In "The American Cinema," Andrew Sarris writes, "The best directors generally make the best films ... 'That was a good movie,' the critic observes. 'Who directed it?' When the same answer is given over and over again, a pattern of performance emerges."
Pier Paolo Pasolini's "Mamma Roma" will play tonight as part of the Film Society's "Auteurs" film series in Spaulding Auditorium.
Pasolini was not only a filmmaker but also a novelist, an essayist and a poet. And he pursued his radically nonconformist personal vision in all of his varied artistic endeavors.
As a poet, Pasolini chose to write in Fruilan, a regional dialect of his mother's native village, a language almost nobody understands. Pasolini recognized and appreciated the deeply expressive potential of the Fruian dialect and the vitality of the peasants who spoke it, but this decision put him squarely outside the literary establishment.
Of course, he was always comfortable on the outside. Pasolini identified strongly with those at the fringes of society. As a young man, he moved to the slums of Rome, to the sub-proletarian world of prostitutes, thieves, and beggars. This eroticized, pseudo-pagan (and therefore "uncontaminated") atmosphere was to form the majority of Pasolini's lifework.
Life imitates his work, because, incidentally, Pasolini is dead. He was killed by a male prostitute named "Pino the Frog" just after the premiere of "Salo, or 120 Days of Sodom" (which DFS showed last term). He had been beaten by a board full of nails ... and then run over by his own car.
This gruesome tidbit is mentioned not to glorify some romantic dead-artist's mythos, but rather to exploit the sick irony. As his friend (and fellow director) Michelangelo Antonioni said, "He was the victim of one of his own characters."
This was not the first (though it was the most successful) time Pasolini had been attacked at one of his premieres. He was also assaulted at the first screening of "Mamma Roma."
"Mamma Roma" portrays the failed attempt of a prostitute to go straight, move out of the slums and provide a better life for her son.
This setting and these characters, which are very characteristic of Pasolini, caused some complaint from a neo-fascist boy, named Falvio Campo, who screamed, "In the name of the nation's youth, I tell you that you are disgusting."
Again, this was not the first (nor certainly, the last) time Pasolini and his films have been called disgusting. Pasolini showed many things on screen which often shocked certain fragile sensibilities. Some of Pasolini's films depict homosexual sex on screen, and it is no surprise that many small-minded people have not seemed to appreciate this.
Though if people complain about the lingering shots of male genitalia in Pasolini's "The Decameron" then perhaps they could be on more comfortable heterosexual footing with Pasolini's film version of "Arabian Nights" in which an arrow with a phallus for an arrowhead is shot into a woman's vagina. There really is a little something for everybody.
Pasolini's films are definitely iconoclastic, but before he is dismissed as a simple shock artist, remember the classic texts from which this material is taken.
Pasolini's films are quite literary. Other screen treatments include "Oedipus Rex," "Medea," "The Canterbury Tales," and "The Gospel According to St. Matthew." "Salo" was taken from the Marquis de Sade's "120 Days of Sodom" and is based structurally upon Dante's "Inferno."
This preview is not a simple catalogue of crudity. Pasolini's films are very true to the spirit of the classical sources ("The Gospel" is actually considered quite reverent), and the more shocking scenes are not without conscious significance.
For example, the feast of feces in "Salo" symbolizes Pasolini's disdain for modern consumerism/capitalism, and the final scenes of torture in that film, framed as viewed through binoculars, are a powerful indictment of the voyeuristic nature of film itself.
Just as Pasolini may capture a shocking moment on camera, he also captures -- even perhaps more often -- very beautiful moments (of course, these are often one and the same), and really nothing in his films should be taken for granted. This is what it means to be an auteur.
To quote Andrew Sarris again, "The art of the cinema is the art of an attitude, the style of a gesture. It is not so much what as how. The what is some aspect of reality rendered mechanically by the camera."
As for the how, Pasolini said in an interview with Oswald Stack, "The cinema of poetry is the cinema which adopts a particular technique just as a poet adopts a particular technique when he writes verse."
"If you open a book of poetry, you can see the style immediately, the rhymes and all that: you see the language [lingua] as an instrument, or you can count the syllables of a verse."
He continues, "The equivalent of what you see in a text of poetry you can also find in a cinema text, through the stylemes, i.e. through the camera movements and the montage. So to make films is to be a poet."
These are among the many reasons why "Mamma Roma" -- a truly haunting work and social commentary -- is worth seeing as a centerpiece of Pasolini's films. The shocking truth and all.
