At 82, Italian director Marco Bellocchio is the guest of honor at Visions du Réel, where his latest documentary “Marx can wait” (Marx can wait – 2021) premiered on Monday evening. He also gave a masterclass on Tuesday afternoon.
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Between fiction and documentary
Marco Müller, former director of the Venice and Locarno film festivals, said via video link from Shanghai that the award was “particularly important because it recognizes the delicate balance between fiction and documentary,” the festival said in a statement.
Keystone-ATS asked director Marco Bellocchio, during an interview in Nyon, what he had to say about it. “I’ve received many lifetime achievement awards, which to me means only one thing: what I do is often not understood right away and appreciation comes with time. “, noted the filmmaker
In fact, Bellocchio’s cinema has been non-conformist since his debut with “Pugni in tasca” (Fists in the pockets – 1965), winner of a silver veil at the Locarno Film Festival the same year. During his long career, Bellocchio worked on fiction films and documentaries. He says he doesn’t prefer one or the other, but uses one or the other “depending on the project.”
What I do is often not understood right away and appreciation comes with time
Marco Bellocchio, Honorary Prize at Visions du Réel
“It’s as if the direct reality fascinates me but is not enough. So on several occasions, and in a more accentuated way in recent years, there is this attempt to mix so-called archival material with the images that I shoot”, explains the man, who says he finds in it “a synthesis and a style “. He then cites the examples of “Buongiorno, notte” (Good morning, the night – 2003), “Vincere” (Vaincre – 2009) and “Marx can wait”. “In my practice, the goal is to reconnect with images from the past,” continues the artist.
A family tragedy
“Marx can wait” deals with the suicide of his twin brother at age 29 in 1968. The director brings together the Bellocchio siblings still alive on December 16, 2016 and it is with these images that the film opens. “From there, all my attention is on my absent brother,” says Bellocchio.
“The course of the film is to try to understand, to discover something more than what I had understood until then”, continues the director. “I was always the youngest in the family, but now I’m a certain age,” he continues with a laugh.
“There was a great generosity and sincerity on the part of my brothers and sisters, and that’s what the film is built on,” he says. “The thing that moved me was that even though I was speaking about an absolutely personal story, it elicited strong and emotional responses from an audience far removed from my story, because many of they rediscover the torments, anxieties and misfortunes common to many families”.
The Italian director claims he didn’t make this film as therapy, but he says “it revealed something that I had always looked at from afar or through the experiences of others or the characters I imagined”. Besides Bellocchio’s siblings, the film also features his two children, Pier Giorgio and Elena. “The story continues and continues through the questions they ask me during the film,” explains the director.
Testimonials
In “Marx can wait”, there are several scenes taken from Bellocchio’s previous films, which are also linked to family dynamics. In this regard, the director says that during the editing process, which lasted a long time: “little by little, I remembered this or that film which could somehow merge and represent what we were to tell about”.
The director cites as a characteristic aspect of this film the fact that “the testimonies of the protagonists were sufficient”. “Their voices were louder than what I could have done if I had staged the episodes, for example the death of my brother,” he explains.
“The gymnasium where the tragedy took place no longer exists, we have reconstructed a very similar one in which I read this letter that Camillo had sent me and that I had ‘forgotten'”, says the artist . What he describes himself as “a lack of sensitivity”. “Behind this message was a great request for help,” he says.