The next Screen Talks event will be on Monday 25th March, 6.30 pm. Dr Danielle Hipkins will introduce Rocco and His Brothers (Luchino Visconti, 1960). Join the event on Facebook and find out more here.

Booking Information book online, call the Box Office: 0871 902 5730 or buy tickets on the door (half price for students on Mondays).

Dr Danielle Hipkins has written a guest blog post for us, outlining the importance of Rocco and His Brothers as a key film exploring issues of migration and identity at a key moment in Italy’s post-war transformation:

Although contemporary Italy may be plagued by economic and political crisis, in the late 1950s the country saw the beginning of a period of development so dramatic that it was labelled an ‘economic miracle’. This era transformed Italy from a predominantly agricultural country into an industrialized one. One of the main motors of this transformation was the steady supply of low-wage labour from the impoverished, agricultural south; between 1958 and1963 more than 900,000 southerners moved to northern Italy. Those moving from this underdeveloped area, still bound by feudal and religious tradition, into a consumer-oriented, individualist, and rapidly modernizing urban environment felt as though they had moved to a foreign country, and were often treated dismissively.

Rocco and His Brothers is the epic story of one such family of migrants, five brothers and their mother, who seek their fortune in Milan after the death of their father. There is perhaps no Italian film that narrates more powerfully the personal costs of migration: the hardships of surviving in a hostile environment and adapting to an unfamiliar set of cultural codes. This family melodrama draws out engaging performances from Alain Delon, Annie Girardot, and Renato Salvatori, locked in a love triangle that comes to dominate the film, as two of the brothers fall for the same woman. The film’s strength lies in the powerful emotional response that change elicits in the stories of Rocco and Simone, who find it most difficult to adapt, to accept changing social codes, and to let go of family loyalties and nostalgia for a lost world.

In my research in the Visconti archive in Rome I discovered how Visconti’s directorial approach to an ‘anthropomorphic’ cinema – a cinema that puts the individual drama at its heart led to sympathetic role for a woman that he did not originally anticipate. Thanks also to input from a female scriptwriter, Suso Cecchi d’Amico, and the lead actress herself, the character of the prostitute Nadia, who seduces one brother, but falls for another, developed beyond her original sketchy symbolization as figure of urban evil. Central to the film’s final shape, she complicates the Marxist ambitions that structure the film and reminds us that changing roles for men and women lie at the heart of the brothers’ problems.

1960 was a boom year for Italian cinema, producing La dolce vita (Federico Fellini) and L’avventura (Michelangelo Antonioni). However, whilst those two films explore the lives of Italy’s rich elite and their ennui, Visconti blended his fascination with opera and Communism into a powerful, melodramatic exploration of what it means to be at the sharp end of the economic scale, to be caught between two radically different cultures. Visconti’s daring use of real locations to screen sex, violence, and unpalatable truths about the foundations of Italy’s boom invoked the wrath of the censors, but contributed to creating an emotional narrative for a forgotten class. Visconti tells an unforgettable tale of what and who gets lost in the need to adapt and to survive in the modern urban environment.

Dr Danielle Hipkins is a Senior Lecturer in Italian in the Dept of Modern Languages, College of Humanities, University of Exeter.  Read more about Danielle’s work here.

The next Screen Talks event will be on Monday 11th March, 6.30pm. Dr Ali Haggett will introduce Ron Howard’s A Beautiful Mind (2001). Join the event on Facebook and find out more here.

Booking Information book online, call the Box Office: 0871 902 5730 or buy tickets on the door (half price for students on Mondays).

Ali has written a guest blog for us on A Beautiful Mind and its importance as a film and a way of engaging with historical and current-day issues around mental illness:

A Beautiful Mind, starring Russell Crow and Jennifer Connelly and directed by Ron Howard, was released in 2001 and went on to win four Academy Awards, including Best Picture. Based on the biography of the same name by Sylvia Nasar (1998), it recounts the life of the American John Forbes Nash, Professor of Mathematics, whose work on Game Theory eventually earned him the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. However, the film is much more than a biography of a mathematical genius, as it charts Nash’s at times devastating battle with schizophrenia.

The film is important on a number of levels. First and foremost, it offers insight into the experience of mental illness from a number of perspectives; from John Nash himself as the sufferer, but also from the view point of his family and colleagues. It also raises numerous questions about involuntary institutionalisation, physical and chemical restraint and the pharmacological treatment of psychotic illness. Nash’s illness developed during the late 1950s which was a key period in the history of psychiatry. The discovery of chlorpromazine in 1952 appeared to offer real hope to Schizophrenic patients; however, one of the drawbacks of the treatment was that it stifled creativity and in some cases muted not only delusions but also the experience of ‘real’ life. .

The film also raises broader questions about life and how we create ‘meaning’ to our existence. Nash initially begins his lifetime search for a ‘higher truth’ through mathematics, logic and rationality. This was the period of the Cold War, and the film deftly portrays a sense of optimism, so significant at the time, that a young generation of mathematicians and scientists might offer the key to a better world. However, despite winning a Nobel Prize for his work, Nash ultimately finds ‘meaning’ in his life as much through the love and loyalty of his wife. Something that could ultimately never be explained by mathematical formulae.

There are of course a number of diversions from actual events, some undoubtedly for popular appeal. Visual hallucinations, for example, were added to Nash’s auditory delusions. However, other changes reflected the sensitive nature of the subject matter. Nash claims in the film, for example, that he continued to take anti-psychotic drugs, when in reality he stopped medication sometime during the 1970s, learning to control the delusions himself. The production team were clearly cognizant of the strong anti-psychiatry sentiment during the period and keen not to be portrayed as sympathetic to this stance. However, Nash’s eventual spontaneous recovery was rare and Howard notes that the producers were keen not to offer false hope to other patients and their families. A number of other omissions include an illegitimate son and allegations that Nash had relations with other men. These might perhaps illustrate some of the difficulties associated with recounting the life story of someone who is still alive.

Nash admitted, during a conversation with the director, that schizophrenia had humbled him. Recognition and success were perhaps, in the end, less about external factors and professional achievement and more about what he had learned from his illness and his relationships. Crow and Connelly found many of the scenes difficult and exhausting – and sometimes even frightening. Ultimately, their portrayal of the characters, and Crow’s portrait of the illness, is extraordinarily convincing. This is a powerful film. Whether or not our lives have been touched in any way by mental illness, it speaks to us all on many levels.


Dr Ali Haggett will introduce the film, and there will be opportunities for informal discussion in the bar afterwards.

Ali has written extensively about the gendered representation of mental health in the post-war period. Find out more about Ali’s research here.

The next Screen Talks event will be on Monday 25th February, 6.30pm.  Dr Helen Hanson will introduce Alfred’s Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960)

Booking Information Book online or call the Box Office: 0871 902 5730

When asked by the interviewers to outline the guiding principle in making his films, Alfred Hitchcock playfully quipped: ‘always make the audience suffer as much as possible’.  Hitchcock’s films are still renowned for their ability to grip an audience through their precisely controlled and suspenseful unfolding of events.  During his career Hitchcock fostered his public image as ‘Master of Suspense’, and he was adept in his performance and handling of his public persona. He was well known for appearing in brief on-screen cameos and his familiarity with audiences was further developed in his droll role introducing episodes of his television series Alfred Hitchcock Presents.

In 1959, after making a series of high budget technicolour suspense thrillers, which typify ‘Hitchockian style’ in their balance of glamour and crime, such as Dial M for Murder (1954), Rear Window (1954), To Catch a Thief (1955) The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), Vertigo (1958) and North by Northwest (1959) Hitchcock shifted both his style and production strategy, adapting Robert Bloch’s sensational pulp horror novel, Psycho.  The shift, for Hitchcock, was to a more gritty aesthetic and the opportunity to experiment with shocking narrative material and a frank presentation of sex and violence.  Psycho was produced on a low budget with a tight production schedule, and the events surrounding the film’s production are dramatised in Sasha Gervasi’s film Hitchcock, on general release at the moment.  One of the key features of the film’s release was the careful control of its marketing. In posters and publicity (pitcured above) Hitchcock exhorted viewers ‘not to tell’ the secrets of the plot.

The release of Gervasi’s film, and the recent BBC/HBO film The Girl (broadcast on BBC in December) provides an opportunity to revisit Psycho to explore the ‘stories’ that have sprung up about its genesis as a Hitchcock project, to consider the ways in which filmmakers appear on screen, and to ask why this film continues to grip and unsettle audiences. 

Dr Helen Hanson will introduce the film, and there will be opportunities for informal discussion in the bar afterwards.

Helen has written about Psycho in Contemporary American Cinema.  Find out more about Helen’s research here.

Screen Talks will soon be launching a new strand under the title ‘Sickness on the Screen’. This theme will consider issues relating to medicine, health, sickness and wellbeing on film – we have a fantastic selection of films coming up.

We will offer a wide range of films that address mental and physical illness (psychiatry, obesity), medical practitioners (migrant doctors, sorcerers), patients or sufferers (cancer) and more. These will be introduced by scholars from a range of departments including English, Sociology, Medical History, Film and Medicine. These topics are of universal significance and should provide plenty of food for thought – the films are really rather good too. As promised by all Screen Talks: great films, great debates!

Keep an eye on the blog, Facebook and Twitter for details of our launch on 11th March and the first film in the strand.