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Journey into the twilight retraces the roads that lead to the cold darkness of Italy’s decline: of the family, of the patriarchal society, of the school system, of religion. This is a land where the interior of the communal, public, shared space is made out of a colourless, amorphous egoism, where even the revolutionary, socialist, communist ideals mixed with the Manichean Catholicism have transformed into fideistic, totalitarian dogmas. From the opening credits, the animation expresses a combination of places: ghostly, austere, decadent, elegant, and decrepit.
Continuously mixing fiction and documentary, the film structure is able to radically deconstruct narrative forms.
Bellocchio’s films, which the director started from, become poetic verses that, arranged in a particular narrative order, create a new meaning. The same happens with the archival materials, as their use is functional to poetry, and not to the narration anymore.
Journey into the Twilight is based on a “quantum” editing. The director employs multiple writing styles and cinematographic genres, as if they were parallel universes that mirror, multiply and split into each other, determining form, rhythm, and content of the film space-time. The ultimate goal is to talk about the main Italian and international issues from unusual points of view, starting from Bellocchio and going forward, as if travelling on a thin border line towards a universe that wants to give voice to the factory workers and to the farmers, identifying some historic turning points. The ending scene, a horse vanishing on the icy road of a non-place that can be anywhere and nowhere, in a different, utopian universe, is symbolic of the whole film.
