The Thinking Machine #102
Rocco i suoi fratelli
In their series The Thinking Machine, critics Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin create a new video essay for Filmkrant every month.
Close-ups play an especially strong and disturbing role in Luchino Visconti’s films. They serve as eruptions, fragmenting the scene and bringing to the surface disquieting undertones of characters, relationships and situations. A kiss is no longer just a kiss!
In his classic social melodrama Rocco and His Brothers (1960), Visconti expresses extreme violence in the way that bodies approach, mingle and overwhelm each other in close-up: it is fundamentally a grotesque, decadent carnival of defacing and defiling.