Pasolini Retrospective

A mini-retrospective of Pasolini's films is on at the film society of the Lincoln center. An Article from The New York Times by A O Scott.

Another article about a Max Ophuls retrospective here.

Pasolini's Poetry

Feeling a little impudent in commenting about Pasolini's poetry but then what else is a blog for? I don't know anything about Italian tradition in poetry. I have read Inferno (in a very literal way) and have heard of Eugenio Montale but that's it. (With prose the situation is a little better. I am familiar with at least the representative works of Svevo, Levi, Moravia and Calvino.) So this will probably just be a shout out for the fans of Pasolini's films (which I have become recently). I haven't stopped thinking about Mamma Roma and Accattone ever since I saw them a couple of weeks back. I had the same reaction to his Teorema and Gospel According to St. Matthew which I saw early this year. Before everything else, his films work as an embodiment and expression of a unique and rare sensibility. Having read his poems and understood whatever I could, I think the same is applicable to his poems too. (In a way isn't all poetry about encapsulating an attitude towards the world and the self?)

The volume I have is a bilingual edition containing selections from five of his published poetry collections. Most of the poems are quite long - on an average around 20 pages (more than 500 lines). So reading these poems it feels like you are following a sustained trajectory of a thought and actually the interest of the poem lies in the nature of that trajectory itself. Most of these poems can fit into standard genre of confessional poetry, or at least they start like that, in the first person, with lamentations and self-reproachments, but just a few pages after you find him talking about Italian society, Marxist history, the hopelessness of the bourgeoisie, finally ending in exhortations of a bloody revolution! One of the poems in the book titled "Reality", that I liked particularly, starts with these lines:

Oh practical end of my poetry!
Because of you I can't overcome
the naivete that shrivels my prestige;

because of you, my tongue cracks with
anxiety, which I have to smother with talk.
I search my heart only for what's there.


And in the end after calling for a bloodbath of a revolution...

This is what a prophet would shout who doesn't have
the strength to kill a fly - whose strength
lies in his degrading difference.

Only when this has been said, or shouted,
will my fate be able to free itself,
and begin my discourse on reality.

"Tears of an Excavator" is another poem that resonated with me. The way he writes about the sights and sounds of a poor shantytown where he lived when he was a schoolteacher is very evocative in the same way as are the similar scenes in his films. He also writes about his homosexual experiences in a very frank manner. It is very close in tone to his initial films which had similar background - Accattone and Mamma Roma. Another noticeable and very interesting thing is that unlike many modern poets, writers and intellectuals writing about the modern life he doesn't write about the problem of alienation, the isolation of consciousness from the outside world. His subject is the exact opposite -- too much openness, a willingness to let the self completely disappear in the world, a radical immersion in the world. He writes about his sexual encounters with the young boys in the same mystical vein. There is another long poem titled "The Ashes of Gramsci" which moves in similar confessional territory despite its title. (Gramsci was an influential Marxist philosopher and a co-founder of the Italian communist party.) It didn't really make much sense to me though. There is another rather simple and moving poem addressed to his mother ("Prayer to My Mother") in which he prays to his mother not to die. There is another poem titled "A Desperate Vitality" starts with the line, "As in a film by Godard--rediscovery/of romanticism in the seat of/neocapitalistic cynicism and cruelty--. It didn't make much sense to me either. Another poem "The Beautiful Banners" is similar and somewhat shortened version of "Tears of an Excavator" and readily recognizable for someone coming to it after his films.

Most of these longer poems are written in unrhymed tercets which actually makes them a little easier to read. These tercets often (but not always) end in one line conclusion which probably makes it something else that I don't know about. The introduction to the book (translated from the Italian too) is pretty disappointing and not very helpful for the beginners. The book does contain some short notes in the end though which explain Italian specific phrases and words. I couldn't find anything of much help on the internet either.

An interesting exchange in the latest NYRB about Pasolini's poetry. The original essay in question is more about Pasolini's death than about his works.

Two films by Pasolini

Before Pasolini turned to fim making in 1961 with his life in Roman slums drama Accattone, he had already established himself as a major poet and a public intellectual, of the thorny, adversarial kind. As has been noted at so many places he was a man of contradictions but that is only if you look at it from a superficial level. His whole artistic project was to show how false and hollow these contradictions are. He was a dedicated Marxist who was obsessed with the idea of the sacred and was always searching for an epic and mythical dimension in life that is his opinion was being destroyed and devalued in the modern industrial societies. In his poetry, and in many of his films too, he elegized the vanishing peasant culture of Italy and "the desperate vitality" (the title of one of his poems) which he thought was being replaced by a shallow consumeristic material prosperity in postwar urban Italian society. He was also an avowed atheist who made some of the most stirring and profound religious films ever (including a couple, Teorema and The Gospel According to Saint Matthew which won prizes from some Catholic organizations while inviting boos and calls of bans from others) As if all of this was not enough he was also openly homosexual. One has to actually look at his Teorema or Mamma Roma to see how he reconciles all these apparent contradictions into one complex and exhilarating work of art.


Accattone is a generic Italian word for what Americans call a "bum," a street scrounger, a good for nothing. The hero's name is Vittario but people call him Accattone and he doesn't mind the nickname. He is actually a pimp, living a food-chain existence exploiting those who are weaker than he is-- that is the women who work for him as prostitutes. The main narrative follows him closely as he goes about his life, tries to get straight, though very half-heartedly and ultimately fails tragically in the end.

Even though on surface it looks like a standard neo-realist film documenting the lives of outcasts, downtrodden and marginalized people, you soon realize that it is no regular documentary work of political protest. Pasolini's interests lie elsewhere. He is more interested in locating that idea of sacred in the lives of people living in the Roman slums. In one scene when a prostitute is beaten brutally by a bunch of thugs the soundtrack swells to the music of Bach's passion. For someone not aware with his sensibility and ideas, the whole thing will look too pretentious and heavy-handed but once you realize what he is trying to achieve the scene becomes deeply moving. It is far from being a reactionary work, romanticising the life of the slums though, to Pasolini the whole issue of social injustice and moral failure is too obvious to really bother depicting it explicitly. It could otherwise have become yet another film full of slogans. He is tackling more complex themes here.

I think I am babbling rather incoherently so I will just link to this essay which says the same things in a much more interesting manner. This comment in particular - "Unlike so many other young iconoclastic directors at this time, Pasolini is not intent on de-mythifying and de-sacralising but rather on “re-sacralising” human existence."

Pasolini made Mamma Roma just one year after Accattone and though in the subject, characters and the basic treatment it repeats a lot of what is there in the earlier film, it still is a far more satisfying film in technical aspects. Or may be it was just that the dvd was issued from criterion with their usual attention to quality transfer. The visual compositions and the cinematography is much more beautiful and evocative in the film. With the way he shoots even the garbage dumps or the billowing grass on the waste lands, it is not hard to understand what he meant by his quest for a mystical dimension in the apparently seedier side of human existence. The film also has Anna Magnani, at her stormy best, in the title role. Pasolini generally worked with non-professional actors (this is another thing that will trouble a neophyte) but Magnani's acting is so over the top and stylized that it works beautifully in counterpoint to the awkward actors all around her. With the way she laughs (rather guffaws), or the way she walks or even carries herself, she reminds of the Pasolini's phrase "a desperate vitality."

The basic story concerns the middle aged prostitute played by Magnani trying to start a new life in Rome for the sake of her teenage son. She gets a new house, becomes a vegetable vendor, even gets her son a job through an elaborate con-scheme but tragedy is always around the corner. Her pimp returns, forcing her to walk the streets again. Her son eventually learns of her past and gets involved in some petty crimes all ultimately leading to tragic consequences.

Like in Accattone the film is full of religious symbolisms, most of them so obvious, blatant and over the top that it will make your jaw drop with its audacity. The young son as he lies dying in prison is photographed in the manner of the religious paintings of the dying Christ. Mamma Roma herself is portrayed as the Virgin Mary. The music, like in Accattone, is highly operatic and religious in nature. The final scene looks like as if it is shot for an opera or a tragic drama with even a bunch of people acting as a chorus. Pasolini was actually inspired by the medieval and renaissance religious painting and his visual compositions show it very clearly - the way he shoots the faces in medium closeups, always occupying the center of the frame. Before shooting Accattone he also showed his cinematographer clips from Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc which is again an interesting reference point when thinking about this film.

There are so many more things that can be said about the film but I will probably keep them for future. Both of these films are masterpieces, specially Mamma Roma which is I think the best place to start if you haven't seen any film by him. Will also try to post about Pasolini's poetry sometime soon. For now, the senses of cinema has a profile of Pasolini which is a very good introduction to his films. Also an essay on the criterion site.

Teorema

Teorema (Theorem), the Italian film directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini, is one of the most confounding films I have seen in a long while. I really don't know what it all really means even after seeing it for a second time. It is strange and unusual not just in what it wants to say but also in how it goes about doing it.

The main story itself is very strange. An upper class family is visited by a mysterious stranger and soon after the visit everyone in the family is thrown into some kind of a spiritual crisis by uncontrollable yearnings for the stranger. The Husband, the wife, the son, the daughter, and even the maid, everybody wants to sleep with him. It helps that the visitor (he is never named throughout the film) is played by an actor (Terence Stamp) of uncommon masculine beauty. I had never seen, or even heard of him before. Anyway, soon after seducing everybody in the family the visitor leaves as strangely as he had arrived. The rest of film tells how each of the characters are profoundly affected by the experience. The son becomes an artist and starts painting as if followed by some powerful inner force. The daughter becomes catatonic after she measures the ground where the visitor sat with a measuring tape and runs helter-skelter signifying I don't know what and has to be admitted to hospital. The maid acquires spiritual powers and starts performing miracles. The mother becomes a nymphomaniac and starts picking up strange men on streets for sex and the father, after handing over his factory to the worker's collective ends up in a desert howling into nothingness!

First of all I don't know what the title means. May be a right theorem for living life? It is specially startling in the way it proposes connections between sexuality, politics and religion. The bourgeois respectable life that the family members live have alienated them from themselves and it is only after a contact with an outsider, a symbol of some divine, mysterious truth that they are able to come out of their shells and recognize what really lies within their selves. In other words, they discover their "souls"! Pasolini seems to say that sexual repression, materialism and selfishness all stem from basic inauthenticity that lies at the center of everything. Pasolini was himself a complicated figure. Besides being a filmmaker he was Marxist activist, a published poet, a homosexual, an atheist and extremely interested in religion. It comes as no surprise that he is able to see connections between these apparently incompatible ideologies and ways of looking at the life and the world.

Even more than the content, it is the style of the film that makes a powerful impression. It is defiantly non-naturalistic in its tone, texture, narrative, or the way it uses dialogue and background music. It invites ridicule and catcalls of pretentiousness and yet resists them successfully because it is so extreme and again so defiantly non-naturalistic. There is scene in which maid in her spiritual ferment ascends in the air and Pasolini films in such matter-of-fact way that even if you laugh it is not a laughter of dismissal but of understanding. Same is with many shots of the crotch of the visitor or with the scene in which a weird postman comes with a mail about the arrival of the visitor, waving his hands like wings as if impersonating an angel. There are very few dialogues and there is an alarming speech about philosophy of art. Also, interestingly the film was awarded some prize by some (obviously enlightened) catholic group but when the catcalls from the uncomprehending and puritan section grew louder they had to rescind. I think this is a great film about religion, not necessarily about christianity but religion and spirituality in general. And coming from someone who is generally hostile to religion it is really a high praise indeed! It is refreshing to see a film which takes a lot of risks and is able to tackle complicated subjects and great ideas with such confidence and aplomb.

This is a comprehensive article on the film. It contains lots of stills too.