Marco Bellocchio:
"Taking risks with images is my job."

In Marco Bellocchio's latest film, $My Mother's Smile$, young Leonardo asks his father, Ernesto, the meaning of consistency, and he replies that it is "Always doing what you have said you will do." Consistency between words and actions: here is a constant value which typifies the 40-year career of a filmmaker who, during a course which has been tumultuous, contradictory, deviating, perhaps incongruent, full of twists and turns and stops and reversals, has always remained true to himself, even when he was forced to clash with himself.

Since 1965, when the first film of the 26-year-old Piacenza native, $Fists in the Pocket$, fell like a bomb on Italian cinema, blowing up from its very foundations the family (as a value and an institution), Marco Bellocchio has never stopped searching, through his films, for the deeper meaning of existence (his own existence), in order to be able to approach and understand the existence of others and of the world. This never-ending adventure in search of the truth has led him along dangerous paths, to the indistinct limits between what is (or what society considers to be) normal and that which is different, diverging: the Other.

Almost in its entirety, Bellocchio's oeuvre is permeated by this tendency to make a whole-hearted and risk-taking opening towards the unknown world of the Other. After his first film, an unconditionally iconoclastic, revolutionary and unconventional work, which even today appears to be coming from the future, Bellocchio went on to direct, over a period of ten years, $China Is Near$, $In the Name of the Father$, $Slap the Monster on the Front Page$ and $Victory March$. The fact that these five films were classified as "denouncements" of middle class institutions and labeled their maker as an "angry young man", has to do more with journalistic conventions rather than with the essence of the matter. These films aimed at underscoring the dominating mechanisms of these institutions and their power to homogenize behavior or to crush any form of rebellion. After all, any classification based on aesthetics or any other criterion is extremely difficult, since Bellocchio's oeuvre is like a river which is constantly winding and changing course.
If there are indeed certain constants, then they should be sought in the ruins of the family which lie scattered throughout his oeuvre --in the bold and fearless way in which he gazes upon the abyss of "madness"-- in his dangerous wanderings through the mysterious and unexplored province of existence which is known as the unconscious. Marco Bellocchio has been, and still is, a brave wayfarer through this region, where the instinct for self-destruction co-exists with that of self-preservation, and sexual desire (the giver of life) is often crowned by the dark aura of death. It is within this thematic unity that we come across $Fit to Be Untied$, a unique documentary which is "directed" by the heretic word of the abnormal, as well as the masterful $Leap into the Void$, a film which whispers about the darkening of the mind and the twilight of the soul, as it deals with the normalcy of "madness". It is this "madness", this passion and agony of existence which drips off every single frame of $The Seagull$ --the best film adaptation of Chekhov ever made-- and it is this same "madness" which Henry wears as a mask in order to protect himself from the hypocrisy of a spurious life in $Henry IV$, a masterpiece of ambiguity, where the limits between the theatrical and cinematic representation are invalidated by an exquisite $coup de grace$. When his "psychopathic" heroes release the energy of their sexual field, they are "cured" and go on to follow their hearts, like Giulia in $The Devil in Her Body$, a film in which love is bigger than life, or, alternately, they break the bonds of space and time, as Maddalena does in $The Witch$. For these "marked" heroes, the road to freedom passes necessarily through the gates of their unconscious and their repressed sexual desire, which, once it is released and allowed to reach its climax ($The Condemnation$), the agitation, on a conscious level, is so great, that the heroine demands the incarceration of the man who has led her to the heights of pleasure. As he stays on his course, constantly risking and challenging his very existence as an artist, Marco Bellocchio does not leave behind any unsettled accounts. With $The Eyes, the Mouth$ (his only autobiographical film, in the sense of it being self-referential), he returns, 17 years later, to $Fists in the Pocket$ and to the troubled landscapes of adolescence, in order to pay an old debt to the figure of the mother. Following $The Butterfly Dream$, an almost silent film, the frozen beauty of which is similar to that of statues, Bellocchio returns once more to the warmth of dreams with $The Prince of Homburg$, where the hero, impulsive to the point of "madness", goes after the mirage of a Utopia and becomes trapped in a delusion between the Land of Youth and Desire and the Kingdom of Shadows and Law. Finally, the young wet nurse in $The Nanny$, floods the sanitized bourgeois home with the juices of Mother-Nature, while, in $MY Mother's Smile$, the sleep-walking Ernesto (a relative of the Prince of Homburg) not only defends the value of consistency against his odious family, but saves his young son, Leonardo, from the kingdom of the living-dead of the Catholic Church in order to lead him to the safe haven of his first love.

Marco Bellocchio is a genuine filmmaker, who has always endeavored to take his experiences and personal contradictions and transform them into art (into cinematic images), leaving a clear and brightly shining mark on the corpus of modern cinema.

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