Rocco and his Brothers (Rocco e i suoi fratelli)

Sam Rohdie

• Publisher: British Film Institute
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781839021961
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

Sam Rohdie's insightful and compelling analysis of Luchino Visconti's 1960 epic of modern urban life provides reveals the film as one of the greatest masterpieces of Italian cinema. Rocco tells the story of a family of peasants uprooted from their village in southern Italy, and forced to battle for existence in the industrial metropolis of Milan.
Though fascinated by the social reality of modern Italy, Visconti had by this time thrown off the influence of the neorealist movement. He had developed a style all his own, enriched by his experience of directing opera for the stage. As a result, the characters in Rocco are no longer held in check by the naturalistic conventions of neorealism. Instead, they erupt on the screen with all the emotional power of heightened melodrama.
The violent sexuality projected by stars Alain Delon, Annie Girardot, Claudia Cardinale and the rest of Visconti's impressive cast was too much for the Italian censors, who cut several scenes. Rohdie discusses the film in terms of its 'passionate splendid realism', arguing that these two apparently opposing moods are held in balance rather than contradiction in the film, part of 'the very condition of the film's power - and grace.'

‘Rocco and His Brothers’

Visconti sketched out the idea for Rocco and His Brothers (Rocco e i suoi fratelli) in spring 1958 for the producer Franco Cristaldi. He worked on a treatment with Vasco Pratolini, the novelist, and Suso Cecchi D’Amico, his preferred scriptwriter, who had collaborated with him on Senso (1954) and would work on virtually all of Visconti’s subsequent films. The treatment was ready that summer, but Visconti and Cristaldi had some disagreements and the project eventually went to the producer Goffredo Lombardo at Titanus. Pratolini withdrew and the script was worked on by five writers (including Visconti), each of whom wrote one of the five ‘chapters’ around which the film is structured: Massimo Franciosa (‘Vincenzo’), Suso Cecchi D’Amico (‘Simone’), Pasquale Festa Campanile (‘Rocco’), Enrico Medioli (‘Ciro’), and Visconti himself (the final chapter, ‘Luca’). Visconti used the same group of writers for Il gattopardo (The Leopard, 1963), and later singly for other films.

Each ‘chapter’ took the name of one of the five Parondi brothers in order of age from the eldest to the youngest. The script assumed its final form by autumn 1959. Shooting began in Milan on 22 February 1960, and was completed on 2 June 1960 at Civitavecchia.

Though the film is wholly set in Milan, some scenes had to be shot elsewhere, notably, and controversially, the scene of the murder of Nadia by Simone at the Milan flying-boat station. The provincial authorities refused Visconti permission to use the station, afraid that a scene involving murder and prostitution would be bad for tourist development in the area; it was shot at Lake Fogliano in Latina instead. For most other film-makers the change in location, to simulate one reality with another reality, would hardly have mattered; but for Visconti, whose realism is fastidiously authentic, the shift to Lake Fogliano was a reluctant compromise. In the event, this setback proved the least of subsequent censorship difficulties the film was to face, and the further compromises Visconti was forced to make.

The credits list a collection of short stories, Il ponte della Ghisolfa, by the Milan writer Giovanni Testori as having inspired the film. (In the year Rocco was released, Visconti staged Testori’s L’Arialda, and in 1967 his La monaca di Monza [The Nun of Monza]). The most important stories for Rocco in the collection are the trilogy Il ponte della Ghisolfa (Ghisolfa Bridge), I ricordi e i rimorsi (Memories and Regrets), and Un letto, una stanza ... (A Bed, a Room ... ), which are about a love affair of a woman with her husband’s brother. The story is told from her point of view; one of the best passages is her meticulously detailed revulsion for her husband as he comes to bed, drunk and smelly, and her image of the more delectable brother, which makes the reality of her husband so intolerable. In Rocco, the differences between Rocco and Simone, joined over Nadia, find part of their symbolic charge in a physical contrast: the fresh, sweet beauty of Rocco (Alain Delon) and the shambling, unshaven, mean, desperate Simone (Renato Salvatori), with the appearance but also the stink of decadence.

A similar situation of incestuous passion, more closely related to Rocco because of its setting among Italian immigrants in Brooklyn, is Arthur Miller’s play A View from the Bridge, which Visconti directed for the theatre in 1958 at the time he was thinking about Rocco. (Visconti also directed Miller’s Death of a Salesman in 1949, The Crucible in 1955, and After the Fall in 1965.) The play involves not only incest and ‘brotherly’ jealousy, but traditional Southern Italian ‘honour’ put at risk in a modern urban setting, close to what occurs in Rocco.

Other literary sources for the film were important during the writing of the script: Thomas Mann’s Joseph and His Brothers and Dostoevsky’s The Idiot. Mann and Dostoevsky (like Testori and Miller) were particularly favoured by Visconti. His 1971 film Morte a Venezia and his 1956 ballet production Mario e il Mago (Mario and the Magician) were based on Mann stories; in 1946, Visconti staged an adaptation by Gaston Baty of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment; and he adapted the Dostoevsky story White Nights for the film of the same name (Le notti bianche, 1957).

The Mann novel has a definite presence in Rocco. The novel, like the film, juxtaposes mythic, primal forces and historical, social ones; and it concerns, as Rocco does, the confrontation of different worlds and moralities, which in the film are an industrial Italian North and a primitive rural South. Visconti, like Mann, was fascinated by disintegrating worlds, values in crisis, the historicity of relations, for which, in both novel and film, the family is the historical and psychic centre.

The character of Rocco is directly based on Dostoevsky’s Prince Myshkin in The Idiot, the pure innocent in a corrupt world whose Goodness ends by provoking Evil. It is joined to other Dostoevskian themes of guilt, remorse, sacrifice. The link between a moral universe and a social-historical one, the crisis in the one felt in the other, is characteristic of Visconti (and also of Mann), and more generally of a realistic-melodramatic literature of the late nineteenth century whose best Italian expression was not in letters but in lyric opera, particularly the operas of Giuseppe Verdi.

II

Besides the Testori stories, there are three Italian sources for Rocco: Giovanni Verga’s ‘veristic’ novel I Malavoglia, Antonio Gramsci’s fragmentary essay ‘The Southern Question’, and, overall, the operas of Giuseppe Verdi.

The juxtaposition – Verga and Gramsci, the novel and social analysis – is at the heart of Rocco, and is central to Visconti’s other purely literary choices, works which construct circles of relations between private and public, the fictional and the historical, family and society. Verga and Gramsci have an extra, specific importance for Rocco, a film about the experience of Southern Italian immigrants coming from the poor rural South to the developed Italian North: ‘I’ve always seen the Southern question as one of the principal sources of my inspiration,’ he said in 1960.¹

The ‘Southern Question’ in Italian politics has been a question of economic difference, class exploitation, political deals, but also involves the shape of Italian culture, the cultural price of development, the destruction of traditional relations by capitalist ones. The film is a product of that culture, not simply representing the ‘Southern Question’ but representative of it.

The post-war Italian ‘economic miracle’ altered not only traditional peasant cultures, but also a traditional elite bourgeois culture, which was Visconti’s own and whose forms and values structure the film. The film is encased within a cultural history as much as the Parondi family are enmeshed in a social one. The forms of the film belong to a bourgeois culture as threatened by modernity as is the peasant culture which those forms in the film are used to represent. The events which occur in the fiction have a mirror in the shape of the fiction itself.

The fictional story of Rocco concerns the dislocation of traditional values of a peasant culture transplanted into an industrial one. The historicity of those values, their inevitable displacement, is not simply a matter of fiction but a matter of history. In the space of just over a decade, from the mid-1950s to the late 1960s, Italy was transformed from a relatively backward agricultural economy to an advanced capitalist one. For the depressed South, the miraculous economic development of Italy was socially and culturally traumatic. The South became a symbol of an entire Italian experience of economic change and social disruption.

One aspect of the Italian literary and filmic reflection on the South was regret and nostalgia for values lost, a humanity and warmth forever gone, destroyed by neo-capitalism and its neo-bourgeoisie. It is the theme and obsession, for example, in the works of Pasolini even when the Italian South shifts to India, to a mythical Arabia, to the Yemen, to Morocco where Pasolini sought in the peasant third world what had ceased to exist for him in Calabria or Basilicata, or in the slums of Naples or the shanty towns of the Rome borgate. For intellectuals like Visconti and Pasolini, the cultural loss caused by economic development affected them not because the South had disappeared, but because their own cultural values, the humanism they had learned and valued, seemed also on the verge of disappearance, as culturally moribund as the Italian Southern peasantry was historically irrelevant. Unable to adjust fully to the modern, these film-makers, each in their way, made films which involved a regret for the loss of the past. By 1960 (the year of Rocco), when Pasolini made his first film, Accattone, juxtaposing the ‘human’ values of a sub-proletarian world (a symbolic South) with the inhuman new bourgeois universe surrounding it, the third world, peasant civilization image of the South had become, by the very force of change, abstract if not absurd.

Nostalgia for a past destroyed could appear politically radical and socialist since there was in that nostalgia an admixture of anti-bourgeois, anti-capitalist feelings. It connected to a Marxism and a loyalty to the Italian Communist Party by film-makers like Visconti, Pasolini and Giuseppe De Santis which was often sentimental and sometimes reactionary, for example when it became a rejection of the modern in all its manifestations, especially of the avant-garde, of new artistic forms, condemned not on artistic grounds but for a lack of apparent (or obvious) political value.

Rocco, Simone, Rosaria in Rocco are victims of the new modern North into which they are plunged, but they are also the heroic figures of the film, especially in their defeat. They may have lost their worlds but, for the fiction, the loss ennobles them. Their grandeur is in their victimization: purer, better values destroyed by vulgar, instrumental, lesser ones.

It isn’t simply the theme of that regret in the fiction of Rocco that matters, but the means for structuring it, a last-century classical humanist culture: Verga, Mann, Dostoevsky, Verdian opera, melodrama, the historical novel, Chekhov, Shakespeare. The centre of Rocco may be the defeated peasant world, but the staging of that defeat implicates a defeated old bourgeois world. The film depicts, with an obsessive realism, the history of what is already past at the moment it is being represented, and in fictional forms of the past.

Rocco is a film whose artistic and narrative structures belong to a culture which predates the cinema and for which the means of cinema are used to revalue and at the same time make present again as attesting to the historicity of those values. Rocco is not a modern work (because of the classical forms it uses), but a contemporary one (for the consciousness of its own history). Visconti measured all that has been lost, the price of an inevitable, unwelcome progress, in a meticulous nostalgia; it is the exquisite detail of his measure that makes his work at once current (for its politics and history) and remote (for its forms and culture).

In the case of Pasolini, the consciousness of loss, often taken to the point of absurdity, nevertheless employed singularly modern terms to express a thoroughly unmodern nostalgia and regret. Visconti, who in many ways was more modern than Pasolini in his politics and in his acceptance of economic and social changes (as Rocco attests), was more old-fashioned in the forms he clung to (as Rocco also attests). While Pasolini parodied or cited classical culture, from Chaucer to Mannerist painting, the forms of that culture are the very texture of Visconti’s films – like Rocco, a nineteenth-century melodrama more to do with Verdi, than with, say, Minnelli or Douglas Sirk.

At the level of ideology Rocco is progressive, but its structures and language seem not to be, or at least that is the problem Visconti’s film poses: is there any relevance now to the forms of operatic melodrama and the historical novel, as lovingly, as accurately reproduced in Rocco as are the streets and bars of Milan, or the bruises to Simone’s face, or the tearing of flesh by a knife? And is there in these forms and in the culture and values they represent something more productive than a lament and nostalgia? Can those values not only point to values lost, but to values to be regained?

III

Of the five Parondi brothers, Vincenzo, the eldest, and Ciro and Luca, the two youngest, are integrated into the industrial society of the North. Vincenzo has a secure construction job, Ciro is a skilled worker for Alfa Romeo, and the family hopes that Luca will return to Lucania in the South, to the village which the family had left, but a village being transformed by economic progress within a more prosperous South. The fate of the three ‘integrated’ brothers directly refers to ideological and social-historical positions argued by Gramsci in ‘The Southern Question’.

Gramsci saw the Southern question of North-South disunity in class terms. He regarded the relation of the industrial North to the rural South as one of exploitation by a political bloc of Northern industrialists and large, semi-feudal Southern landowners. Rather than workers in the North taking the Southern peasantry as their natural allies against the bourgeois state, and rather than Southern bourgeois intellectuals regarding the peasantry of the South as their allies, the working class aligned itself with Northern capital, while Southern intellectuals detached themselves from solidarity with the Southern peasantry to attach themselves in...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series
• Dedication
• Title
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• ‘Rocco and His Brothers’
• Notes
• Credits
• Bibliography
• Copyright