The Thinking Machine #40

“Rigidity is fatal”, announced the great Italian director Marco Bellocchio in 2006. Rigidity can be internal – a frozen mind, a depressive soul, a broken heart – but it is also physical. Few filmmakers are so fixed on the poetry of human movement.

But Bellocchio usually begins at the opposite pole: with oppressive environments, closed rooms, stillness. Movement in his work is linked not only to escape, but also liberation and transformation of the self. The outer world is a strange, wonderful, unknown place to be encountered. We walk, stumble, run, hurl ourselves forward into the void – alone or together. In the smallest gestures of our daily disorientation, a revolution can begin.