Rocco and His Brothers · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

The image that won't leave is Rocco watching. Simone has dragged Nadia into the dark, and Rocco stands at the edge of it, holding still. Later he watches again — the murder this time — and again does nothing, or rather his nothing becomes the most active thing in the frame. Alain Delon plays absolute goodness as a kind of paralysis, and Visconti shoots it as one: a saint who can only behold. Hold onto that, because it splits the film cleanly down the middle, and the split is the whole argument.

Start where Visconti starts, on the documentary ground he inherited. The Parondi widow and her five sons step off the train into a Milan of fog and wet pavement and half-built suburbs, and for a long stretch the film simply observes them — the crowded basement room, the shared bed, the laundry where the women work, the boxing gym. This is the neorealist trunk, the lesson of Bicycle Thieves and La Terra Trema: humble people moved through an indifferent city, treated with tragic weight, their sound post-synced over real bodies in real streets. Visconti had built this method himself, back to Ossessione. What he does to it here is graft opera onto it, and the graft is where Deleuze becomes useful.

Simone is the film's downward engine, and he is almost a textbook of what Deleuze called the impulse-image. Not action — action is a man who sizes up a situation and changes it. The impulse-image is beneath action: pure appetite and compulsion, a drive that erupts from underneath the social surface and drags everything toward exhaustion and death. Deleuze's word for the milieu of such films is the derived milieu — the visible, concrete world — and beneath it the originary world, a savage place of raw drives. Milan's gyms and tenements are the derived milieu; what surfaces through Simone — the theft, the rape, the murder — is the originary world breaking through. He even has his fetish in the strict sense Deleuze meant: a part-object charged with compulsive force. Nadia becomes that object, less a woman the brothers love than a thing their rivalry fastens onto. And Simone follows what Deleuze called the line of slope, the irreversible entropy of naturalism: promising boxer, kept man, thief, killer. Each scene a notch lower. The film refuses to let him climb back.

Rocco is the opposite figure, and the more modern one. He perceives everything — the degradation of his brother, the doom of Nadia — and he cannot convert that perception into an act that would change it. This is precisely what Deleuze named the crisis of the action-image: the sensory-motor link snaps, and a character is left only able to look. Rocco is a seer before he is an agent. The two notorious scenes both station him as witness; his terrible saintly stillness, the goodness 'so absolute it becomes complicit,' is the crisis made flesh. He answers catastrophe with sacrifice, which is to say with non-action. In 1960 this is a strange thing to put at the center of a melodrama, and it points forward, past the genre, toward the watchers and endurers of the decade's art cinema.

Visconti gives both brothers a world to move through, and it is an any-space-whatever — Deleuze's term for spaces that have stopped being settings for action and become charged, deserted, affective fields. The frozen unfinished building sites, the snow and fog of the periphery, the cold anonymous geometry of the new Milan: these are not backgrounds, they are the disconnection itself, the migrant family's collectivism dissolving into void. And as the story darkens, Rotunno's light turns expressionist — sculptural chiaroscuro that lifts faces out of engulfing shadow, things charged with a non-organic menace. The famous reckoning on the cathedral roof, the spires of the Duomo behind the brothers, frames a fraternal murder as something sacred and vertiginous. Realism's even gray gives way to tragedy's blacks.

Underneath all of it runs the movement Deleuze found everywhere in Visconti: crystal-decomposition, an ordered world rotting from within. Usually Deleuze means an aristocratic world (and Visconti, the aristocrat, would spend the rest of his career filming exactly that, in The Leopard and The Damned). Here the decomposing order is the peasant collective — the clan as a single body, mother and five sons in one frame — caught in the act of disintegrating against urban individualism. Rocco is where Visconti discovers the rot that becomes his lifelong subject.

The formal masterstroke binds the two brothers back together. At the climax Visconti cross-cuts Rocco's triumph in the boxing ring against Simone murdering Nadia — pathetic montage, the collision of public spectacle and private atrocity producing a third, unbearable meaning that neither image holds alone. Rota's score swells against the documentary plainness, and melodrama reaches its operatic peak by editorial force.

That fusion is the film's significance. Rocco is the hinge where Italian cinema turns: neorealism's truth-telling about the poor, kept whole, but now run through opera and through a hero who can no longer act on what he sees. Watch it again for the two brothers as two cinemas — one falling down the slope of pure drive, one frozen into pure vision — and the whole history of the time-image starts to stir inside a family chronicle.