ROCCO AND HIS BROTHERS
Rocco e i suoi fratelli
Italy, France, 1960, 178m
Director: Luchino Visconti  
Cast: Alain Delon, Annie Girardot, Renato Salvatori, Katina Paxinou, Paolo Stoppa, Claudia Cardinale

 

Luchino Visconti’s Rocco and His Brothers is an epic of postwar Italy and a melodrama of seismic proportions boasting great photography and performances.
Visconti’s rich and expansive masterpiece has an emotional intensity and tragic grandeur matched by few other films.

 

The director turned to Giovanni Testori, Thomas Mann, Dostoevsky, and Arthur Miller for inspiration, achieving a truly epic sweep for this story of a mother and her grown sons who head north from Lucania in search of work and new lives.

 

In one beautifully realized scene after another, we observe a tightly knit family coming apart, one frayed thread at a time. Alain Delon is Rocco, Renato Salvatori is his brother
Simone, Annie Girardot is the woman who comes between them, and Katina Paxinou is matriarch Rosaria. One of the defining films of its era, Rocco and His Brothers has been beautifully restored, and Giuseppe Rotunno’s black and white images are as pearly and lustrous today as they were always meant to be. Restored by Cineteca di Bologna in association with Titanus, TF1 Droits Audiovisuels and The Film Foundation. Restoration funding by Gucci and The Film Foundation.

 

A powerful and majestic film, featuring a magnificent score by Nino Rota and outstanding performances Alain Delon,  Annie Girardot, Renato Salvatori, Katina Paxinou, Paolo Stoppa, Claudia Cardinale.
It is still regarded as an unsurpassed masterpiece of neorealism.
Black-and-white imagery created by cinematographer Giuseppe Rotunno, glowing with soft pearlescent light, enhances the film’s dramatic intensity, depth, and nobility.
An intoxicatingly emotional story of a family, woven from love, sacrifice, desire, betrayal, forgiveness, and farewell…
The film possesses an almost unbearable emotional intensity and a sense of tragic grandeur. 
The director blends neorealism with elevated, operatic expression, achieving a cathartic power comparable to that of ancient tragedy.

Language: Italian
Subtitles:  English