FISTS IN THE POCKET/ I PUGNI IN TASCA (Marco Bellocchio, 1965) is one of the most audacious first films I’ve ever seen. A bourgeois family on the skids live in a huge manor on the outskirts of a town by the Italian Alps. The mother is blind, two of the brothers, Alessandro (Luc Castel) and Leone (Pier Luigi Troglio), are epileptic; the sister (Paola Pitagora) has mental problems; and it is up to the elder brother (Marino Masé) to maintain the family, though this means he can’t move into town, get an apartment and marry the woman he loves. Alessandro decides to take it upon himself to free his older brother by killing off everyone else. The film has been historicised as a break with neorealism that foreshadowed the events of 1968. I understood it more as a film about a country in which past ways no longer work; where there is still a nostalgia for the certainties of the church, the military, the old (fascist?) order combined with an eagerness for and fear of modernity. In his excellent piece for SENSES OF CINEMA, Karl Schoonover convincingly demonstrates how the film dramatizes a dialectic with the past. Lou Castel, baby-faced, fearful, but with fist in pockets into the future, and rather sexy with it, is an extraordinary presence. It’s clearly a first film by a young filmmaker in love with cinema, it moves with energy and inventiveness, and through some impactful striking imagery. I couldn’t see it in Bologna so bought the DVD put out by the Cinemateca di Bologna, which is accompanied by a marvellous book of essays, chock-full of shot plans, storyboards etc. I’m eager now to see more of Bellocchio

José Arroyo