Fists in the Pocket

In a large house at the foot of a mountain in the provinces, a family lives: a blind mother and four siblings. Three of them are epileptic. Augusto, the eldest, is the only one who works and the only one considered normal; he wants to marry and cannot with this weight. One of the brothers, Alessandro, finds a solution: remove the family one by one. The subject is not murder but the family constructed as a prison. Alessandro is not malicious; in his own head he is doing his brother a favour, and the horror comes from the coolness of that logic. The form is nervous and irregular: handheld camera, abrupt cuts, shots that are barely composed. The house is filmed not as a set but as somewhere actually walked through. It is Marco Bellocchio's first feature, made at twenty-five. He financed it with money from his own family, shot it in his home region and in a house resembling his own. Ennio Morricone wrote the score. The film provoked a strong reaction in Italy and is regarded as one of the markers of a generational break in post-war Italian cinema. Lou Castel plays Alessandro and Paola Pitagora his sister. Who it is for: viewers who like hard sixties European cinema aimed directly at the family as an institution. Who it is not for: anyone looking for a character to sympathise with; nobody is defended and the narrative never relaxes.