Viaggio nel crepuscolo explores the roads that lead into the cold darkness of Italian decline: decline of the family, of patriarchal society, of educational institutions, of religion. In a land where common, public, shared space is molded by a drab, amorphous egotism, even its revolutionary, socialist, communist ideals, mixed with a Manichaean Catholicism, have been transformed into fideistic and totalitarian dogmas. Right from the intro the animation presents this mix of phantom, austere and decaying places. Blending fiction and documentary, the film radically deconstructs the narrative forms. Bellocchio’s movies become lines of poetry that create new meaning; the same is true for the archives, whose use no longer serves the needs of narration, but those of poetry. Viaggio nel crepuscolo proposes a “quantum” montage: multiple stylistic features and cinematic genres as if they were parallel universes that reflect one another, determining the form, rhythm and content of the filmic space-time, in order to speak of the principal questions facing Italy and the world, and starting out from Bellocchio to venture into a universe that gives a voice back to workers and peasants, crystalizing some momentous turning points.
