I pugni in tasca (Fists in the Pocket). 1965. Italy. Written and directed by Marco Bellocchio. With Lou Castel, Paola Pitagora, Marino Masé, Liliana Gerace. 4K digital restoration by Cineteca di Bologna with the support of Giorgio Armani; courtesy Cinecittà. In Italian; English subtitles. 109 min.
Marco Bellocchio’s astonishingly provocative and inventful feature debut, made on a shoestring budget at a family villa in Piacenza with a cast of friends and students, centers on a middle-class Italian family of incestuous, inbred epileptics, their mother blind and widowed, and on the teenage Sandro’s increasingly frenzied attempts to save another brother, as well as himself, from the madness and malignancy of an adult world seemingly governed by lies and betrayal. The film, naturally, sent the Catholic Church and the Italian government into paroxysms of violent indignation, while critics like David Robinson and filmmakers like Benardo Bertolucci were outspoken in their admiration for the young and brash Bellocchio: “It is a deep and extraordinary film, and a wholly exceptional first work,” Robinson declared, “shot and cut to give the same impression as the desperate jerks of an epileptic’s electro-encephalograph record.” In keeping with Lou Castel’s compulsively jittery energy as Sandro, Ennio Morricone’s spare and uncompromising score is repeated throughout the film, and one critic has noticed its similarity to Luigi Dallapiccola’s 1941 “Canti di Prigionia,” with its eschatological invocations of Dies Irae.