Originally Published: 2008-06-29

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The wave of success was not without criticism and so in 1960 Luchino Visconti was censured and accused of obscenity with his Rocco e i suoi fratelli. On April 13 of the same year the president of the province of Milan even suspended shots with an amendment that accused the film of being “not very moral and defamatory.” This was without realizing that soon it would become one of the masterpieces of Italian cinema.
After this era of religious zealousness, in 1963, another masterpiece arrived: Il Gattopardo (The Leopard), adapted from the novel by Tomasi da Lampedusa and which won the Palme d’Or at Cannes. For Luchino Visconti, it was time for reflection and between 1969 and 1973 he achieved a sort of spiritual testament that was baptized with the term “the German trilogy”: La caduta degli dei, Morte a Venezia and Ludwig.
The following year brought the film Gruppo di famiglia in un interno and, in 1976, just before Visconti's death came L’innocente.
Each film showed a different style, but in each one Visconti included contrasts and conflicts, giving much importance to social and psychological problems.
“I speak more about Realism than Neo-realism. We have to assume a moral attitude when facing events, life: in an attitude that, in short, that allows us to see with a clear, critical eye how society is today and recount facts that are part of this society. Neo-realism is a term that was invented because we needed something new. But we treated themes that one was permitted to treat from that visual angle that has always been typical of an Italian artist,” declared Visconti in 1960 in an interview given to Mondo Nuovo.
It was the year of Rocco e i suoi fratelli when Visconti dug into the dreams of immigrants and, through images, described the difficulty of a southern Italian family that had moved to Milan. The plot: after the death of the father, four brothers are dragged by their mother into the rich metropolis where another brother has decided to live after completing military service. It’s there, in that jungle of buildings, that the family must survive: two sons try out a boxing career in order to put some money in their pockets, another takes a wrong turn, another ends up defeated. A film that was in Luchino Visconti’s mind for a long time and that, after Ossessione and Terra trema, had remained in the fibres of his imagination for almost two years.

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