Marco Bellocchio
Marco Bellocchio - Honorary Degree in Television, Cinema and New Media, awarded on December 9, 2019.
On Monday, December 9, 2019, IULM University awarded Marco Bellocchio, one of the greatest Italian directors whose work spans more than fifty years of our cinema and of the history of our country, an honorary Master's degree in Television, Cinema and New Media
The recognition was conferred by the Rector, Professor Gianni Canova. His Laudatio Pictures that look at us, pictures that concern us.
"There are directors who manage to be present at their time for about twenty years, few know how to do it for more than half a century, as Bellocchio - explained the Rector Canova. - From The Hour of Religion onwards, through The Wedding Director, Win and Make Beautiful Dreams to The Traitor, his films are masterpieces because they put their gaze inside the open wounds of society, because they shape the ghosts that populate the collective imagination. Marco Bellocchio's films have more and more stylistic registers that intersect. Also in Il traditore: the filmic reconstruction of the historical story of Tommaso Buscetta, the chronicle and the visionary part with the mental ghosts that pass through the head of the traitor. By mixing and superimposing these three registers, Bellocchio creates a cinema that has no equal in Italy, of absolute originality and able to excite and make us better understand some aspects of the world in which we live.
Marco Bellocchio, born in Bobbio in 1939, is a director, screenwriter, film producer and teacher. A representative of the New Italian Cinema of the Sixties, Bellocchio - we read in the motivation for his Honorary Degree - has been able to constantly renew itself, always remaining faithful to an unmistakable style and to some themes that define its research horizon. Among these, the relationship with the Law, with authority and with the Father; but also illness and madness as deformed mirrors of a normality subjected to drive dynamics; History and the past, to which one looks without nostalgia because it is a place of betrayed transformation.
His works range from I pugni in tasca - with which he won at the Locarno Film Festival in 1965 - to the very recent Il traditore (2019) on the figure of Tommaso Buscetta and nominated for Italy at the Academy Award 2020. In between, among his works, we remember Matti da slegare (1975/76) - a collective film made in the asylum of Colorno in support of the battle of Franco Basaglia -, Marcia trionfale (1976) - on military life as a reflection of authoritarian repression -,Buongiorno, notte (2003) on terrorism and the imprisonment of Aldo Moro and Vincere (2009) on Mussolini's link with Ida Dalser and the most awarded film at the David di Donatello 2010.
Bellocchio has to his credit more than fifty films, including feature films of fiction and documentaries. Among the awards he received were the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement from the Venice Film Festival in 2011 and the Pardo d'onore from the Locarno Film Festival in 2015. Since 1995 Marco Bellocchio organizes every summer in Bobbio, the village in the province of Piacenza where he was born, the directing workshop Fare cinema and since 2014 he is President of the Fondazione Cineteca di Bologna.