Understanding Auteurs: Pier Paolo Pasolini (Salo)

The “Trilogy of Life,” for all of its flaws, brought Pier Paolo Pasolini a great deal of acclaim and a relatively high amount of commercial success late in his career.  But the eternally provocative writer-director gradually grew disenchanted with the trilogy’s optimistic and hopeful view of the world as a playground of art and sex.  Around the time of the release of Arabian Nights (1974) Pasolini denounced the worldview expressed in his own trilogy in an Italian newspaper.  In an essay entitled Abjuration from “The Trilogy of Life,” Pasolini wrote:

Even the “reality” of innocent bodies has been violated, manipulated, submitted to the consumerist power:  or rather, this violence on bodies has become the most macroscopic datum of the new human epoch…Private sexual life (such as my own) has undergone both the trauma of false tolerance and of corporal degradation; and in sexual fantasies what was once pain and joy has become suicidal disappointment, formless sloth…

Therefore, I am adapting myself to the degradation, and I am accepting the unacceptable.  I am maneuvering to reorganize my life.  I am forgetting how things were before.  The beloved faces of yesterday are beginning to fade.  I am – slowly and without alternatives – confronted with the present.

This matter-of-factly hopeless and despairing viewpoint animates every frame of Pasolini’s final film, Salo (1975), a simultaneous adaptation of Dante’s Inferno and the Marquis de Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom, and set in the last days of Mussolini’s Italy.  You might expect a film with this pedigree to hold something back, to avoid graphically depicting the atrocities described in Dante and de Sade’s literary works.  But Salo holds precisely nothing back – the film is essentially an uninterrupted succession of scenes in which a group of powerful fascists torture, rape, humiliate, mutilate, and/or kill a group of very young looking men and women.  These acts occur almost uniformly in the direct center of the frame of Pasolini’s shot compositions, which, in a surprising but effective rebuke of his standard rough verite style are generally cold and static, essentially forcing the viewer to take the perspective of the fascists.  Pasolini intended for the film to be “indigestible,” and indeed it is extremely difficult to stomach; chapter headings such as “Circle of Blood” and “Circle of Shit” aren’t metaphors.  Knowing that the actors are actually eating brownies when their characters are supposed to be eating huge amounts of feces (in one of the film’s most notorious scenes) doesn’t make the scene any easier to take.  The nonstop degradation is occasionally punctuated by strikingly incongruous and weirdly sinister moments of physical comedy that have the exact opposite effect of “comic relief” and only make the film more disturbing.  There are also some creepy and haunting ambiguous moments, such as a scene where one of the fascists’ wives inexplicably jumps out of a fourth story window.

No one has ever made or will ever make a movie as horrifying and troubling as Salo.  There are a lot of films that have provocative subject matter or grisly, realistic looking violence, but it’s impossible to imagine one that stares directly into the heart of darkness to the extent that Pasolini’s final film does.  Many films are disturbing; Salo is emotionally scarring.  I can’t imagine anyone sitting through the entirety of Salo without at least once covering their eyes or getting literally sick to their stomach, and personally I can’t imagine watching the film more than once in a lifetime.  I virtually always rewatch a film that I’ve already seen if I’m going to write about it for this blog, but I had to make an exception in this case.  Though I’m basing what I write here on four-year old memories, Salo has left a mark on me that will make it hard to forget.  It’s the only film that I’ve seen that I think of as a genuinely traumatic experience.

Ironically, the very things that make Salo unwatchable are also what make it brilliant, and possibly the greatest achievement of Pasolini’s career.  The director’s strategy of distancing the viewer from the nameless victims and putting us in the cold, voyeuristic perspective of the fascist torturers initially seems offensive, but Pasolini’s moral goal (and lunatic ambition) with this film seems to be to beat the latent fascism out of each viewer.  Salo takes the desire (that we all have on some level) to have power over another human being and pushes it to its logical extreme, using Brechtian distancing effects to present our lopsided societal structure in its most base and disgusting light.  The film refuses to allow us to redeem ourselves, even through Pasolini’s most cherished social causes.  A victim who gives the Communist salute is gunned down mercilessly; another one praying to God is forced to literally eat shit.  Instead of coming to any real resolution, Salo ends mysteriously with two male victims waltzing together, leaving the prior violence hanging in the air.  It’s a relentlessly disturbing experience, and a profoundly uncompromising end to one of the cinema's most philosophically complex filmographies.

FINAL GRADES FOR PIER PAOLO PASOLINI

Accattone (1961) = B

Mamma Roma (1962) = B+

La ricotta (short) (1963) = B+

The Gospel According to Matthew (1964) = A-

Hawks and Sparrows (1965) = B-

Oedipus Rex (1967) = B+

Teorema (1968) = B

Porcile (1969) = D+

Medea (1969) = C+

The Decameron (1971) = C+

The Canterbury Tales (1972) = C

Arabian Nights (1974) = B+

Salo (1975) = A-

Understanding Auteurs: Pier Paolo Pasolini (The Trilogy of Life)

After stumbling with the half-baked provocation Porcile (1969) and ripping off his own Oedipus Rex (1967) with the noticeably weaker Medea (1969), Pier Paolo Pasolini sought a new creative direction with a series of films that he dubbed the Trilogy of Life.  The director’s first three movies of the ‘70s were each adaptations of beloved medieval texts, each of which are an anthology of shorter tales.  Pasolini’s versions of these books would emphasize the gritty carnality of the original text, while ostensibly providing a lighthearted examination of the intersection between art and everyday life in the pre-industrial world.

The trilogy begins with The Decameron (1971), based on Giovanni Boccaccio’s Italian classic collection of one hundred stories.  Pasolini’s version only includes a fraction of the stories, and is missing Boccaccio’s framing story, in which ten young people gather to relate the tales to each other.  The lack of any sort of structuring principle to Pasolini’s script makes The Decameron feel like one of his least disciplined efforts.  Pasolini does introduce a recurring motif about halfway through the movie that follows a painter (played by Pasolini himself) who searches for inspiration while painting a cathedral, but there is no rhyme or reason to why this story needed to be told in such a fragmented way while most of the other tales are given their own individual segments of the film.  Many of the stories have promising setups, but none of them really feel like they come to a point before the film arbitrarily moves on to a new story.  Pasolini’s determination to preserve the bawdiness of the original text rather than making a stuffy Masterpiece Theater episode is admirable, and he does conjure up a convincing overall depiction of medieval Italy.  But the plotting in The Decameron is way too lackadaisical, especially considering that the movie is meant at least partially as a tribute to storytelling.  With its lazy pacing, seemingly arbitrary structure, and generally inconsequential tone, The Decameron resembles many of Fellini’s films from this period; like Satyricon (1971) or Roma (1972), The Decameron mostly seems like an excuse for its director to indulge himself.  Where Fellini at least has enough technical skill to occasionally make this aimless, masturbatory style work, Pasolini remains a fairly straightforward stylist (albeit one with a good eye for exotic locations), and the eccentric social commentary that distinguishes most of his oeuvre is almost totally absent here.

Unfortunately, there is hardly any more depth to the second film in the trilogy, the Geoffrey Chaucer adaptation The Canterbury Tales (1972).  As in the previous film, Pasolini jumbles the order of tales arbitrarily, while removing the original text’s framing story – though in this case he alludes to it by having a character suggest that a group of villagers take turns telling stories as they travel to Canterbury, which only makes it more awkward when the film completely abandons this structure.  Pasolini again appears in a quasi-framing story, this time playing Chaucer himself, though these brief scenes mostly only consist of the author sitting in front of his notebook and laughing to himself about his writings.  A few of the stories are lightly amusing, such as one where a jolly beggar made up to look like Chaplin’s Little Tramp (Pasolini favorite Ninetto Davoli, who actually looks more like Chico Marx) attempts various hustles in exchange for food, but the film’s rambling structure only allows it to work on a moment to moment basis.  Where The Decameron could at least boast some interesting, highly photogenic locations, The Canterbury Tales feels constrained by its somewhat bland British locations (despite the fine work of cinematographer Tonino Delli Colli).  Pasolini’s depiction of medieval England is not as immersive as his portrayal of primitive Italy, mainly because of his distracting decision to dub the dialogue into English even though most of the actors are clearly speaking Italian.  Why Pasolini didn’t simply hire an English-speaking cast is a mystery, though his decision to stick with recurring cast members like Davoli and Franco Citti is consistent with the generally lazy and carefree feel of this film and The Decameron.  There is a crazy low-budget vision of Hell toward the end of the movie (with screaming demons firing out of Satan’s ass in what appears to be the same volcanic wasteland seen in Porcile and 1968’s Teorema), but it may not be worth sitting through the rest of this tediously inconsequential effort to get to the rare good moments.

Considering the slump that Pasolini seemed to be in after Porcile, Medea, The Decameron, and The Canterbury Tales, it is almost shocking that Arabian Nights (1974) is as vital as it is.  The final film of the Trilogy of Life shares many traits with the first two parts, including some of their flaws, but overall it is the first of Pasolini’s exotic pagan films to live up to the beauty of Oedipus Rex.  Somehow the rambling structure of Arabian Nights works where it fails in the previous two films, perhaps because Pasolini actually allows the stories time to develop and come to a conclusion before abruptly moving on.  There are still some odd scripting decisions – such as having a young hero (Franco Merli) enjoying an orgy in one scene before being inexplicably distraught in his next appearance – but the overall atmosphere of Arabian Nights is spellbinding enough to make the film feel like the only truly coherent chapter of the Trilogy of Life.  The mysterious, poetic Arabic tales are a good match for Pasolini’s aesthetic, and the flights of fancy are nicely balanced by the earthiness that Pasolini brings to the film’s frequent good-natured sex scenes (with their nicely matter of fact handling of both male and female nudity).  With its consistently gorgeous imagery and its compelling mixture of fantastical storytelling and raw carnality, Arabian Nights single-handedly justifies the highly flawed Trilogy of Life.

UP LAST  Salo

Understanding Auteurs: Pier Paolo Pasolini (Teorema and Porcile)

Teorema (1968) is perhaps the most difficult of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s films up to this point, a work that brings many of the director’s pet themes to their logical conclusion while remaining almost maddeningly elusive about what those conclusions are.  Rather than follow the sea change in aesthetics and theme that Oedipus Rex (1967) seemed to suggest, Pasolini again pursues the conflict between Italy’s Christian ideals and its complacent bourgeois realities.  But the conclusions that the writer-director reaches in Teorema are far less easy to summarize than those in Mamma Roma (1962) or The Gospel According to St. Matthew (1964), both of which made challenging but easy to identify points about the cultural confusion of the society that Pasolini lived in.  One can come to certain conclusions about various thematic aspects of Teorema, but there is far more ambiguity built in to this film’s structure than there is in Pasolini’s previous films.

Teorema focuses on a typical upper-middle class nuclear family whose daily routines are disrupted by the inexplicable arrival of a strange, quiet man listed in the credits as “the Visitor” (Terence Stamp).  The Visitor seems to bring out the latent desires and frustrations in every member of the household, prompting them each to make bold changes in their lives.  The father (Massimo Girotti) decides to give up control of his business, letting his workers take charge.  His wife (Silvana Mangano, returning from Oedipus Rex) experiences a sexual awakening, feeling passions that have presumably disappeared from her dull married life.  The son (Andres Jose Cruz Soublette) realizes to his shame and humiliation that he is a homosexual, with the Visitor allowing the boy to experience what is apparently his first same-gendered sexual experience.  The daughter (Anne Wiazemsky) tentatively breaks free from her sheltered “good girl” status through her own sexual relationship with the Visitor.  Even the maid (Laura Betti) is affected by the strange man’s presence, as he prevents her suicide attempt and ultimately prompts her to return to the humble village where she grew up.

The Visitor leaves the family just as abruptly as he arrived, and his disappearance has a tremendous impact on the household.  Only the maid seems to take a positive inspiration from the mysterious guest’s visit, as she begins to perform miracles in her old village, ranging from curing a child of what appears to be leprosy to mysteriously floating above a building.  Once again Pasolini seems to be suggesting that the poor are closer to the peasant roots of spirituality and are therefore the only ones in a position to accept true religion.  This positive interpretation is complicated, however, by the bizarre and highly ambiguous conclusion to the maid’s story, which finds the woman instructing one of her disciples to bury her alive for no discernible reason.  

The effect that the Visitor’s leaving has on the bourgeois family is no less mysterious, and in many ways more interesting than what happens to the maid.  It would be easy for Pasolini to take a high and mighty position and mock the wealthy family for their banal concerns.  But although the members of the family are used more as representative figures than fleshed-out characters, Pasolini seems to empathize and even identify with their existential struggles.  The son who struggles with his sexual identity is going through feelings that Pasolini undoubtedly dealt with as a homosexual growing up in a macho culture, and the fact that the son ultimately channels his frustrations through increasingly violent abstract art suggests a particularly bracing autocritique.  The wife’s futile search for transcendence through tawdry sex with young hustlers may have also hit close to home with the writer-director, who was allegedly murdered while attempting to pick up a gigolo.  Pasolini’s biggest howl of despair comes from the father, who renounces all ties to his business, strips himself of his clothes, and goes out into nature.  But the father cannot simply become one with the world in the style of Saint Francis.  He is too much a product of his middle-class industrial world to escape from it, and the film ends with him utterly lost in the middle of a weird volcanic wasteland, screaming incoherently at the camera.

The mysteries revolving around who exactly the Visitor is (he could be interpreted, with equal justification, as a Christ or Satan figure) and how much he can be held accountable for the destinies of the family make Teorema the most challenging and intellectually stimulating of Pasolini’s films to this point.  At the same time, the intense yet ambiguous directions that the family members go in following the Visitor’s departure may make this the most nuanced and complicated of Pasolini’s provocations at this point.  That said, while Teorema is a triumph of bold thematic complexity, the script’s poetry doesn’t necessarily translate cinematically.  Where Oedipus Rex presented a huge leap forward for Pasolini as a visual stylist, Teorema is somewhat clunky from a directorial standpoint.  Aside from the highly memorable aforementioned final shot, and the effective use of Terence Stamp’s passive yet intensely sensual stare, Teorema is pretty basic on a visual level, with some of Pasolini’s overt attempts at stylization falling flat.  An early scene is arbitrarily presented in the style of a silent film, which might have at least been a charmingly weird diversion if Pasolini were more technically equipped to actually replicate the style of early cinema.  While the film is smartly and logically structured overall, it nonetheless opens awkwardly with a TV news-style report about the father’s business, a scene that could have easily been cut from the film altogether.  Teorema isn’t an easy film to warm up to, and in some senses it is a stylistic failure, but it is undeniably a major statement.

Unfortunately, the same can’t be said for Pasolini’s next film.  Porcile (1969) is the most outwardly confrontational of Pasolini’s films to this point, and it was clearly intended to provoke a strong, possibly hostile response from its audience - which would be fine if it was at all clear what the writer-director was trying to say with this very muddled effort.   The film is divided between a mostly dialogue-free story set in the distant past that follows a man (Pierre Clementi) as he is mysteriously hunted through the same volcanic hellhole that was featured in the final shots of Teorema, and modern-day scenes set in a villa occupied by a Nazi-turned-businessman (Alberto Lionello) and his bored son (Jean-Pierre Leaud).  Continuous cross-cutting between the two stories suggests that Pasolini means to draw some parallel or contrast between the old-fashioned barbarism of the medieval story and the contemporary fascism found in the latter story, but it isn’t even remotely obvious what Pasolini’s intentions in combining the two stories are. 

While Pasolini’s films have sometimes felt a bit blandly directed, the strength of their ideas has usually made up for any visual deficiencies.  But Porcile seems intended only to provoke a knee-jerk response of disgust from the viewer, and ultimately fails even on the level of pure shock value.  For a film that prominently features cannibalism, beastiality, and Nazi war atrocities, Porcile feels awfully tame, allowing most of its potentially disturbing material to happen offscreen.  Most of the contemporary material is devoted to tedious scenes of the Nazi and his business associates tediously tossing half-baked philosophies at each other, or Leaud and his fiancée (Wiazemsky, returning after Teorema) sharing some abstract political frustrations.  The material set in the past fares somewhat better, if only because of the stunningly odd volcano location, but it mostly feels like a poor man’s version of Oedipus Rex, or even Medea (1969). 

The post-synched dialogue proves to be more of a problem in Porcile than it has in previous Pasolini films.  For the most part, audio sync hasn’t been a major issue in Pasolini’s previous films, though it is a little awkward to see Orson Welles’ part clearly dubbed over by a different actor in La ricotta (1963).  Where the Welles character was not a major focal point of La ricotta, Jean-Pierre Leaud is an important character in Porcile.  It is really distracting to see the well-known stand-in for the French New Wave being clearly dubbed by an Italian actor while playing a German character.  It is understandable that Pasolini would want to work with Leaud, one of the best and most intense actors of his era, but he is terribly miscast in this role.  The post-dubbing of Welles’ character in La ricotta is undeniably distracting, but there is enough else going on in that short film to nullify the issue.  Porcile, on the other hand, is nothing but a series of awkward, half-baked ideas signifying nothing.  With the murky, confused Porcile and the redundant Medea, Pasolini seems to be in a bit of a slump.  Hopefully his next project, a trilogy based on classic works of literature, will reinvigorate his art.

UP NEXT  The Trilogy of Life (The Decameron, The Canterbury Tales, and Arabian Nights)

Understanding Auteurs: Pier Paolo Pasolini (Oedipus Rex and Medea)

Oedipus Rex (1967) marks an undeniable turning point in the filmography of Pier Paolo Pasolini.    Where Hawks and Sparrows (1965), for all of its virtues, felt in many ways like a tentative and somewhat awkward attempt to move forward after The Gospel According to St. Matthew (1964) brought the thematic concerns of Pasolini’s series of Christian films to their logical endpoint, Oedipus Rex is unmistakably a confident step into new territory for the writer-director. The black and white conflations of Christianity and gritty neorealism that comprised Pasolini’s early film works here give way to boldly colorful re-interpretations of classic myths, while primitive tribal music replaces the classical pieces used for the early films’ soundtracks.   In melding a completely new aesthetic direction with an eccentric and highly personal take on Sophocles’ legendary tale, Pasolini set a new path for his oeuvre and finally left any lingering traces of conventional Italian neorealist cinema behind him.

As if to mark Oedipus Rex as a sort of second debut, Pasolini cast Franco Citti, who began his acting career as the protagonist of Accattone (1961), as the titular figure.  Citti’s raw, plainly emotional performance played a huge role in the success of Pasolini’s first film, but his bracingly energetic work stands out even more in the context of an adaptation of a Greek legend.  The cries of rage and anguish that Oedipus periodically lets out are visceral even with the inevitable remove provided by the post-synched dialogue (which was standard in Italian cinema of the time).   Pasolini’s Oedipus is far from a stuffy, scholarly take on Sophocles; it feels immediate and impassioned in a way that few adaptations of classic literature do.  The controversial writer-director wasn’t aiming for a respectable middlebrow adaptation of a world-renowned work of art – he was out for blood.

Pasolini clearly did not take the transition to color cinematography lightly.  While Pasolini’s use of color is not as extreme as in Michelangelo Antonioni’s contemporaneous first color film Red Desert (1964), which included such bizarre sights as hand-painted trees, the vibrant sun-dried look of Oedipus Rex’s Moroccan desert locations is nonetheless a rather flamboyant change of pace from the stark black and white of Pasolini’s early films.  The writer-director didn’t start his film career as a particularly visually oriented director.  While there are some striking shot compositions in Pasolini’s earlier films, such as the headlight-lit gang rape of a prostitute in Accattone and the walking-on-water scene in The Gospel According to St. Matthew, those films seemed more oriented around their thematic ideas than their visual design.  Oedipus Rex reverses the equation, as the film plays like a series of beautiful, strange images that are supported by an elusive interpretation of a classic text.  It isn’t clear why the film, which mostly takes place in the same setting as Sophocles’ story, opens with a scene in pre-WWII Italy and closes with a scene in 1960s Italy, but the aggressively odd imagery gives the film a compelling poetic logic. 

The scene where Oedipus unknowingly murders his father and his entourage is a tour de force for Pasolini and cinematographer Giuseppe Ruzzolini, who punctuate the stabbings with blinding flashes of sunlight rather than the expected showers of blood.   But there is something interesting to look at in literally every shot, whether it is the wonderfully grungy tribal costumes worn by the cast or the impressively rugged Moroccan scenery or the inscrutable facial expressions of Silvana Mangano, who plays Oedipus’ mother.  Oedipus Rex isn’t the type of stiff, overly composed art movie that insists on its creators’ mastery.  The cinematography, for all of its beauty, retains a rough, visceral shakiness that makes the film feel like an improvised oil crayon drawing come to life.

Pasolini followed Oedipus Rex with Teorema (1968) and Porcile (1969), both of which we’ll look at next month, and then returned to Greek myth with his take on Medea (1969).  But where Oedipus Rex marked a bold stylistic departure for Pasolini, Medea feels almost like a poor man’s repeat of its sister film.  Up to this point, Pasolini hadn’t ever come close to repeating himself, each new film feeling in some way like an advancement of ideas presented in earlier works, but Medea finds the director covering the same territory as he did in Oedipus Rex without improving on that film in any way. 

There is still an abundance of extraordinary imagery (this time provided by ace cinematographer Ennio Guarnieri, working with Turkish locations), and the audio assault of esoteric African and Balkan folk music is impressive and distinctive.  Medea is too exotic to be truly dull, but Pasolini’s take on the material is tediously repetitive, awkwardly structured, and dramatically inert.  Jason (Giuseppe Gentile) is initially presented as the film’s protagonist, before the perspective abruptly shifts to Medea (opera legend Maria Callas, acquitting herself nicely in her only film role ).  Jason’s betrayal of Medea, which sets most of the actual plot in motion, happens late in the film and mostly offscreen, which makes it hard to have any sort of reaction to her violent revenge on Jason’s family.  That revenge is also inexplicably presented in two successive, barely distinguishable versions to no discernible dramatic effect.  A few of Pasolini’s films up to this point have been problematic for one reason or another, but Medea is the first one that finds the director repeating himself.

UP NEXT  Teorema and Porcile

Understanding Auteurs: Pier Paolo Pasolini (Hawks and Sparrows)

It is surprising how consistent Pier Paolo Pasolini’s films seem when they are viewed chronologically.  I’d seen Accattone (1961), Mamma Roma (1962), La ricotta (1963), and The Gospel According to Saint Matthew (1964) before starting this project, but seeing them out of order (and intermingled with later, radically different Pasolini films like 1975’s Salo) made them seem like they could hardly be the product of the same filmmaker.  When viewed in the order in which they were made, Pasolini’s early films add up to a coherent and original vision that conflates realistic depictions of Italy’s working class with heady spiritual concerns.  Hawks and Sparrows (1965) continues this trend to a degree, focusing once again on poor characters who are at times presented as modern Christian icons, but it also finds the writer-director dealing with any number of other issues that happened to be on his mind at the time.  The film’s rambling, episodic structure suggests that Pasolini was searching for a new creative direction by throwing everything at the wall and seeing what stuck.  For better and for worse, Hawks and Sparrows is a transitional project.

Still, Hawks and Sparrows is a particularly eccentric transitional project, and its flamboyantly playful tone is signaled immediately by its unconventional opening credits sequence.  Ennio Morricone’s jolly theme song features an opera singer belting out the name and occupation of virtually every cast and crew member who worked on the film (the name of regular Pasolini producer Alfredo Bini sounds particularly ridiculous in this context).  This enthusiastically preposterous opening primes the viewer for a spastic story that follows an old man (legendary Italian comedian Toto) and his son (Ninetto Davoli) as they travel aimlessly down an empty road.  Eventually the duo is joined by a talking crow (voiced by Francesco Leonetti) that provides a lot of random philosophical musing and social commentary. 

The loose plot seems to exist entirely to support these stray bits of commentary.  This isn’t inherently a problem; Jean-Luc Godard built his entire filmmaking career around rambling, episodic projects that often seemed like excuses to unload whatever thoughts happened to be in his head as he was making them, and many of his films were outstanding.  But Pasolini lacks Godard’s formal inventiveness.  Where the French New Wave master could make a wildly unruly film like Pierrot le fou (1965) seem vital through sheer playful energy, Pasolini has only a few stylistic tricks up his sleeve.  Aside from the typically great use of music (this time it’s all original Morricone material) and the deft, straight-faced handling of the talking bird, there isn’t much of formal interest in Hawks and Sparrows.  The occasional use of comically sped-up footage feels like a lazy return to something that worked better in La ricotta, which would be less of a problem is Pasolini had at least a few other tricks up his sleeve.  The director’s earlier films succeeded because of the clarity of their ideas, while overt stylization seemed like a secondary concern.  Hawks and Sparrows lacks the earlier films’ thematic coherence, and isn’t stylistically interesting enough to make up for it.

Since there is no consistent throughline in Hawks and Sparrows, the movie can only work on a moment to moment basis.  Fortunately, the amusing episodes largely outweigh the tedious ones.  A lengthy aside in which the travelers imagine themselves as Franciscan monks charged with converting a flock of birds to Christianity is a particular highlight, with Toto eventually learning to communicate with the birds through a series of subtitled whistles.  Also memorable is a Fellini-esque sequence in which the protagonists help a rag tag theater group push a car, deliver a baby, and have a fiery party.  Hawks and Sparrows has enough fun, eccentric scenes to be worthwhile, but as a whole it lacks the intelligence and the provocative morality that Pasolini is capable of.

UP NEXT  Oedipus Rex and Medea

Understanding Auteurs: Pier Paolo Pasolini (La ricotta and The Gospel According to St. Matthew)

Though his first two films contained serious religious overtones, Pier Paolo Pasolini’s point of view was never going to line up exactly with that of the Vatican.  Accattone (1961) and especially Mamma Roma (1962) posited that the underclass of ‘60s Italy was closer to God than the supposedly pious bourgeoisie of a society that called itself Catholic.  Unsurprisingly, Pasolini’s radical combination of Christian iconography and stark neorealism, which depicted pimps, thieves, and poor workers as modern religious icons, didn’t sit well with the church.  Even if Pasolini had presented himself as a straightforward Catholic, it’s unlikely that the church would want to be associated with an openly gay Marxist, though the director’s relationship to sexuality and leftist politics was probably no less complicated than his religious views were. 

Suffice to say, Pasolini was not generally considered to be a Christian artist at this point of his career.  In 1962, Pasolini was invited by Pope John XXIII to a dialogue between high-ranking members of the Vatican and non-Catholic artists.  Apparently something in this meeting struck a chord with Pasolini, as he subsequently visited Assisi to attend a seminar at a Franciscan monastery.  At some point during this trip, Pasolini came across a copy of the New Testament and read all four gospels straight through, in the process gaining inspiration for a film called The Gospel According to St. Matthew (1964).

In the interim between the Assissi trip and the filming of The Gospel, Pasolini was commissioned to film one of the four segments for an omnibus film entitled RoGoPaG (the odd title being a combination of the first letters of the four directors’ last names:  Roberto Rossellini, Jean-Luc Godard, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and the lesser-known Ugo Gregoretti).  Pasolini’s 32-minute contribution was La ricotta (1963), a project clearly inspired by the preparation that that the director was doing for The Gospel.  In many ways, this short film is just as much a statement of purpose as The Gospel wound up being, and it finds Pasolini further developing his concept of the poor as the true modern spiritual figures while also offering a blatant criticism of the bloated epics that often passed for religious cinema in the 1960s.

La ricotta takes place during the filming of what appears to be a glossy religious epic in the style of King of Kings (1961).  The opening credits of La ricotta roll over color footage of the film-within-a-film’s crew doing a twist to a frivolous and simplistically repetitive pop instrumental.  After this jarring opener, the first instance of color cinematography in Pasolini’s cinema, the film alternates between documentary-style black and white footage of the cast and crew of the Biblical epic joking around between takes and static color shots of the actors in the film attempting to hold iconographic poses around a cross as frustrated offscreen stagehands yell commands.  The in-between takes scenes alternate between the distant and seemingly depressed director (Orson Welles) brooding from his director’s chair, and depictions of the struggles of a poor extra named Stracci (Mario Cipriani) to get some food for himself and his starving family.  Eventually, members of the cast mock Stracci by overfeeding him huge amounts of cheese and watermelon, shortly before a scene where the extra has to go up on a cross.  The huge amount of food that the poor man eats, combined with the awkward position he has to assume as he is “crucified” on film winds up killing Stracci.  Finally noticing his extra’s death, the director laments that Stracci “had no other way to remind us that he was alive.”

La ricotta is even bolder than Mamma Roma in its treatment of Italy’s underclass as modern religious icons, largely because the film is more openly critical of the hypocrisies of the bourgeoisie than the earlier films were.  Where Accattone was concerned entirely with poor characters, and Mamma Roma featured only brief glimpses of slightly more middle class figures, La ricotta features an entire film cast and crew who stand in for Italy’s upper crust.  Stracci’s status as an alternately mocked and ignored extra marks him as a clear representative of Italy’s suffering working class.  La ricotta makes its point rather bluntly, showing the characters that represent Italy’s dominant value system behaving cravenly while attempting to appear pious, while the character representing the poor is crucified right under their noses. But it’s a good kind of bluntness, making a fairly complicated point in a clear, concise, and memorable way.  It helps that much of the film is presented as a broad comedy rather than a humorless morality play. 

Pasolini also complicates the film’s potentially over-schematic plot by apparently identifying himself with Orson Welles’ director character.  While the film that Welles’ character is making appears to be the polar opposite of what The Gospel According to St. Matthew would become, and is obviously meant to be a critique of big-budget Biblical epics, Pasolini nonetheless has the Welles character read one of Pasolini’s own poems out loud at one point, suggesting an element of self-critique.  Though Pasolini celebrates the working class in this film and others, he also seems hyper-aware here of his own status as a relatively privileged middle-class citizen.  It seems that Pasolini may have doubted whether he, as a person occupying a similar social status to Welles’ character, had the ability to make a sincere religious film.

Despite whatever reservations Pasolini may have felt about his ability to depict the life and death of Christ, he ultimately went through with his plans to depict the Passion in his third feature-length film, The Gospel According to St. Matthew (1964).  Departing almost entirely from the expected aesthetic of Biblical films, The Gospel is presented in a gritty black and white, neorealistic style that suggests what it might have looked like if cinema verite documentarians had been present during Jesus’ lifetime.  While the filmmaking style is similar to the aesthetic that Pasolini had previously adopted on Accattone and Mamma Roma, the context and setting of the new film is obviously radically different.  The effect makes The Gospel seem like one of the only truly serious Christian films.  (The Last Temptation of Christ, Martin Scorsese’s 1988 depiction of many of the same events, is also a serious film, but it is clearly intended as a radical interpretation of Biblical stories, whereas The Gospel seems more like an attempt to get an accurate version of Jesus’ life on screen).  If I were a Christian, this would almost certainly be one of my all-time favorite films, but even as a non-believer I can appreciate The Gospel’s sincerity and ambition.  It is clearly Pasolini’s most major and important cinematic statement to this point, and certainly one of the best religiously themed films ever made.

Working without a script, and condensing the events of Matthew’s Gospel only to the point needed to bring the film to an acceptable length, Pasolini brings the story of Jesus (too often depicted as a schlocky epic) back down to earth.  The rough edges of Pasolini’s early films – the sometimes clumsy edits separating scenes, the occasionally stilted dialogue readings of his largely non-professional casts – are present here as well, and once again the almost-documentary feel makes the film feel more grounded and realistic than a normal movie.  For his Jesus, Pasolini cast a Spanish economics student named Enrique Irazoqui, whose dark complexion and short black hair gives him the appearance of an actual person from the region where Christ is said to have lived rather than the conventional blond haired and blue eyed depiction of Jesus in most Christian iconography.  There is something unusually believable about this film’s version of Christ, both as a member of the community depicted in the film and as a half-supernatural prophet who receives visions from God.  Even the miracles that Jesus performs in the film are presented in a matter-of-fact way that makes them seem less like spectacles than like simple facts of life.  The effect of Jesus walking on water was probably handled fairly simply, most likely accomplished by Irazoqui walking on an unseen platform under the water, but it is filmed in such a low-key way that it seems simultaneously miraculous and realistic.

It would certainly be reductive to say that The Gospel According to St. Matthew is simply an example of neorealism.  Aside from the period setting and the occasional glimpses of the supernatural, the film has a fairly elaborate and complex use of background music that greatly expands on the beautiful use of classical music in Pasolini’s previous features.  Where Accattone used multiple snippets of a Bach composition, and Mamma Roma utilized a handful of spiritual Vivaldi pieces, The Gospel draws music from a variety of different genres and sources.  Classical music is prominent once again, with bits of Bach and Mozart appearing alongside snatches from Prokofiev’s score for Sergei Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky (1938).  A version of the spiritual “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child” appears at several different points, and there is also a snippet of a mournful Robert Johnston blues in one of the later scenes.  The most striking and beautiful piece of music in the film is an African chant called “Missa Luba,” an ecstatic piece of music that appears during a number of the film’s miraculous events, such as Jesus’ birth and his later resurrection.  Luis E. Bacalov also contributed some original music to the film, rounding out what is by far the most eclectic selection of music in any Pasolini film to this point.

Pasolini’s growing skills as a stylist are felt not only on the soundtrack, but in the way that he stages some of the film’s key scenes.  His depiction of the Sermon on the Mount is particularly striking, with a closeup of Jesus’ face making each line feel personal rather than preachy.  Each line is also clearly delivered on a different day, with the weather changing behind Jesus’ head, even as the whole multi-day sermon is edited together as one continuous speech, Christ’s demeanor unchanging whether it is the middle of calm day or the beginning of a stormy night.  The decision to film Christ’s pre-crucifixion trial from a distance is uniquely tasteful; rather than overdramatize Jesus’ persecution with a bunch of expressionistic horror shots of his accuser’s grimaces, as Mel Gibson did in his hysterical Passion of the Christ (2004), Pasolini puts the viewer in the perspective of someone in the crowd, emphasizing our commonality with the film’s non-Christ characters rather than overplaying the sliminess of the men who put Jesus to death.

A large part of what makes Pasolini’s depiction of Jesus so convincing is that he doesn’t use Christ to stand in for any sort of cause.  He simply presents the story of Jesus in the most realistic manner possible.  While some commentators have referred to Pasolini’s version of Jesus as a Marxist, there isn’t much in the film to back that claim up; while Jesus delivers the famous line about a rich man entering Heaven being less likely than a needle passing through a camel’s eye, it isn’t as if that line is given more emphasis than any of Jesus’ more gnomic pronouncements.  The film makes no attempt to convert viewers to a particular cause (including Christianity), and the version of Jesus presented in the film often seems as weird and unapproachable as a guy walking on water and claiming to be the son of God would if you actually encountered him in real life.  Pasolini’s version of the Jesus story is the most convincing in popular culture precisely because it isn’t trying to sell the viewer anything, or use the story to justify any particular social agenda.  It is a simple story told directly, powerfully, and beautifully.

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Understanding Auteurs: Pier Paolo Pasolini (Accattone and Mamma Roma)

Though Pier Paolo Pasolini has a reputation as a great filmmaker, there seems to be no consensus on which of his films are classics, or on what qualities make them great.  Many of Pasolini’s contemporaries have at least one commonly agreed-upon essential work that is (rightly or wrongly) treated as critical shorthand for their style.  Jean-Luc Godard has Breathless (1960), Francois Truffaut has The 400 Blows (1959), Michelangelo Antonioni has L’avventura (1960), John Cassavetes has Shadows (1959), and Federico Fellini has both La Dolce Vita (1960) and 8 ½ (1963).  While a number of Pasolini’s works have earned substantial critical praise, none of them are as famous as the aforementioned films, and none of his works has been singled out as a definitive representation of a consistent aesthetic.  While Pasolini is frequently cited by critics and film buffs as an important figure, it seems that his work is somehow more respected than it is well-known.

Perhaps the reason for Pasolini’s somewhat ambivalent cultural status is that it seems that he evolved quickly, changing his aesthetic according to the needs of each individual film.  There are certain thematic concerns that do carry over from one Pasolini film to another, and from these it is actually fairly easy to discern the director’s lifelong obsessions.  Yet these fixations often seem contradictory, as if Pasolini spent his career as a filmmaker trying to figure out what his point of view was.  Pasolini was a gay man with a mother fetish, a Marxist who dabbled in Christian worship, a middle-class citizen with a deep respect for the poor, a realist with a love for fantasy and spirituality, and a forward-thinking taboo-breaker whose films tended to be set in the past.  Each of these concerns figure into most of the Pasolini films I’ve seen (seven of his twelve features), but because the contradictions in Pasolini’s recurring themes are never resolved, these obsessions don’t add up to any sort of obvious composite portrait of who the director was.  Many of Pasolini’s films are based around classic texts which are then tailored to the director’s unique fixations and social concerns.  But even taking these common aesthetic traits into account, it is hard to see how something like the neorealist, earthy The Gospel According to St. Matthew (1964) could’ve been made by the same filmmaker as the deliberately controlled, brutally hopeless Salo (1975).

With his myriad contradictions and his chameleonic filmic style, Pasolini is an ideal subject for Understanding Auteurs.  His is one of the most confounding bodies of work in the history of cinema, and sorting out his many competing ideas – or at least figuring out Pasolini’s approach to exploring those contradictions – should be fascinating whether it ultimately proves illuminating or mystifying.  This will be a somewhat incomplete study by default, as I’ll only be looking at his twelve feature films (and his most notable short, 1963’s La ricotta) and not his documentaries, many of which are difficult to find.  Pasolini was also a controversial novelist, poet, and essay-writer – with the exception of Orson Welles, it’s hard to think of a filmmaker who was accomplished in so many fields – and ignoring Pasolini’s literary works will obviously have its disadvantages when trying to understand his oeuvre. 

Given the difficulties inherent in Pasolini’s cinema, it is somewhat surprising that the director began his filmmaking career with two relatively straightforward examples of Italian neorealism.  Though Pasolini hated the term neorealism, his debut film, Accattone (1961), is undeniably an example of the genre.  The definition of neorealism offered by Wikipedia could double as a vague yet accurate description of Accattone:  “…(a story) set among the poor and the working class, filmed on location, using nonprofessional actors.”  Vittorio (the magnetic Franco Citti), a low-rent pimp nicknamed Accattone (street slang for “beggar”), drifts through the film, splitting his time between bullshitting with his friends and dealing with various hazards of his profession.  The story, such as it is, mostly revolves around Accattone’s various, constantly thwarted attempts to go strait.  Like most neorealist films, Accattone is less focused on narrative than on realistically capturing the life of poor Italians struggling to get by in post-WWII Italy.

Accattone succeeds marvelously as a convincing depiction of everyday life among Rome’s petty criminals and poor workers.  Simply taken as a slice of life, Pasolini’s debut is nearly as compelling as Vittorio De Sica’s neorealist standard bearer Bicycle Thieves (1948) and far less melodramatic than Roberto Rossellini’s Rome, Open City (1945).  Even the faces of the people appearing in Accattone seem somehow more authentic than they do in the average movie.  Though many of the actors in the supporting cast deliver rather stilted line readings, their awkwardness in front of the camera paradoxically seems to make their performances feel more realistic than any professional work could manage.  For the most part, the events of the film unfold in a natural rhythm that gives a genuine feel for the daily lives of the characters.  By the end of Accattone, the anguish that the street hustlers hide as they laugh through their directionless daily activities is palpable.

The film includes many memorable scenes that realistically convey the characters’ plight with a tragicomic tone that is enormously engaging.  A scene where Accattone conspires to eat most of the small amount of spaghetti that he and three equally starving friends are cooking is particularly amusing, though even as the viewer laughs the full tragedy of the friends’ situation is unavoidable.  There are a handful of moments where it seems that Pasolini is straining to make a point – as in Claude Chabrol’s contemporaneous Les bonnes femmes (1960), it sometimes feels like the film is exaggerating the boorishness of the male characters’ attitudes toward women to the detriment of the film’s credibility – but in the context of lower-class Italian culture circa 1961, the characters’ dated attitudes toward gender issues are probably fairly accurate. 

Pasolini’s direction is fairly basic; aside from a strikingly beautiful recurring use of Bach’s Saint Matthew’s Passion on the soundtrack, the first-time director seems to mostly be working from a “neorealism 101” handbook.  The director also falters in his one major break with neorealist convention, an awkward dream sequence toward the end of the film that clumsily underlines the themes of inescapable poverty that Accattone otherwise handles with such grace and subtlety.  Despite this one truly flawed scene, Accattone is a tremendously impressive debut film.  The film genuinely feels like “poetry written with reality,” and its unsentimental tone manages to stave off the melodramatic tendencies that mar the supposed truthfulness of many neorealist films.

Mamma Roma (1962) is a logical follow-up to Accattone.  While Pasolini’s second film once again takes neorealism as a stylistic jumping off point, it has a more dynamic tonal range, a more ambitious scope, and more assured direction than his debut.  Franco Citti once again appears as a pimp, perhaps as a nod to his debut role, but the focus of the film is on spirited call girl Mamma Roma (Anna Magnani) and her troubled son Ettore (Ettore Garofolo).  Mamma Roma claims to be retired from her profession, but her plans to move with her son to Rome are continuously thwarted by her lack of bourgeois social skills and by her son’s petty thievery. 

Once again Pasolini captures early-‘60s Italy with a cinema verite sense of realism, but the tenor of the film is complicated by his treatment of Mamma Roma and Ettore as simultaneously realistic and iconic figures.  Pasolini reportedly regretted casting Magnani in the title role, as he preferred to work with nonprofessionals and she apparently disregarded many of his suggestions, but her boisterous, full-bodied performance doesn’t make her seem out of place in this mostly amateur cast.  Even though it is evident that Magnani is a more skilled actress than everyone around her, her performance has a remarkable lack of obvious polish.  Garofolo also makes his character feel like a real human being, albeit in the opposite way that Magnani does; like the amateur cast of Accattone, his true nature comes through almost because of his lack of thespian skills.  His seeming embarrassment in front of the camera makes Ettore’s shyness around love interest Bruna (Silvana Corsini), as well as his awkwardness around the bourgeois Romans whom his mother tries to get him to befriend, palpable. 

Layered on top of Mamma Roma’s verisimilitude is a mythic, spiritual element that seems like a big departure from neorealist orthodoxy.  Pasolini believed that the middle-class luxuries that were becoming increasingly prevalent in Italy in the ‘60s were destroying the country’s spirituality and that only the working class were in touch with Italy’s peasant and religious roots.  He hinted at this religious dimension in Accattone, both with his use of Bach’s Christian-themed music and with the title character assuming a Christ pose before diving into the river, but this thematic element is much more pronounced in Mamma Roma.  The wedding party in the beginning of the film is shot in a way that deliberately recalls The Last Supper, and Mamma Roma and Ettore are frequently depicted as modern versions of the Virgin Mary and Christ.  After Ettore is arrested for petty thievery toward the end of the film, he is placed on a wooden slab in a crucifixion position, with a Vivaldi spiritual playing on the soundtrack.  Depicting the Virgin Mary as an aging prostitute and Christ as an incorrigible young thug may seem blasphemous – and this element of the film may explain why Pasolini was attacked by fascists as its premier – but it is clear when watching Mamma Roma that Pasolini is not treating his themes irreverently.  While his conflation of the everyday working class and heavenly religious figures is certainly provocative, it is obvious that Pasolini cares deeply about the relationship between God and man and truly feels that only the poor are in touch with this partnership.

Pasolini proves up to the task of conveying this strange but potent mixture of realistic and iconic tones.  While Accattone is a terrific film in many ways, it appears that Pasolini’s main skill as a director at that point was to stay out of the way of his material, with the awkwardly handled dream sequence being the only obviously “directed” scene in the film.  Mamma Roma continues the first film’s documentary look, but also uses that aesthetic in some very beautiful and subtly ambitious ways.  The highlight of the film might be a lovely reverse tracking shot that follows Mamma Roma down a street as she relates her life story to a revolving succession of strangers who join her under the lamp flickered night sky.  There are a number of other examples of terrific black and white cinematography in the film, with Ettore’s quasi-crucifixion standing out in particular.  With his second film, Pasolini turns the priorities of neorealism on their head, using reality to convey the spiritual psychology of the underclass characters that he refuses to sentimentalize but obviously has a lot of genuine affection for.

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