Marco Bellocchio’s creative universe, between cinema, television, and theater, fiction and documentary, analog and digital, has revolutionized not only the history of Italian cinema but the entire international cultural and political context since the mid-1960s. From Fists in the Pocket to Kidnapped, we witness a continuous rewriting of expressive codes within the close revolutionary and transgressive relationship with History. “Imagination is real,” claims one of the characters in Buongiorno, notte, thus declaring the revealing essence of Bellocchio’s inspiration.
Bellocchio’s idea of cinema, which obtained the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the 2011 Venice Film Festival and the honorary Palme d’Or at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival, is a constantly evolving creative machine that possesses the ability to “imagine” the surrounding world with a perpetual and ascending motion. Through a series of “inner images,” he arrives differently and without scruples at the heart of the truth, questioning the individual and collective psyche or tackling head-on the most unspeakable secrets of an Italy that projects its own long-lasting shadows on the entire world, as happens in the dark in a movie theater. Bellocchio is therefore an always antagonistic filmmaker, armed with a “lucid crowd” and irony to criticize and self-criticize private and public space from time to time, targeting institutions such as Family, Marriage and Couples, the Church and the Army, Psychiatry and Asylums, Politics and the State. Each of his films, series, and documentaries is therefore a singular “first work,” unpredictable and surprising, which calls into question the acquired audiovisual language and revises shared certainties to elaborate indefinitely new and provocative questions that remain open and nail the existing, past and present, rather than returning easy and bland answers.
— Anton Giulio Mancino