Martin Scorsese on Visconti's Rocco and His Brothers

Rocco and His Brothers (Directed by Luchino Visconti)

A distinct feature of Luchino Visconti's work is his realistic approach to individuals caught up in the conflicts of modern society, which led to the designation of Visconti as the ‘father of Neorealism’ in relation to Italian cinema. 

From an aristocratic background, Visconti was familiar with the arts as his mother was a noted pianist, and his father hired professional entertainers to play at their own theatre throughout his boyhood. He spent around 10 years studying cello and, after that, worked briefly as a theatre set designer. 

Visconti joined Renoir as his assistant in 1935, at a time when the French filmmaker was beginning to address social and political concerns in his films. In the immediate aftermath of World War II, he began to distinguish himself as an inventive theatrical and opera director. 

The first major project to establish him as a filmmaker was Obsession, an adaptation of the James M. Cain novel The Postman Always Rings Twice. The film he produced employed natural locations, paired professional performers with locals, and included footage captured with concealed cameras to augment the believability of the story. Neorealist directors like as Roberto Rossellini and Vittorio De Sica were some of the most prominent filmmakers during the postwar period. The Earth Trembles (a documentary-style study of Sicilian fishermen) took home the Grand Prize at the Venice Film Festival. Senso from 1954 is widely acclaimed by critics. Among Visconti's other noteworthy works is Bellissima (1951; The Most Beautiful). White Nights, an adaptation of a story by Dostoevsky, and Rocco e I suoi fratelli (1960; Rocco and His Brothers).

His 1963 drama Il gattopardo (The Leopard) is widely admired, and connects strongly with Visconti through his identification with the character of Giuseppe di Lampedusa, an aristocrat with liberal political convictions. When he died in 1976, Visconti was finishing the editing of his last picture, L’innocente (The Innocent), based on a novel by D’Annunzio. 

Here, Martin Scorsese pays tribute to Luchino Visconti, whose early classic Rocco and His Brothers had been recently restored to its original glory.

Luchino Visconti was one of the greatest artists in the history of cinema. He had a fascinating life, which was intertwined with many different strands of European art and culture.

Visconti came from the Milanese branch of one of Europe’s oldest families, whose roots can be traced back to the early 13th century. He might have appeared as a character in one of his own films about the aristocracy, such as Senso or The Leopard – that’s the life he was born into. But at a certain point in the 1930s, his passion for theatre, opera and the cinema set him on a radically different path.

Visconti had a kind of apprenticeship with Jean Renoir and worked as an assistant on some of the pictures he made during the period when he was associated with the French Popular Front – Renoir was actually the one that gave him the idea for his first film, Ossessione, an adaptation of The Postman Always Rings Twice. Visconti’s artistic and political lives became almost one and the same – he started making films and directing theatre during the war years, the same period in which he joined the Communist party and worked with the Resistance.

He has often been referred to as a great political artist, but that’s too limiting and frozen a description. His sense of European history was vast and he knew the lives of the rich and powerful first hand – but at a certain point he became drawn to understand the other side of life, that of the poor and powerless. He had a strong sense of the particular manner in which absolutely everyone, from the Sicilian fishermen in his neorealist classic La Terra Trema to the Venetian aristocrats in Senso, was affected by the grand movements of history.

Visconti directed 14 features in his lifetime, each one extraordinary. Some, such as Senso, The Leopard and Rocco e i suoi Fratelli [Rocco and His Brothers], are among the greatest in the history of the art form. Written by Visconti and his long-time collaborator Suso Cecchi D’Amico (along with the contributions of four other writers), Rocco was based on elements of Ghisolfa Bridge by the Milanese writer Giovanni Testori, but it was also inspired by themes found in Thomas Mann’s Joseph and His Brothers and Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot. Visconti follows the fortunes of Rocco (Alain Delon) and his three brothers Simone (Renato Salvatori), Ciro (Max Cartier) and Luca (Rocco Vidolazzi), who travel with their mother (Katina Paxinou) from south to north in search of a better life. Unlike Senso and The Leopard, Rocco was set in the present, which at the time was in the midst of the industrial and economic boom that transformed Italy during the mid-1960s. The picture is about the effects of life in this new world on the family, which gradually comes apart at the seams.

When Rocco and His Brothers came out, in 1960, a lot of people criticised it for what they perceived as emotional excess. It is operatic, as were all of Visconti’s films, but the remarks about excess made no sense to me. Rocco is Italian culture. I grew up in Italian-American culture, but there wasn’t much of a difference. For us – that is, me and my family and my friends – the physical and emotional expressiveness of the characters in the film, Katina Paxinou’s character in particular, seemed like an accurate and only slightly heightened reflection of the life we knew. We all saw that kind of ‘excess’ on a regular basis.

Rocco is one of the most sumptuous black-and-white pictures I’ve ever seen. The images, shot by the great Giuseppe Rotunno, are pearly, elegant and lustrous – it’s like a simultaneous continuation and development of neorealism. Thanks to Gucci and The Film Foundation and our friends at the Cineteca di Bologna, Luchino Visconti’s masterpiece can be experienced once again in all its fearsome beauty and power.

MARTIN SCORSESE, founder and chair of The Film Foundation, is a director, producer, screenwriter, actor and film historian, and widely regarded as one of the most significant and influential film-makers in cinema history; film-foundation.org

Visconti: Rocco and His Brothers

Luchino Visconti: Rocco and His Brothers

“At once lyrical and brutal, this family saga is fatalist film noir expressed through a purity of vision; like the saintly Rocco (Alain Delon) himself, it takes a lot of violence to daunt Visconti’s love. Rocco is a character like Dostoyevsky’s Prince Mishkin, or Robert Bresson’s Balthazar. He is the anomaly among the five sons of a poor but canny widow (Katina Paxinou) who brings her family from the south to Milan, where they “arrive like an earthquake,” unprepared for the strains of urban living. The film develops in five episodes, one devoted to each brother, but the structure is as complex as their lives are intertwined.”

– Judy Bloch 

Five boys and their mother migrate north to Milan in search of opportunity. In the boxing ring, Simone and Rocco discover fame and love in the same woman—Nadia. In this sharp, sensual, emotionally devastating classic from filmmaker Luchino Visconti, jealousy grows, blood is spilt, and a striving family confronts self-destruction.

Luchino Visconti's picture, a great, late neo-realistic combination of melodrama and tragedy features Alain Delon as Rocco, Renato Salvatori as the hapless Simone, Annie Girardot, and Visconti regulars Paolo Stoppa and Claudia Cardinale round out the multinational group (father and daughter in The Leopard, three years later). 

Giuseppe Rotunno's gritty black-and-white photographs of Milan is striking: not just Central Station, misty canals, and majestic cathedral spires, but also squalid working-class tenements and boxing rings — providing an evocative image of a pivotal moment in recent Italian history.

Rocco and His Brothers "represents the artistic apotheosis of Italian neorealism," according to A.O. Scott of The New York Times, with an operatic Nino Rota score and Giuseppe Rotunno's dazzling, on-location photography. Visconti organises his characteristic themes—modernity, social friction, familial discord—across an epic canvas that directly impacted later Italian-American sagas by Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese, drawing on Dostoevsky and Thomas Mann. 

The film premiered at the Venice Film Festival in 1960, when it was met with controversy and awarded the Special Jury Prize. 

A distinct feature of Luchino Visconti's work is his realistic approach to individuals caught up in the conflicts of modern society, which led to the designation of Visconti as the "father of Neorealism" in Italian cinema. In the immediate aftermath of World War II, he began to distinguish himself as an inventive theatrical and opera director. 

From an aristocratic background, Visconti was familiar with the arts as his mother was a noted pianist, and his father hired professional entertainers to play at their own theatre throughout his boyhood. He spent around 10 years studying cello and, after that, worked briefly as a theatre set designer. He was well-educated in classical music, too. Visconti joined Renoir as his assistant in 1935, at a time when the French filmmaker was beginning to address social and political concerns in his films. 

The first major project to establish him as a filmmaker was “Obsession,” an adaptation of the James M. Cain novel The Postman Always Rings Twice. The film he produced employed natural locations, paired professional performers with locals, and included footage captured with concealed cameras to augment the believability of the story.

This is an excellent example of Neorealism in the world of international cinema. Neorealist directors like as Roberto Rossellini and Vittorio De Sica were some of the most prominent filmmakers during the postwar period. "The Earth Trembles" (a documentary-style study of Sicilian fishermen) took home the Grand Prize at the Venice Film Festival. Senso from 1954 is widely acclaimed by critics.  Aming Visconti's other noteworthy works is Bellissima (1951; The Most Beautiful). White Nights, an adaptation of a story by Dostoevsky, and Rocco e I suoi fratelli (1960; Rocco and His Brothers).

His masterpiece, the 1963 drama Il gattopardo (The Leopard) is widely admired, which connects strongly with Visconti through his identification with the character of Giuseppe di Lampedusa, an aristocrat with liberal political convictions. When he died in 1976, Visconti was finishing the editing of his last picture, L'innocente (The Innocent), based on a novel by D'Annunzio. 

Martin Scorsese paid tribute to Rocco and His Brothers when it was recently restored to its original glory: “When Rocco and His Brothers came out, in 1960, a lot of people criticised it for what they perceived as emotional excess. It is operatic, as were all of Visconti’s films, but the remarks about excess made no sense to me. Rocco is Italian culture. I grew up in Italian-American culture, but there wasn’t much of a difference. For us – that is, me and my family and my friends – the physical and emotional expressiveness of the characters in the film, Katina Paxinou’s character in particular, seemed like an accurate and only slightly heightened reflection of the life we knew. We all saw that kind of ‘excess’ on a regular basis. Rocco is one of the most sumptuous black-and-white pictures I’ve ever seen. The images, shot by the great Giuseppe Rotunno, are pearly, elegant and lustrous – it’s like a simultaneous continuation and development of neorealism.”

The following extract is an interview with Luchini Visconto in which the great Italian director discusses Rocco and his Brothers.

B.C.: Could you say something about neorealism and the Italian cinema?

L.V.: The big mistake of neorealism, to my way of thinking, was its unrelenting and sometimes dour concentration on social reality. What neorealism needed, and got in a film like De Sica’s Miracle in Milan [1951] and even Pietro Germi’s The Road to Hope [1950], was a “dangerous” mixture of reality and romanticism....

B.C.: Let’s move to the subject of Rocco and His Brothers, a film that has more in common with Bellissima than one might think: its “improvement” on neorealism through a “dangerous” mixture of reality and romanticism, as well as the fact that Rocco itself is star-centered: in Alain Delon. Why did you use Delon in the role of Rocco?

L.V.: Because Alain Delon is Rocco. If I had been obliged to use another actor, I would not have made the film. I wrote the role for him, and Rocco is the main character in the story. After all, the title of the picture is “Rocco and His Brothers.”

B.C.: What exactly is Rocco’s role?

L.V.: I really don’t want to recount the plot of my own film. Nonetheless, just for you I will do so. A mother and her five sons live in the Lucania region of southern Italy, but, in order to find work, they all eventually move north to Milan. Rocco is the first one seized by a desire to escape to the north. He wants to leave, so he just runs away from home, and, inspired by his example, the other brothers quickly follow suit. Though she would rather stay at home in the south, their widowed mother doesn’t want to be separated from her sons, so she too goes north along with her boys.

B.C.: It’s Rocco, then, who serves as a role model for his brothers?

L.V.: It’s more or less fated to be this way, but that is not immediately evident, nor is such a familial “fate” preconceived on Rocco’s part. In Milan, the family settles in a slum. At first everyone looks for work, but no one finds it. Very quickly, the situation there deteriorates and the domestic atmosphere becomes polluted.

B.C.: Even for Rocco?

L.V.: Yes and no. Rocco is pure, you see, the only one who can successfully resist this degrading environment and preserve his integrity. He is also the person who suffers the most, for he is conscious of the familial tragedy, of the irresponsibility of certain of his brothers in the face of the vicissitudes of life that are destroying them. Rocco’s drama is therefore double because, in addition to his own suffering, he takes upon himself the misery of every other member of his family.

B.C.: What are the stages of this domestic tragedy, the events that trigger it?

L.V.: Well, the situation is tragic at the very start. The events that follow are the natural consequence of the social situation in which this family finds itself. That is what I was always at pains to show. And, at the same time, I must insist on the communication gap between Italians of the north and those of the south. We also have our racists, you know, and they are not only of the linguistic kind.
Discouraged because they can’t find work—disheartened is perhaps a better word—three of the brothers end up by becoming boxers. But, above all else, please do not believe that I was out to make a boxing film. This is merely one element in the picture, almost an exterior one or an accessory; simultaneously, boxing is of course intended to be a symbol of physical violence in the face of the figurative violence that Rocco’s family encounters.

Confronted by the difficulties of life in the big city, the brothers fall from grace one after the other. The one who falls first, Simone, is Rocco’s favorite. (For this role I engaged the actor Renato Salvatori.) Simone arrived in Milan almost in rags, but soon he was outfitting himself in silk shirts; and the audience well understood the source of his newfound income without explicitly being shown that he had become a gigolo. In the end, this character plays a very important part in the drama. For what happens to Simone makes clear that the reasons for, or causes of, a family’s survival—or self-destruction—are not the unique location in which it finds itself, as you might expect. Basically, this family, had it remained united, in Milan or anywhere else, would have had a chance to survive intact. Staying together would have been its best strategy for success, if you will.

Another element apart from unemployment divides the family, however, and pits two of the brothers (the others are too young) against one another. In the same ghetto as theirs lives a call girl named Nadia. She is also poor by birth, but her job permits her to live better than those around her. Every day, she lures young men into her bed, and for them she represents luxury of a kind, even mystery. Only Rocco remains insensitive in the beginning to the charms of this urban princess. But such precise delineation or differentiation is unnecessary here, since all these characters are part of the same reality. I don’t need to assign it any poetic quality, for poetry emanates naturally from this environment—from the clash between fish out of water, as it were (Rocco and his displaced family), and the highly toxic water in which they now find themselves (the city of Milan).

Still, in her mysterious way, Nadia herself is a character apart from this environment, and one who intervenes directly—almost constantly—in the tragedy, precipitating its events. This is because she falls in love with Rocco, the family’s only hope for salvation. Nadia and Rocco’s rapport, which forms gradually, is difficult to fathom. There are so many “shades” to their relationship that I simply could not explain them all in mere words. You have to see the film. But the result of Rocco and Nadia’s liaison is obvious: it arouses the jealousy of others. And Rocco suffers as a result, because saving his family is more important to him than Nadia’s love.

It is the “fallen” Simone who is the first to fall passionately in love with Nadia, but she scorns him. Naturally, he is jealous of Rocco, who for his part feels guilty, yes guilty, at being loved by a woman whom he himself does not really love, and whose love, he knows, could only placate and even change for the better his favorite brother, Simone. But Rocco also wants Nadia, and this feeling at times shames him. Already trapped in a dizzying downward spiral where his material life is concerned, he now finds himself hounded by moral dilemmas to which he cannot find a solution. And because no material hardship can destroy him, it is his reason that begins to waver. Up to a certain point, though, Rocco is able to remain whole, spiritually as well as physically.

Already harassed and even harmed by a kind of social fatality, however, Rocco is remorselessly reduced to a slow death, to a more or less long decay. And it is Simone himself who will be the clumsy instrument of his demise: driven in the end by extreme jealousy (Nadia has ridiculed him at the same time as she has clearly stated her preference for Rocco), he loses his head and murders this girl who has sown discord among brothers. After Nadia’s death, Rocco finally becomes bereft of all reason, his “escape” to Milan having removed forever the possibility for him of a normal and healthy life. His mother, for her part, subsequently returns to southern Italy with the youngest of her sons.

B.C.: Is Nadia really the cause of Rocco’s folly-become-madness?

L.V.: To the extent that one can assign causes to madness, yes. These characters are linked: Nadia loves Rocco, who can no longer stand the sight of Simone, who is otherwise his favorite brother and the lover of Nadia. The lines of this story are simple yet unerring, and the very setting of “cold,” utilitarian Milan lends itself to such a narrative. I had no intention, however, of treating this film as a melodrama; for me, it is a realistic tragedy.

An Interview with Luchino Visconti. After Neo-Realism.