Marco Bellocchio parle de L’Ora di religione (Le Sourire de ma mère) mais pas seulement
Certains critiques m’ont défini comme un « réconcilié », au sens – aussi – du fils prodigue de l’évangile qui retourne à son père et à sa famille. Stupéfait, il est vrai, par la canonisation de sa mère complotée à son insu, mais tout autant en paix avec la société des normaux. Et par là même en quelque sorte « religieux », au sens de retourné à la religion, ou nostalgique de la religion. Hérétique en somme, mais aussi, d’une manière ou d’une autre, religieux.
Que seraient au fond que les blasphèmes sinon la reconnaissance d’un Dieu ou d’une Vierge que l’on maudit ? L’acceptation de leur existence ? D’autres critiques, à l’inverse, ou en complément, ont retrouvé dans ce film précis l’auteur des Poings dans les poches, le désacralisateur de la famille bourgeoise, le « doux » justicier de l’Apennin... J’ai souvent tenté de contester ces deux thèses en affirmant que je suis un laïc, et même un non croyant, un athée, et que je ne pense plus que la voie de la libération humaine passe par le meurtre de la mère, du frère idiot, etc. [...] Tout d’abord, le film n’a pas pour but premier la volonté de démasquer tout ce que l’église catholique comporte d’hypocrite et de corrompu, mais il veut avant tout raconter la lutte, le refus de la pensée religieuse (du « penser religieusement ») par un homme qui n’est pas un héros (un ami a redéfini et renommé le film « Rédemption d’un homme normal »). Et le refus de la pensée religieuse est quelque chose de plus et de différent du refus de l’église catholique en tant que telle. La pensée religieuse est une « pensée » qui investit catholiques et laïcs. Est religieux aussi bien le catholique qui va à la messe le dimanche, que le laïc qui fait demi-tour quand un chat noir traverse la rue devant lui. Sont religieux les laïcs et les catholiques qui croient au bien et au mal (majuscules ou minuscules), que tous naissent bons et méchants, anges et assassins potentiels. Est religieux qui a renoncé à lutter et s’est résigné à son propre échec parce qu’il est convaincu, au fond, que la société des hommes ne peut être changée et que les hommes s’entretueront toujours parce que telle est leur nature. Est religieux le fou qui rit de celui qui veut le guérir, et bien sûr sont religieux les croyants de toutes les religions qui en se confiant à un père transcendant, qui est aux cieux, lui « délèguent » (on disait comme ça autrefois) la réponse aux problèmes fondamentaux qu’ils ne savent ou ne veulent affronter seuls. Ce n’est pas un hasard si le personnage principal du film, Ernesto, répondant au cardinal qui instruit la canonisation, dit que la seule vraie grande profession d’athéisme qu’il sent à sa portée est de tomber amoureux d’une femme et non l’amour du prochain en général. Idée qui sert à démontrer combien une conviction qui ne soit ni abstraite ni volontariste, mais hautement passionnelle, et donc vécue dans la praxis (autre mot d’autrefois) peut lui conserver et même lui augmenter cette vitalité que ses frères ont perdu pour toujours, et le conduise à réagir presque instantanément aux pulsions d’anéantissement qui l’assaillent de toutes parts. Encore : à qui considère L’Ora di religione comme la continuation naturelle des Poings dans les poches et l’auteur le même qu’alors, j’ai envie de répondre que ce film en est au contraire la « réaction », le renversement, l’opposé dans les idées. Tandis que moi, loin d’être réconcilié, je reste un rebelle, qui aujourd’hui, cependant, choisit une lutte sans effusion de sang, parce que je ne crois plus que la colère seule puisse conduire au changement. [...] Ernesto Picciafuoco ne pense plus au meurtre pour régler le compte d’une société matérialiste et voyante (apparente). Comme moi, qui lui ressemble un peu, et qui ne me sens plus aujourd’hui inspiré par ces images, ces réactions, ces mouvements intérieurs qui à l’époque, dans le lointain 1965, me représentaient et constituaient mon identité. C’est bien moi qui ai écrit et mis en scène, et avant cela imaginé, Les Poings dans les poches et L’Ora di religione. Je crois, autrement dit et pour parler de manière terre à terre, qu’on naît artiste (petit, grand ou moyen) et non qu’on le devient. Mais la pensée a changé, et de ce fait, les affects et les images eux aussi ont changé, du moins en partie.

Préface à l’édition du scénario, aux éditions Elleu Cinema, Rome, 2002.

   Marco Bellocchio

Marco Bellocchio, two documentaries and a milestone film
Marco Bellocchio’s filmography, from Fists in the pockets or Leap into the void to the recent My mother’s smile or Buongiorno notte, has often been taken from the exercise of documentary filmmaking.
We remember the collective work based on the psychiatric revolution in Italy and abolition of mental homes, “Nessuno o tutti / Matti da slegar” (Fit to be untied), which (already) refused to ease the conscience of an apparent release of the “insane”.
Sogni infranti and Addio del passato would be two of the forms that cinema practice would take between two fiction movies or rather “with” fiction movies.
Sogni infranti gathers former activists of armed struggles, a former radical leader and a great Resistance worker to build a thought of what is qualified (all too hastily) as a chapter in history. It documents but from close up. The distance taken by the director is the key component of the film: not being above, beside or back in relation to the “subject” but rather constantly bringing him back to thinking, to personal experience and emotion. To that extent, Sogni infranti displays its relationship to all Bellocchio’s cinema work. One can hear a refrain in L’Ora di religione (Vittorio Foa on students’ riots). This is not quoting from himself but rather the same and continuous deep thought, after a gap of five years. The main character’s doctor brother in The “smile” is a former activist, a reformed man, who makes up for the past by being a most sinister conformist. Not a way of indirectly approving of the past but forcing the viewer to consider the effect of historical experience on the whole time of human life. Rejecting the fragmentation of beings into biographical episodes and relating the past to its present consequences, challenging any “inevitable” fate.
Sogni infranti comes before L’Ora di religione and Buongiorno notte; it does not prepare the ground for the other two, but is tied to them. The writing form (documentary, fiction, essay, etc.) results from a review of its relevance: the documentary is necessary to root the creation of characters and stories in reality.

Addio del passato could pass for a nostalgic musical promenade. But it subtly develops a constant style and theme in Bellocchio’s work.
Constant style in framing and editing: frames often haunted by depth and darkness reluctant to separate the filmed person from both the inner and outer world. Editing work that puts together what powers and prejudices separate (amateur or professional singers, characters torn by their story).
A constant theme, exploring “basic” tales that create people and that are embodied in works of art (music, painting and cinema). Family oppression, social repression, childhood and character formation, filiations, rebellion, love, dreams, and so on.

What is committing young or old singers to stubbornly follow Verdi is similar to what is pushing Ernesto in My mother’s smile to paint, to draw or to fall in love. The call of utopia that would neither deny history nor human complexity, one that would consider the historical being and human fate as a whole and which would fulfil itself in art.

Marie-Pierre Duhamel-Müller

Marco Bellocchio talking about L’Ora di religione (My mother’s smile) amongst other things
Some critics have said about me that I am at peace with myself, also in the sense of the prodigal son in the Gospel who goes back to his father and family. He’s stunned by the plot of canonizing his mother without his prior consent, but also at peace with normal society. He can be considered something of a religious person, in the sense of returning to religion, or being nostalgic for religion. In brief, a heretic but also a religious man in one way or another.Indeed, what is blasphemy finally, if not the recognition of a God or the Virgin Mary whom we curse? Isn’t that acceptance of their existence? Inversely or in addition, other critics have rediscovered in this precise film the author of Fists in the pockets, removing the aura from the bourgeois family, the gentle lawman from the Apennines. I have often tried to protest against these two ideas by claiming that I’m a layman, even a non-believer, an atheist and that I no longer think that the way to human liberation passes through murdering your mother, your stupid brother, etc. [...] First of all, the primary objective of the film is not to reveal all the hypocrisy and corruption in the Catholic Church, but aims above all to show the struggle, the rejection of religious thought (“thinking in a religious manner”) by a man who is not a hero (a friend redefined and renamed the film: “Redemption of a normal man”). And rejecting religious thought is different and goes beyond rejecting the Catholic Church as such. Religious thought is a “thought” that surrounds both Catholic and lay people. Being religious is the Catholic who goes to mass on Sundays as well as the layperson who makes an about-turn when he sees a black cat crossing the street in front of him. Those who are religious are laypeople and Catholics who believe in good and evil (or Good and Evil), that we’re all born good or bad, angels and potential murderers. Being religious is someone who’s given up the fight and has resigned himself to his own failure because he’s ultimately convinced that the society of men cannot be changed and that men will carry on killing each other because such is their nature. Being religious is someone who laughs at the one who wants to cure him and of course those who are religious are all the believers of all religions who by entrusting their fate to a transcendent father in Heaven, delegate (that’s the way it was said in the past) to Him the response to fundamental problems they do not want to or cannot face alone. It is not by chance that Ernesto, the main character, when answering the Cardinal in charge of the canonization, says that the only great atheist profession which he feels is within his reach is falling in love with a woman and not love the neighbour in general. An idea to demonstrate how much a conviction that is neither abstract nor deliberate but highly passionate and therefore held in a praxis (another word from the past) can both preserve and enhance the vitality his brothers have lost for ever and pushes him to react almost instantly to the pulses of annihilation assailing him from all sides. And in addition, to those who see L’Ora di religione as a natural continuity of Fists in the pockets with the author being exactly the same as before, I’d like to answer that this film is on the contrary the “reaction”, the reversal, the opposite idea. As for me, far from being at peace, I am still a rebel who today, however, has decided to go for a bloodless revolution because I no longer think that mere anger can lead to change. [...] Ernesto Picciafuoco no longer believes that murdering will settle the score of a materialistic and obvious society. Like me, who resembles him a bit, today I’m not inspired by these images, reactions and inner movements, which in the distant year of 1965 represented me and made up my identity. I am the one who wrote and directed and before that imagined Fists in the pockets and L’Ora di religione. I believe, in other words, to talk in a down-to-earth way, that one is born an artist (of little, great or average talent) and not that one becomes an artist. But thought has changed and therefore affects and images have also changed, at least partially.

Preface to the published script, Elleu Cinema Editors, Rome, 2002.