IT314 ITALIAN CINEMA: INDIVIDUAL PERSPECTIVES
Term 1, week 5: Cinema and Self (iii)
Gli occhi, la bocca (Marco Bellocchio, 1982)
Key points:
- the individual and society; individual consciousness vs. social conventions and
expectations;
- psychoanalysis; dreams;
- family structures;
- the body and physical experience; play; violence; gender;
- urban and domestic space;
- imagination and constraint; creativity; cinema;
- colour;
- disruption of norms; disjointed vision, disjointed film grammar.
‘[There is] an important constant in Bellocchio’s treatment of the oneiric, one that is
central to an understanding of both the model of the mind and the relationship
between subjectivity and objectivity that is embraced in his films. This constant is what I
will term the hallucinatory mode. The use of hallucination or visions – rather than selfcontained dreams – permits the co-existence of past and present, here and there, and
real and dream, and it sets up a hesitant relationship between states, presenting them
as radically proximate. This will have important consequences for the screening of
interiority’ (pp. 82-83).
‘In the films of the Fagiolian years, spaces continue to be highly enclosed, and few
exteriors are presented. They retain and intensify the claustrophobia embedded in
Bellocchio’s earliest films, a claustrophobia that represents the confinement and
limitations of society, especially bourgeois society. With the waning of interest in the
political, what few crowd scenes were ever used by Bellocchio virtually disappear. The
most significant change during this period, however regards the relationship of interior
space to the psyche of the protagonists, a relationship that results in an increasing
metaphorization of spatial coordinates.
Keys to the relationship between the inner world of protagonists and the society in
which they find themselves are embedded particularly in the apertures that reveal or
hide the dichotomy of inner and outer space. These apertures onto the outside,
whether they be doors, windows, or television screens, imply a discourse on freedom
and confinement, and they feature throughout Bellocchio’s film-making’ (p. 88).
- both from Clodagh J. Brook, Marco Bellocchio: The Cinematic I in the Political Sphere
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010) [see below].
Dr Jennifer Burns,
H411,
tel. (024 765) 73096,
e-mail <j.e.burns@warwick.ac.uk>
Film credits:
Paese di
produzione
Anno
Durata
Colore
Audio
Genere
Regia
Soggetto
Sceneggiatura
Italia, Francia
1982
101 min
colore
sonoro
drammatico
Marco Bellocchio
Marco Bellocchio
Marco Bellocchio, con la
collaborazione di Vincenzo
Cerami e Catherine Breillat
Produttore Enzo Porcelli
Fotografia
Giuseppe Lanci
Interpreti e personaggi:
Lou Castel: Giovanni Pallidissimi /
Pippo Pallidissimi
Ángela Molina: Wanda
Emmanuelle Riva: madre
Michel Piccoli: zio Agostino
Antonio Piovanelli: padre di Wanda
Viviana Toniolo: Adele
Antonio Petrocelli: il dottore
Source: wikipedia.it
Select bibliography:
Aprà, Adriano, Marco Bellocchio: Il cinema e i film (Venice: Marsilio, 2005)
Benincasa, Fabio, ‘Marco Bellocchio, crisi collettiva e rinascita individuale’, Italian
Studies, 67:2 (2012), 214-36
Brook, Clodagh J., Marco Bellocchio: The Cinematic I in the Political Sphere (Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 2010)
----------------------, ‘The Oneiric in the Cinema of Marco Bellocchio’, Italica, 84: 2/3
(Summer - Autumn, 2007), 479-94
Micciché, Lino, ‘Il “cinema negativo” di Marco Bellocchio’, in Il cinema italiano degli anni
’60 (Rome: Marsilio, 1975), pp. 179-86
Vighi, Fabio, ‘On the Real Limits of Self-consciousness: Gazing Back at the Subversive
Subject with Marco Bellocchio’, in Culture, Theory and Critique, 46: 2 (2005), 147-61
----------------, Traumatic Encounters in Italian Film (Bristol: Intellect Books, 2006)
Dr Jennifer Burns,
H411,
tel. (024 765) 73096,
e-mail <j.e.burns@warwick.ac.uk>