Tag: movies

Seeing Palestine from Italy: Private, directed by Saverio Costanzo

Of what use is a film or video, a work that gives us more of the images that we have seen—of cruelty—on the television news; of more of the questions that poets and professors have tried to speak to many of us for decades; of more of the history we have known, forgotten, known, and forgotten again? Privatemakes it possible for us to believe we are seeing individuals, that we are being given true emotions and thoughts.

Luchino Visconti’s Rocco and His Brothers: Poverty and Possibility, Heroism and Decadence in Italy

How one family supports and exploits its members is shown—their connection to each other is strained, it breaks: the family is revealed as a primitive tribe, a complex but primitive tribe, part of a society that replicates (and inspires) the family’s impulses. Visconti, an aristocrat, treats these peasants and workers with a respect that is hard to imagine their equals in American film, especially those who are African-American or Latino, receiving even at this time: Rocco and his brothers are allowed moments of transcendence.