Critic and cultural organizer, he had been director of «Lotta Continua». For his brother, the director Marco, last year he appeared in the documentary “Marx can wait”
Literary critic attentive to the social and political key, narrator, founder in 1962 of “Piacenza notebooks”magazine symbol of the heterodox soul of the Italian left, Piergiorgio Bellocchio, died on April 18 at the age of ninety in his home in Piacenza, it was a heretical intellectual, far from any conformism and a firm believer that true literature must feed on social transformations. With i “Piacenza notebooks” – whose elaboration was soon added by Grazia Cherchi and Goffredo Fofi – animated the cultural debate in the sixties and seventies following a line of autonomy and independence from any political organization germinated at the turn of the sixties.
The intentions, he wrote in the editorial entitled Try for a magazine to do published in the first issue which, like the second, was mimeographed, “are to study the underlying local problems – from school to publishing, from industry to agriculture, from the press to entertainment – with a broad and unscrupulous open-mindedness, not provincial “. Vietnam, the Arab-Palestinian question, Mao Zedong’s China and student movements, workers’ revolts, massacres, civil battles: the magazine addressed any kind of debate, welcoming conflicting opinions also internally and gathering around the founding nucleus friends and collaborators of various ages and positions, such as Cesare Cases, Franco Fortini, Giovanni Giudici, Giovanni Jervis, Ernesto Masi.
“Quaderni Piacentini” was an agile magazine where the reader could find politics, literature, philosophy and psychoanalysis, sociology and economics, but also poetry with authors already known as Vittorio Sereni and Fortini himself, and others who would become, such as Fernando Bandini, Giovanni Raboni, Roberto Roversi, Giancarlo Majorino. On the page there were very popular columns such as Sniper o To read e Not to be readslang characterized by tasty judgments, at times sharpcapable of claiming illustrious victims for which perhaps later to make amends, such as Vladimir Nabokov of Lolita. “It goes without saying – it was written in one of the last issues – that the winning books of the Strega, Viareggio and Campiello prizes are all not to be read”.
Born in Piacenza in 1931 from a wealthy middle-class family, Piergiorgio Bellocchio was the eldest of eight children, including the director Marco, author, last year, of the documentary film Marx can wait in which the critic took part with the other brothers (Letizia, Alberto and Maria Luisa) to recall the tragic event that upset the family: the suicide, in 1968, of Camillo, Marco’s twin. To Paolo Di Stefano in one of the last, precious interviews, published in the «Corriere» in February 2020 he had told: «I am poor, I no longer have a penny, I have lived for a long time on income without ever wasting anything. We of the “Quaderni Piacentini” had a kind of fear of profit, as soon as we sold a little we lowered the price without hoarding. We have always worked for free ».
Clear and precise, Bellocchio’s writing – who, as a narrator, had begun with three short stories, The pleasant servantspublished in 1966 in the Mondadori Il Tornasole series, commissioned by Vittorio Sereni and Niccolò Gallo – was animated by a profound moral tension and a need for ideal and political renewal.
It was also the first director in charge of
«Fight continues» of which, however, he did not directly follow the editorial work, while from 1985 to 1993 with Alfonso Berardinelli he invented and edited “Newspaper
», a publication enriched by the re-proposed pages of great authors, such as Kierkegaard, Leopardi, Tolstoj, Simone Weil. With two issues a year, “Diario” recovered the sense of a punctual critique of the present, taking note of the change in the social and political scenario, “against the false conscience of a left that imagined itself immune from the contagion of the dominant culture, convinced that it had preserved its cultural diversity “
One ironic and resentful style, that mixes passion and rationality characterized Bellocchio’s observations on the present and on cultural phenomena: he translated them into aphorisms or short stories, such as those, mostly from the “Diary”, collected in the volume On the wrong side (Einaudi, 1989), or in the apocalyptic Possibly (subtitle: Observations on the acultural landscapeRizzoli 1993), which they followed The cunning of the passions. 1962-1983 (Rizzoli, 1995), Lost items (Baldini & Castoldi, 1996) and Below the fray. Satires and wise men (Scheiwiller Books, 2007).
Voracious reader, in 2020 he had published the volume
A seed of humanity (Quodlibet), a collection of essays, preface, reviews, written between 1967 and 2005 ranging from the classics of the nineteenth century (Dickens, Dostoevskij, Stendhal, Flaubert …) to Pier Paolo Pasolini; from Edmund Wilson, whom he considered a teacher, to the cursed Ferdinand Céline delle Trifle (“With his dirty nails he continues to seem full of truth to me even when he is at his worst”), but also to his friend Danilo Montaldi, a highly educated self-taught Cremonese, expert in sociology, literature, music and art. A figure on the sidelines that Bellocchio defined “the best example of freedom and coherence that I have encountered in the intellectual world”. In recent times, the lockdown caused by the pandemic had forced him to an isolation accepted with resignation, like the years that passed. “Old age is an ugly beast – he said with the lucid pessimism that characterized him in the interview with Di Stefano – and now there is no way of dying, life is too long”.
April 18, 2022 (change April 18, 2022 | 19:24)
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