Name: Fists in the Pocket
Director: Marco Bellocchio
Genre: Drama
Released: 1965
Duration: 110 min

Fists in the Pocket (1965) · Cinespective

Meaning, unpacked

Central idea

The film can be read as an attack on the family as an institution of repression: the household is so diseased that one son's murderous revolt looks like both madness and a distorted form of liberation.

What it means, and why it matteredFists in the Pocket, Marco Bellocchio's first feature from 1965, starts with a question that sounds almost like a joke: what if the only way out of a sick family is to destroy it? A blind widow lives in a decaying villa with her four grown children. Alessandro decides the family is holding back his brother Augusto, the only one who works. His plan hardens: if the mother and the youngest, Leone, are gone, someone can be free.

What it means

Fists in the Pocket, Marco Bellocchio's first feature from 1965, starts with a question that sounds almost like a joke: what if the only way out of a sick family is to destroy it? A blind widow lives in a decaying villa with her four grown children. Alessandro decides the family is holding back his brother Augusto, the only one who works. His plan hardens: if the mother and the youngest, Leone, are gone, someone can be free.

The film can be read as an attack on the family as an institution of repression. Blindness, illness and dependence bind everyone to the mother and the house, and care and cruelty are almost impossible to tell apart. The house is so diseased that Alessandro's revolt looks like madness and liberation at once. Yet the film never excuses him. The drowning of gentle Leone ends any idea of a noble liberator, and the ending, where Giulia calmly lets Alessandro die, is a cold judgement. It is a portrait of rage with no direction. Respectable rituals like funerals and engagements are shown as empty forms hiding selfishness, and Alessandro's epilepsy shows how the family treats illness as a burden to hide.

Why it mattered

In the mid-1960s, Italian cinema often idealised the family. This film presented the household as a source of sickness, repression and resentment, with a ferocity that still feels uncomfortable. It broke from both neorealism and the polished art film, bringing a politically charged, anti-bourgeois anger into Italian film. It was the founding shock of a new Italian cinema.

After watching