48 / BD 133 Rocco and His Brothers

[codam]

AVForums review

[domino harvey]

Stunnah

[Antoine Doinel]

I saw a screening of this tonight (a very battered print, presumably struck sometime in the '70s or '80s as it was "presented by Martin Scorsese") and I have to say I was mostly blown away by the film, particularly by the performances of Delon and Salvatori.

But I too was troubled by the treatment of Nadia. Dylan, I understand what you mean when you describe the difference in sexual nature between Rocco and Simone, but I don't think Rocco's natural beauty was the reason Nadia fell in love with him. She fell in love with him because he didn't see her as damaged or a whore, and was willing to accept her for who she was. Her relationship with Simone was always constructed around sex. Indeed, Simone's downfall is caused by his thirst for sex and for validation from his masculine cronies (which is why he gathers them together to witness his rape of Nadia). However, I think Visconti troublingly uses Nadia as a device, rather than a character, which makes for a few scenes that are either wholly unbelievable (particularly the ending where Simone reveals he has murdered Nadia and Rocco continues his stonefaced support) or borderline offensive. Moreover, I found Rocco's insistence to send Nadia back to Simone to be incredibly selfish. That said, I do recognize the film is more of allegory about Italy and contemporary society in general than something to be interpreted literally, so I gave it lot more leeway that I normally would.

That said, there are so many wonderful scenes in the film and Dylan, the coffee shop scene has just leaped into one of favorite sequences of all time. It's a beautiful, hopeful moment that also marks the beginning of everything that will happen in the second half, making it all the more tragic.

Michael, I don't think Rocco is "right" for not confronting Simone, but in the narrative of the story it's "right" in that it sticks to the archetype of the character.

I also think there needs to be something said about Luca, the youngest brother, who even at the end of the film, and even though he disagrees with Ciro for turning in Simone, still invites him over for dinner. Luca is the small, brief ray of hope in the other dark ending, and it's Visconti looking at the next generation to re-evaluate traditional values for those that will work in an evolving and morally declining (at least in his mind) society.

[tartarlamb]

What a problem piece this film is. I have to echo those who felt a lot of unease and ambivalence about this film, particularly concerning the treatment of Nadia. Everything seems to work so well in this film: Rotunno's gorgeous photography, Rota's score, the wonderfully staged and stylized scenes (the cafe scene with Nadia and Rocco, Simone's crime, Simone and Morini's argument), and some terrific melodramatic performances. But things sour after that key scene between Simone, Rocco and Nadia, and I'm not sure Visconti ever resolves his own digust with Rocco afterward. Nadia as a character is avoided after the scene, almost as if the director can't bring his audience back to the scene of the crime. The scope of the film narrows to an inter-fraternal vantage, and the viewer is left with the troubling question of what they should think of Rocco's character.

I don't buy that Rocco and Simone are on opposite poles as characters. Their moral positions have no practical difference, and the paralells are stronger than their differences -- beginning with the fact that they both box. They're both guilty of sacrificing Nadia (Rocco continually claims culpability), and they're both filled with hatred -- Simone's hatred vague and muddled, Rocco's repressed and channeled through boxing. There's a ironic tone to Rocco's sainthood in this film, ending with Ciro's, the good proletariat and true hero of the film, cynically realistic speech to Luca and the shots of the boards plastered with Rocco's face.

I think the film attempts to compensate for its treatment of Nadia by denegrating Simone, particularly in the scene with Morini. But, in the end, I think this film dives into some morally murky territory, and Visconti doesn't guide the audience or his characters out of it in any satisfying way.

[ellipsis7]

MoC ROCCO stirring up academic debate... Intro to piece on the film by D.A. Miller in Film Quarterly, Fall 2008...

Why this new Masters of Cinema (MOC) edition of Luchino Visconti 's Rocco and His Brothers was undertaken-what necessity or desire it was intended to meet-an oracle alone could tell us. The image, though anamorphically wellproportioned, is hardly different from the 2003 Medusa edition, and even most of MOCs "new, improved" subtitles come from that edition. When these are new-and turn, say, a character's "weakness" for boxers into his "generosity" toward them, or send us looking for an invisible "picture" of San Rocco while the statue of him sits in plain view-their prudery and ignorance only resume Rocco's dismal history of censorship. Perhaps not everything about the original should be restored, and certainly not, in Rocco's case, the superannuated conceptual framing that MOC has also salvaged for the accompanying booklet. The latter consists-exclusively-of texts written around the time of Rocco's release by Visconti and his intellectual champion and fellow party member Guido Aristarco. These enlist Rocco under the banner of political and artistic traditions then regarded as progressive. Visconti invokes Gramsci's "Notes on the Southern Question," to which Rocco would give narrative form, while Aristarco sees the film as continuing not only the left-leaning neo-realism of post-war Italian cinema, but also the explicitly proto-Marxist "critical realism" that Georg Lukács finds in the nineteenth-century European novel.

In 1960, it perhaps required such a pedigree to persuade the Italian cultural Left of Rocco's merit. To many of its first spectators, Visconti's great work seemed morbidly afflicted with melancholy, and this condition had to be neutralized, as by an antitoxin, with vigorous insistence on the film's "optimism of the will" (Visconti) and "presentiment of a great transformation to come" (Aristarco), which, appearances to the contrary, made it acceptably inspirational. But such affirmation, disingenuous even in Rocco's original marketing, becomes sheer mystification when reintroduced as the default setting for viewing Rocco now. The film's political value today might be said to lie, if anywhere, in the extreme formal clarity with which its melancholy prevents its dialectic from being more than notional. Unrecognized and even ruled out by Visconti's dutifully hopeful script, this melancholy survives in those appearances to the contrary which are, precisely, the images themselves.

If we started from these images rather than the script, we would see at once, for instance, that Rocco is simply too beautiful to be a neo-realist film. No doubt, the story-of a transplanted southern Italian family in Milan-takes place in that poor and lowly social realm which is neo-realist territory par excellence; in addition, it deploys practically the whole set of neo-realist stereotypes from the virtuous man and the chthonic mother to the creepy homosexual and the child redeemer-only the dog is absent. But the images egregiously violate neo-realism's two chief visual canons: ordinary-looking people and natural lighting. Rocco's beauty-distracting indeed-pulls us away from both conventions. To begin with the first of these, no one can pretend for a moment that Rocco Parondi, country boy and world-class boxer, looks like anything but the exquisitely handsome movie star who plays him, Alain Delon; or that his uncouth brothers Simone, Vincenzo, and Ciro (Renato Salvatore, Spiros Focas, and Max Cartier) do not share with this champion the title of Best-Looking Male Ensemble in the All-European Cinema. What's more, the Parondi beauty is so widely mirrored throughout the film's large population of boxers, soldiers, workers, and other assorted male extras, that, in a quite un-Marxist sense, all men truly do seem like brothers: the millennial class divisions of plain and handsome have been overcome at last, and muscles and well-built frames, so unjustly distributed everywhere else, are here the common property of all.

[Matt]

Seems a little unfair to use the MoC release to launch into a criticism of the film's perceived flaws (BTW, isn't calling Rocco a neo-realist film and then listing all the ways in which is it not a neo-realist film a classic straw man argument?). After all, the riposte to the first statement ("Why this new Masters of Cinema (MOC) edition of Luchino Visconti 's Rocco and His Brothers was undertaken-what necessity or desire it was intended to meet-an oracle alone could tell us,") is pretty obvious: because it was previously unavailable in the UK.

[foggy eyes]

Rocco is simply too beautiful to be a neo-realist film. [...] the images egregiously violate neo-realism's two chief visual canons: ordinary-looking people and natural lighting. Rocco's beauty-distracting indeed-pulls us away from both conventions.

Oh boy. This is embarrasingly simplistic. "Ordinary" = real. "Natural" = anti-spectacle. Of course! Perhaps it should be cross-posted in the 'rediculous' thread...

[peerpee]

The redundancy of many of D. A. Miller's points is disappointing. He comes off as an ignorant prick looking for a fight. I was surprised the editor printed the piece.

[zedz]

Considering how much has been written on neo-realism over the years, there's no excuse for Miller's ignorance of the rudimentary history of the movement or of Visconti's place within (and without) it. He's arguing from a simplistic received notion of what he thinks 'neo-realism' should mean. At any rate, almost everyone had moved on from neo-realism by the mid-fifties, Visconti gloriously and definitively with Senso, and what's most interesting about that great late 50s / 60s period in Italian cinema is exploring how so many different directors were reacting against the aesthetic in their own individual ways. Did it not occur to him that "pull[ing] us away from [neorealist] conventions" might have been exactly what Visconti wanted to do?

[ellipsis7]

Yes, it doesn't really stand up at all... Look to Rohdie's BFI monograph on ROCCO instead...

Another dubious quote from Miller's piece...

ROCCO's too-beautiful beauty cannot be ascribed solely to the photogeny, however considerable, of its dormant male protagonists. It is also owing to Giuseppe Rotunno's comparably breathtaking cinematography. ROCCO's great tableau vivants, as classically structured in their way as Delon's face and Salvatore's torso are in theirs, give only the half of it...

Meaningless apart from 'it looks good'...

[evillights]

"the photogeny ... of its dormant male protagonists"

tableau (sic) vivants

[AtlantaFella]

Did anyone else think that the Nino Rota score was a bit too whimsical for this film?

I am a huge fan of Rota, and his music provides the perfect (and irreplaceable) backdrop for the 15 Fellini films that I have had the pleasure of experiencing. As I watched Visconti's Rocco e i suoi fratelli, however, I felt an uncomfortable disconnect between the score and the drama that was unfolding on screen.

Thoughts?

[justeleblanc]

Did anyone else think that the Nino Rota score was a bit too whimsical for this film?

I am a huge fan of Rota, and his music provides the perfect (and irreplaceable) backdrop for the 15 Fellini films that I have had the pleasure of experiencing. As I watched Visconti's Rocco e i suoi fratelli, however, I felt an uncomfortable disconnect between the score and the drama that was unfolding on screen.

Thoughts?

I agree, but then the score was also used in Fellini's Toby Dammit... so that made it more distracting for me.

[AtlantaFella]

I agree, but then the score was also used in Fellini's Toby Dammit... so that made it more distracting for me.

Wow, how odd. Thanks for the heads-up... that one's sitting in my unwatched pile but is now back on my radar.

[peerpee]

Now viewable in the UK & Eire at The Auteurs.

[GaryC]

Just to mention that Kevin Ashman (Britain's #1 quizzer) is a MoC customer. This came up this week on a repeat of Eggheads (UK quiz show in which a team of challengers play a team of high-level quiz champions, including Mr Ashman). The question was to name the director of Rocco and His Brothers and The Leopard. Ashman got it right and mentioned in passing that he'd just bought the DVD of Rocco. He didn't say "Masters of Cinema" on British TV but you can't have everything...

[SamLowry]

MoC ROCCO stirring up academic debate... Intro to piece on the film by D.A. Miller in Film Quarterly, Fall 2008...

Why this new Masters of Cinema (MOC) edition of Luchino Visconti 's Rocco and His Brothers was undertaken-what necessity or desire it was intended to meet-an oracle alone could tell us.

yadda yadda yadda. What a bunch of claptrap...from someone who must love to hear himself think.
So what's the chance of a Blu-Ray upgrade for this. I've been holding off on this because it really should be on Blu Ray & I was hoping the US dvd would go out of print & Criterion pick up the rights....but that looks like a long wait now.

[rapta]

Finally got a release date for this one!

March 14th

[FrauBlucher]

MoC Trailer

[kristophers]

Saw the restoration DCP last night, looks terrific. The blu ray should not disappoint.

[MichaelB]

Saw the restoration DCP last night, looks terrific. The blu ray should not disappoint.

Saw the Blu-ray last week - it definitely shouldn't.

The censored footage has now been restored, although the optical censoring of a contentious surname is still there.

[FrauBlucher]

Wow, this looks lovely....Beaver

[ellipsis7]

Wow, this looks lovely....Beaver

They told me in Bologna that this restoration was especially good & it certainly is so!...

[Alphonse Tram]

I saw this a couple of times on the recent festival circuit, it does indeed look good. But the be honest, I hardly noticed as I was so deeply transfixed by this astonishing film.

[peerpee]

D. A. Miller's going to be punching fridges that someone's got the temerity to do another new edition.