of the 17th-century war between Germany and Sweden. Exterior scenes and steely prison cells are filled with sharp shadows cast by an otherworldly, luminous moon, while candlelight softens and warms the reconstructed interiors of the castle’s war room and the women’s drawing room. The prince’s struggle between his love of life—and of the young Natalie—and military codes of dignity and heroism is gorgeously expressed through Kleist’s rich language and Bellocchio’s ability to hold us at the threshold between dream and reality.
89 min.
7:00 Enrico IV (Henry IV). 1984. Screenplay by Tonino Guerra, Marco Bellocchio, based on the play by Luigi Pirandello. With Marcello Mastroianni, Claudia Cardinale, LatouChardons. As befits a movie about acting, Bellocchio’s “free adaptation” of Pirandello’s 1921 play brings together two great stars of the Italian cinema: Marcello Mastroianni, as a scholar who has lived for 20 years under the trauma-induced delusion that he is the 11th-century Holy Roman Emperor Henry IV, and Claudia Cardinale, as the aristocratic woman he loved before his accident. Role-playing abounds as Henry’s psychiatrist concocts an elaborate scheme to shock him out of his medieval reverie: he’ll be forced to confront both his lady love as she is in the present, and as she was in the romantic past, as embodied by her look-alike daughter. 95 min.
Thursday, April 24
7:00 Diavolo in corpo (Devil in the Flesh).1986. Screenplay by Marco Bellocchio, Ennio De Concini, Enrico Palandri. With MaruschkaDetmers, Federico Pitzalis, Anita Laurenzi. For his adaptation of Raymond Radiguet’s classic 1923 novel Le Diable au corps, which shook the literary establishment upon its release, Bellocchio shifted the story to present-day Italy—and dedicated the film to his psychoanalyst. One of the first X-rated art films to be released in the U.S. by a major distributor, its frank sexuality is far less shocking today. The film’s bold mixture of sex and politics, however, remains highly provocative. An aimless, spoiled young woman desperately tries to find her way in a society that circumscribes her every move, while her mirror image, the supposedly engaged, politically extreme anarchist, conforms far too readily to bourgeois values when pressed. The liberating force here is passion: Andrei Tarkovsky collaborator Giuseppe Lanci’s gorgeous cinematography captures the amour fou lovemaking on pianos amid 1980s minimalist décor, and MaruschkaDetmers’s lauded performance as the slightly unhinged Giulia is as raw and fresh today as it was almost 30 years ago. 114 min.
Friday, April 25
4:00 Buongiornonotte (Good Morning, Night).2003. Screenplay by Anna Laura Braghetti, Paolo Tavella, Daniela Ceselli, Marco Bellocchio. With Roberto Herlitzka, Maya Sansa, Luigi Lo Cascio. Politics, family, and the power of the subconscious again come together in Bellocchio’s disconcertingly lyrical imagining of the real-life kidnapping and execution of the Italian politician Aldo Moro. The mother-son dynamic at the center of many of Bellocchio’s films is here replaced by a metaphorical father-daughter relationship, largely imagined through dreams, between the reserved Moro (Herlitzka) and the girlish Red Brigade functionary (Sansa) who provides a middle-class front for his captors. 106 min.
8:00 Bella addormentata (Dormant Beauty). 2012. Italy/France. Screenplay by Veronica Raimo, Stefano Rulli, Marco Bellocchio. With Toni Servillo, Isabelle Huppert, Alba Rohrwacher. The multilayered narrative of Bellocchio’s latest film is constructed around Italy’s equivalent of the Terri Schiavo case, a legal struggle around the fate of a woman, EluanaEnglaro, suspended in a vegetative coma for 17 years. Each story plays out on a different stylistic level: domestic drama (a liberal senator risks losing the love of his deeply religious daughter), social realism (a young doctor struggles to save a drug addict from herself), and operatic delirium (a famous actress creates a theatrical spectacle around her own daughter, a young woman kept alive by a respirator). 115 min.
Saturday, April 26
1:30 Sbattiilmostro in prima pagina (Slap the Monster on Page One). 1972. Italy/France. With Gian Maria Volonté, Fabio Garriba, Laura Betti. Blending footage of real demonstrations with newly shot sequences, the film opens with a bang as a right wing newspaper’s headquarters are attacked by anarchists. Presaging today’s international newspaper scandals, this scathing satire of the power alliances and manipulations of the news-gathering ilk is fast-paced and often funny. The film’s narrative demonstrates how political strategy determines every inch of coverage—and once again that sex sells news. Clearly enamored by the newspaper milieu, the film’s news-czar, played by the formidable Volonté, proudly prances around his kingdom and thinks nothing of ruining or building fake reputations around any dead or living creature that comes into his orbit—all while he himself is manipulated by the money men behind the scenes. 90 min.
5:00 GliOcchi, la bocca (The Eyes, the Mouth). 1982. Italy/France. Screenplay by Bellocchio, Vincenzo Cerami, Catherine Breillat. With Lou Castel, Emmanuelle Riva, Michel Piccoli. Seventeen years after Fists in the Pocket,Bellocchio reunited with his star, Lou Castel, for a follow-up study of class and family relations in the wake of a failed revolution. In a role that draws on aspects of his own life, Castel plays a fading icon of the 1960s who returns to his provincial hometown to attend the funeral of his twin brother, who has committed suicide. He finds himself drawn to his dead brother’s fiancée (Angela Molina), a working-class immigrant from Latin America, even as he blames her for his brother’s death.Premiere of newly restored version by Luce Cinecittà & ipley’s Film.101 min.
Sunday, April 27
2:00 L’Ora di religione (My Mother’s Smile).2002. Screenplay by Marco Bellocchio. With Sergio Castelitto, Jacqueline Lustig, Chiara Conti. A celebrated author of children’s books who also happens to be a dedicated atheist, Ernesto (Castellitto) is astonished to discover that his emotionally distant mother, murdered years earlier by his psychotic brother, has been proposed for sainthood by the Vatican. Here Bellocchio creates perhaps the most spectacular of his dysfunctional families, adding the political power of the Catholic Church to his ongoing study of Italy’s eternally oppressive institutions. 105 min.
5:30 *title not in BoldI Pugni in tasca (Fists in the Pocket). 1965. Screenplay by Marco Bellocchio. With Lou Castel, Paola Pitagora, Marino Masé. Blending politics and psychology, Bellocchio’s first feature, made when he was 26, was among the first Italian films to give voice to the anger and alienation that would define the generation of 1968. Riding that resentment, the Dutch actor Lou Castel became a cult figure as the seizure-prone young man who unilaterally decides that the world would be better off without some members of his decaying, haute bourgeois family—including his blind mother (Liliana Gerace), whom he lures into walking off a cliff. 105 min.
Monday, April 28
7:30 Il Regista di matrimoni (The WeddingDirector). 2006. Screenplay by Marco Bellocchio. With Sergio Castellitto, Donatella Finocchiaro, Sami Frey. Framed by two gorgeously choreographed weddings—only one of which might be real—the stage is set for the spectacle of a film director in rapid decline. Sergio Castellitto is perfect as the depressive director saddled with cheating colleagues and demanding fans. When he falls for a princess in a castle guarded by two dogs and a menacing father, he’ll do anything to stop her wedding. Farcical and cynical in equal measure, the film is also a heartfelt critique of the state of the Italian movie industry and, by extension, the whole society in which “the Dead commands,” and everyone else cheats, deceives, usurps, and creates bad art, accompanied by hideous pop music. The heart of the real artist comes through in the movie itself, though, with its innocent fairy tale symbolism and magnificent use of all kinds of imagery fueled by the imagination, from church and pagan ceremonies, to surveillance and photographic images, to dreams and movies. 100 min.
Wednesday, April 30
4:00 Diavolo in corpo (Devil in the Flesh).1986. Screenplay by Marco Bellocchio, Ennio De Concini, Enrico Palandri. With MaruschkaDetmers, Federico Pitzalis, Anita Laurenzi. For his adaptation of Raymond Radiguet’s classic 1923 novel Le Diable au corps, which shook the literary establishment upon its release, Bellocchio shifted the story to present-day Italy—and dedicated the film to his psychoanalyst. One of the first X-rated art films to be released in the U.S. by a major distributor, its frank sexuality is far less shocking today. The film’s bold mixture of sex and politics, however, remains highly provocative. An aimless, spoiled young woman desperately tries to find her way in a society that circumscribes her every move, while her mirror image, the supposedly engaged, politically extreme anarchist, conforms far too readily to bourgeois values when pressed. The liberating force here is passion: Andrei Tarkovsky collaborator Giuseppe Lanci’s gorgeous cinematography captures the amour fou lovemaking on pianos amid 1980s minimalist décor, and MaruschkaDetmers’s lauded performance as the slightly unhinged Giulia is as raw and fresh today as it was almost 30 years ago. 114 min.
Thursday, May 1
4:30 Discutiamo, discutiamo(Let’s discuss). 1969. In this episode from the anthology film Amore e rabbia (Love and Anger), a group of students invade a classroom spouting Maoist slogans. The short, with Bellocchio himself as the professor, makes tangible the divisive political ambitions and impotent rage of the 1968 student revolt. 24 min.
Nel Nome del padre (In the Name of the Father). 1971. With Yves Beneyton, Renato Scarpa, Piero Vida. A repressive Catholic boarding school takes care of the errant sons of the bourgeoisie with sadistic hard hands and no pedagogically legitimate goals. When a new boy arrives and seems capable of standing up to the chaotic regime, alliances are made and hopes of freedom rise—until divisiveness and fear create new hierarchies and fearsome demagogues. 2011 director’s cut. 90 min.
Friday, May 2
4:30 La Condanna (The Conviction).1991. Screenplay by Marco Bellocchio, Massimo Fagioli. With Vittorio Mezzogiorno, Claire Nebout. Featuring a script cowritten byBellocchio’s psychotherapist, The Conviction’s thesis about women, men, and rape remains hugely controversial. After hours in a museum, a woman and a man are seemingly locked in. We observe a stylized mating ritual, and at dawn they leave, each with a different story. She says it was rape. He claims consensual sex. The contentious court case that follows debates the psychosexual theories of the day. Many of the film’s challenging ideas prove relevant to today’s discussions around sexual harassment. 95 min.
8:00 Vacanze in Val Trebbia (Vacation in Val Trebbia).1980. Screenplay by Marco Bellocchio. This charming, seemingly improvised “home movie” featuring the extended Bellocchio clan reveals itself to be a bit more constructed than it first appears, but this doesn’t detract from the unpretentious, intimate feeling of peeking into the director’s private life. Occasionally (in between the idyllic images, elaborate performances by children and more questionable ones by teenagers, discussions between spouses, and bonfire entertainment for all), the poetic passages artfully transform into oneric, symbolic images, calling to mind several of Bellocchio’s favorite topics. Premiere of newly restored version by Luce Cinecittà & Ripley’s Film . 52 min.
Saturday, May 3
2:00 Salto nel vuoto (A Leap in the Dark).1980. Italy/France/West Germany. Screenplay byMarco Bellocchio, Vincenzo Cerami, Piero Natoli. With Michel Piccoli, Anouk Aimée, Michele Placido. Judge Mauro Ponticelli (Michel Piccoli) has been living with his sister (Anouk Aimée) his whole life, but as she develops an increasingly serious mental illness he’s left uncertain how to care for her. With their relationship complicated by the introduction of a liberal young actor and an ever-present housemaid, A Leap in the Dark deftly traces the dynamics of familial and professional obligation, morality, and personal desire with a slow-burning ferocity that allows the actors to perform at the height of their power (Piccoli and Aimée both received best actor/actress prizes at the Cannes Film Festival). 120 min.
5:00 La Cina è vicina (China Is Near). 1967. Screenplay by Elda Tattoli, Marco Bellocchio. With Glauco Mauri, Elda Tattoli, Paolo Graziosi. The powerful follow-up to Bellocchio’s debut proves that a trenchant critique of bourgeoisie buffoonery and the social ambitions of the working class, combined with clichéd Western assimilation of political movements in a completely corrupt political system, is plenty comical in the hands of a master satirist. This beautiful black-and-white film gleefully exposes the sorry moral and financial state of three siblings who each try to con their way through life with no particular passion or knowledge, but with the lofty goal of keeping their privileged position. They are abetted by the egotistical squabbling of the working-class friends and foes around them, endlessly scheming in love and (class) war. 107 min.
Sunday, May 3
2:30 Vincere. 2009. Italy/France. Screenplay by Marco Bellocchio, Daniela Ceselli. With Giovanna Mezzogiorno, Filippo Timi, Fausto Russo Alesi. Vincere recounts, with operatic flair, the little-known story of Benito Mussolini’s first wife, Ida Dalser, from Mussolini’s first political undertakings in the 1910s to their postwar separation, which left Ida and her son in forced institutionalization. Using newsreels, flashy headlines, and archival footage to evoke the period, and shot through with severe shadows and a muscular elegance, Bellocchio’s film bursts with passion and authority—and reminds us of the brutality that often comes hand-in-hand with each. 128 min.
5:30 Vacanze in Val Trebbia (Vacation in Val Trebbia).1980. Screenplay by Marco Bellocchio This charming, seemingly improvised “home movie” featuring the extended Bellocchio clan reveals itself to be a bit more constructed than it first appears, but this doesn’t detract from the unpretentious, intimate feeling of peeking into the director’s private life. Occasionally (in between the idyllic images, elaborate performances by children and more questionable ones by teenagers, discussions between spouses, and bonfire entertainment for all), the poetic passages artfully transform into oneric, symbolic images, calling to mind several of Bellocchio’s favorite topics. Premiere of newly restored versionby Luce Cinecittà & Ripley’s Film. 52 min.
Sunday, May 5
4:30 Salto nel vuoto (A Leap in the Dark).1980. Italy/France/West Germany. Screenplay byMarco Bellocchio, Vincenzo Cerami, Piero Natoli With Michel Piccoli, Anouk Aimée, Michele Placido. Judge Mauro Ponticelli (Michel Piccoli) has been living with his sister (Anouk Aimée) his whole life, but as she develops an increasingly serious mental illness he’s left uncertain how to care for her. With their relationship complicated by the introduction of a liberal young actor and an ever-present housemaid, A Leap in the Dark deftly traces the dynamics of familial and professional obligation, morality, and personal desire with a slow-burning ferocity that allows the actors to perform at the height of their power (Piccoli and Aimée both received best actor/actress prizes at the Cannes Film Festival). 120 min.
8:00 La Condanna (The Conviction).1991. Screenplay by Marco Bellocchio, Massimo Fagioli. With Vittorio Mezzogiorno, Claire Nebout. Featuring a script cowritten byBellocchio’s psychotherapist, The Conviction’s thesis about women, men, and rape remains hugely controversial. After hours in a museum, a woman and a man are seemingly locked in. We observe a stylized mating ritual, and at dawn they leave, each with a different story. She says it was rape. He claims consensual sex. The contentious court case that follows debates the psychosexual theories of the day. Many of the film’s challenging ideas prove relevant to today’s discussions around sexual harassment. 95 min.
Tuesday, May 6
4:30 La Cina è vicina (China Is Near).Screenplay by Elda Tattoli, Marco Bellocchio 1967. With Glauco Mauri, Elda Tattoli, Paolo Graziosi. The powerful follow-up to Bellocchio’s debut proves that a trenchant critique of bourgeoisie buffoonery and the social ambitions of the working class, combined with clichéd Western assimilation of political movements in a completely corrupt political system, is plenty comical in the hands of a master satirist. This beautiful black-and-white film gleefully exposes the sorry moral and financial state of three siblings who each try to con their way through life with no particular passion or knowledge, but with the lofty goal of keeping their privileged position. They are abetted by the egotistical squabbling of the working-class friends and foes around them, endlessly scheming in love and (class) war. 107 min.
8:00 Discutiamo, discutiamo(Let’s discuss). 1969. In this episode from the anthology film Amore e rabbia (Love and Anger), a group of students invade a classroom spouting Maoist slogans. The short, with Bellocchio himself as the professor, makes tangible the divisive political ambitions and impotent rage of the 1968 student revolt. 24 min.
Nel Nome del padre (In the Name of the Father). 1971. With Yves Beneyton, Renato Scarpa, Piero Vida. A repressive Catholic boarding school takes care of the errant sons of the bourgeoisie with sadistic hard hands and no pedagogically legitimate goals. When a new boy arrives and seems capable of standing up to the chaotic regime, alliances are made and hopes of freedom rise—until divisiveness and fear create new hierarchies and fearsome demagogues. 2011 director’s cut. 90 min.
Wednesday, May 7
4:00 Vincere.2009. Italy/France. Screenplay by Marco Bellocchio, Daniela Ceselli. With Giovanna Mezzogiorno, Filippo Timi, Fausto Russo Alesi. Vincere recounts, with operatic flair, the little-known story of Benito Mussolini’s first wife, Ida Dalser, from Mussolini’s first political undertakings in the 1910s to their postwar separation, which left Ida and her son in forced institutionalization. Using newsreels, flashy headlines, and archival footage to evoke the period, and shot through with severe shadows and a muscular elegance, Bellocchio’s film bursts with passion and authority—and reminds us of the brutality that often comes hand-in-hand with each. 128 min.
Il primo film, Maids and Muslin, diretto da Noel Mason Smith, ha per protagonista Oliver Hardy, nel ruolo di Mr. Yards, che col socio in affari Mr. Bolts si contende le attenzioni della cassiera del proprio negozio di tessuti: un ruolo in cui già si riconoscono alcuni dei goffi gesti “romantici” che entreranno nel repertorio di Ollio. Distribuito in Italia con il titolo Fridolen direttore dei grandi magazzini, il film ottiene un grande successo tra il 1923 e il 1924: un’ottima riuscita commerciale, che probabilmente ha segnato la sorte delle copie del film, eccezionalmente usurate, causando la perdita dei titoli di testa e coda, e di alcuni frammenti intermedi. Seppure non integrale, però, questa versione italiana è l’unica conosciuta al mondo: un dato che ne rende ancora più significativo il restauro, che ha inoltre cercato di sanare le inevitabili lacune nella continuità attraverso l’inserimento di nuove didascalie (e rimettendo in sequenza corretta un frammento fuori posto). Il film sarà proiettato mercoledì 4 novembre alle ore 16 e domenica 15 novembre alle ore 18.
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