MFAH Film Series – Italian Interlude: Rocco and His Brothers (Rocco e i suoi fratelli)

Museum of Fine Arts, Houston presents another special Film Series – Italian Interlude. Get in the mood for this trio of Italian classics with a meal at the new MFACafe.

Rocco and His Brothers (Rocco e i suoi fratelli)
Directed by Luchino Visconti
1960, in Italian with English subtitles
Italy, B/W, 180 minutes, DCP

Luchino Visconti’s rich and expansive masterpiece, the story of a mother and her grown sons who head north from Lucania in search of work and new lives, has an emotional intensity and a tragic grandeur matched by few other films.

Visconti turned to Giovanni Testori, Thomas Mann, Dostoyevsky, and Arthur Miller for inspiration, and he achieved a truly epic sweep: in one beautifully realized scene after another, we observe the tragic progress of 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 the matriarch, Rosaria.

Rocco and His Brothers, one of the great and defining films of its era, has now been beautifully restored, and Giuseppe Rotunno’s black-and-white images are once again as pearly and lustrous as they were meant to be. – 2015 New York Film Festival