24Apr06
Made in 1965 and still considered by many to be Marco Bellocchio’s masterpiece, Fists in the Pocket foreshadows the years of student protest in a family tragedy bordering on horror. This seminal first feature catapulted the twenty-six-year-old Bellocchio to fame and introduced a controversial director who, along with Bernardo Bertolucci and Pier Paolo Pasolini, would become a leading cultural figure for a generation of Italians. Fists in the Pocket is one of the reasons people still remember Italian cinema as a great and powerful force.
“The great advantage of first films,” Bellocchio has said, “is that you’re nobody and have no history, so you have the freedom to risk everything.” Daring in the extreme, Fists in the Pocket describes a young provincial man’s annihilating rage—the very title implies pent-up teenage anger and resentment—encompasses matricide, fratricide, and incest, mocks the institutions of church and family, and generally raises hell. It dropped like a bomb on the quiet world of mid-sixties Italian cinema, still under the spell of a humanistic, postwar neorealism. Radical and grotesque, fast-paced and sarcastic, it left all who saw it breathless. Premiered at the Locarno International Film Festival, it was loved by young critics, loathed with equal passion by the Catholic establishment, and earned huffy put-downs from Luis Buñuel and Michelangelo Antonioni, two of the young director’s heroes. In the end, the film made an international figure out of him. Yet its very success would prove to be a ball and chain for Bellocchio, who for a long time felt it overshadowed his subsequent work. And indeed, arguably, only in his most recent films, My Mother’s Smile (2002) and Good Morning, Night (2003), has he once again touched the extraordinary artistic heights that he did here.
24Apr06
François Truffaut once wrote, “All of Louis Malle, all his good qualities and faults, was in Elevator to the Gallows”—a statement that, even given French film criticism’s traditionally high tolerance for the counterintuitive, pretty unambiguously qualifies as, well, false. What’s most striking about Elevator to the Gallows, in fact, is that Malle, having made this almost insolently proficient Série noire thriller, never went anywhere near the genre again, and for the rest of his career rarely displayed much interest in the sort of tightly controlled visual and narrative style he uses with such mastery here. It would be more accurate, I think, to say that “all of Louis Malle” is all that is not in Elevator to the Gallows—or, for that matter, in any individual Malle movie—but is, rather, what lies in the spaces between his films, in the habit of renunciation that required him, it seems, to turn his back immediately on whatever he had just accomplished.
To put it another way: Malle spent the four decades of his filmmaking life saying, “Been there, done that,” over and over again, searching constantly for somewhere he hadn’t been and something he hadn’t done. From the chilly elegance of Elevator to the Gallows, in 1957, he moved quickly to the humid romanticism of The Lovers (1958) and then to the frenetic zaniness of Zazie dans le métro (1960). Next came A Very Private Affair, in 1962, a caustic film à clef about and with Brigitte Bardot, which was followed immediately by the melancholic, Fitzgerald-like The Fire Within (1963), the movie that was the occasion of Truffaut’s rather desperate attempt to fit the director’s already bewilderingly diverse body of work into an off-the-rack auteurist suit.
17Apr06
Another movie, another cause célèbre: Orson Welles’s Mr. Arkadin has been dismissed as a disaster and hailed as a masterpiece. In 1958, Cahiers du cinéma declared it one of the twelve greatest films ever made—unaware that its intricate series of flashbacks had been reedited and “normalized,” or ruined, for its French release by producer Louis Dolivet.
A movie then without a definitive version (Jonathan Rosenbaum explicated seven texts and ur-texts in a 1992 Film Comment article), to be read in any order (like Julio Cortázar’s Hopscotch), this madly stylized cheapster, also known as Confidential Report, is the fullest expression of Welles’s European exile. Beginning in 1954, Mr. Arkadin was shot for five months, mainly in Spain—much of it in a Madrid studio—with additional locations in West Germany and France. This was followed by eight months of postsynchronization and editing in Paris and Rome. After Welles missed a Christmas 1954 deadline, Dolivet took control of the footage and assigned the editing to another. The world premiere was in London, in August 1955; a Spanish-language version opened in Madrid around the same time; the Paris premiere was in June 1956. There, the Young Turks of Cahiers proclaimed it Welles’s greatest achievement.
