Maria Teresa Imbriani
University of Basilicata (Italy)
Rocco e i suoi fratelli: Luchino Visconti’s Lucania Between Real and Imaginary
Luchino Visconti explained the essence of the relationship between individual and society, and about his 1960 film Rocco e i suoi fratelli whose protagonist, together with his family, comes from Basilicata, he observed:
The keystone of moods, psychologies and conflicts is therefore mainly social for me, even though the conclusions I reach are only human and concretely concern single individuals […]. And so, Rocco. The question of the relationships between brothers and between children and the mother certainly has not interested me less than that such a family came from the South, that it was a southern family. By making this choice, I did not limit myself, however, to the search for a particularly suggestive human material, but I consciously resolved to return to the problem of the relationship between North and South, just as an artist who wants, so to speak, not only to move but to invite reasoning.
(“Da Verga a Gramsci”, Visconti 1977).
I am interested in this delicate relationship between the material of reality, the study of places, uses, customs and people, and the artistic transfiguration in a film, where what is indomitable and wild in the personalities of the individual protagonists comes from Visconti’s conscious choice of combining the drama of a family of emigrants with the more intimate conflict between brothers and between mother and children. But Rocco is something more: even in his name the two contradictory aspects, tradition and modernity, of the reasons of the South come into play, as they are declined in the film, on the one hand the poet Rocco Scotellaro, on the other the boxer Rocco Mazzola, Italian light heavyweight champion, who significantly appears in the film.
The video talk includes Tiziana Mazzola‘s reflections on her father Rocco, who died in Potenza in 2012.
Maria Teresa Imbriani is Associate Professor of Italian Literature at the Department of Humanities of the University of Basilicata. Graduated cum laude in Classical Letters, she obtained her PhD in Italian Studies (with particular reference to Southern literature) from the University “Federico II” of Naples. She has conducted an intense research activity, always aimed at the study of rare or unpublished documents and their historical-critical interpretations, and often focused on southern themes, such as in Appunti di letteratura lucana (2000). Original contributions and constant philological commitment are the basis of her works, among which the critical edition of Fiaccola sotto il moggio di Gabriele d’Annunzio e il Carteggio D’Ancona-Torraca. She participated in several national and international conferences. She is a member of the Scientific and Management Committee of the journals Critica letteraria and Studi desanctisiani.