There are quite a few films by Italian director Marco Bellocchio I haven’t seen; much of his older work remains unavailable for home viewing in the U.S., and several of his more recent titles never screened in Chicago. But I can aver based on the ones I have seen that Bellocchio’s output runs the gamut from great to terrible. His caustic, politically astute satires Fists in the Pocket (1965) and China Is Near (1967) are some of my favorite Italian films of the 1960s, and his Good Morning, Night (2003) and Vincere (2009) are some of the best Italian films of the current century. On the other hand, Devil in the Flesh (1986) is little more than tony soft-core porn and The Conviction (1991), a pseudo-intellectual apologia for rape, is among the more offensive films I know. Yet even the bad Bellocchio films I’ve seen contain passages of bravura technique and at least a few ideas to chew on—they made be infuriating, but they’re never boring.
In the days after I saw The Traitor, I went to screenings of two films that take the opposite approach to presenting history onscreen: Pedro Costa’s latest feature Vitalina Varela (which played at Columbia College’s Film Row Cinema with Costa in attendance) and Tsai Ming-liang’s 2003 work Goodbye, Dragon Inn (which played over the weekend in Doc Films’s ongoing Tsai retrospective). Both films contain minimal camera movement, relying instead on static long takes that make one feel, through their duration, the weight of history upon the characters. Aesthetically speaking, these are forward-pushing works, though the content emphasizes looking backwards. Costa’s film asks us to consider the personal history of the title character, a Cape Verdean immigrant playing herself, who’s arrived in Lisbon to bury her husband, who’d come to Portugal for work years earlier. Vitalina Varela feels stuck in the present—the characters’ memories hang over them so heavily that they have trouble moving forward in time—so when anyone reaches a new insight or decision, the progress feels monumental.
