Rocco e i suoi fratelli (Rocco und seine Brüder)

Visconti as a cinematic master of a deeply pessimistic historiography of the present. The time: 1960, or the clash of a rural-feudal era with the age of advanced, ruthless capitalism. The place: Lucania transported to Lombardy, the south in the north, the rural Mezzogiorno in Milan, the cold gray El Dorado of industry and big business. The subject: the matriarchal family unit as the cell of southern Italian life. The narrative style: epic drama, a hundred times over, depending on the need, veering into melodrama—and vice versa. On the one hand, there is the precise social experiment; on the other, the cinema of great emotions and contrasts that clash, embodied in brothers who are doomed to failure. Visconti moves from the neorealism of his earlier works to a multi-character, operatic realism that knows how to portray the fate of a country and an era through the tragedy of individuals. (H.T.)