This Saturday marks the 100th birthday of Pier Paolo Pasolini, the poet of modern film – the restored masterpiece “Mamma Roma” is coming back to the cinema.
When Pier Paolo Pasolini was buried in 1975, his friend, the writer Alberto Moravia, screamed his obituary at a TV camera: Italy has lost a poet, of whom the world produces at most three in a century. The sea of mourners resembled a political demonstration, but even his opponents had no intention of remaining silent after his assassination.
Months later, pictures of his battered corpse were appearing in the tabloids, accompanied by alleged revelations about his lifestyle. Looking at these newspaper clippings today paints a chilling picture of a time when conservative public opinion lusted after narratives linking homosexuality to violence and death. But even if the hustler Pino Pelosi was sentenced for the murder, there is a lot to be said for a conspiracy: While researching his unfinished novel “Petrolio”, Pasolini came across entanglements between politics and organized crime.
Today Pasolini, born on March 5, 1922 in Bologna, would have been 100 years old, and his work and life still appear as an open wound, especially in the Italian cultural public. Whenever an Italian film festival shows a new documentary or its restored works there, a remarkable number of young people flock to the screenings. His critique of capitalism in particular seems more relevant than ever.
The observation of a radical and irreversible social change through consumer culture runs through Pasolini’s work as a nagging pain. It could not escape the fact that he himself became an object of this consumer culture. In 1972, the German division of United Artists released his name as marketable enough to release his film adaptation of the Canterbury Tales under the title Pasolini’s daring stories.
His late adaptations of “Decamerone” and “One Thousand and One Nights” were also suitable as flotsam on the erotic wave of the time. Pasolini responded with the most radical of his films, “Salo or the 120 Days of Sodom”. From today’s perspective, this film seems surprisingly ageless – if only because there is nothing comparable in film history. Pasolini’s vision of a sadistic orgy organized by SS men and Italian fascists in Italy in 1944 has lost none of its disturbing power – precisely because the political allegories cannot simply be historicized.
In his best films, Pasolini was a radical esthete who was repelled by any external aestheticization. As much as he conjured up the idea of the innocence of the sub-proletariat in his early films, his pictures differed from the transfiguring neo-realism of Vittorio de Sica.
He came to film as a poet, Fellini had ordered dialogues from him for “The Nights of Cabiria”. He also gave Pasolini a camera at his request, but he didn’t like what came out. So the artist organized the small budget for his debut “Accattone” himself, with the kitschy subtitle in Germany: “Who never ate his bread with tears”. His assistant director at the time, Bernardo Bertolucci, later described with admiration how Pasolini himself invented cinema: “I was there when the close-up was invented. And the first driving shot.”
There are few examples in film history that can testify to what happens when artistic geniuses discover the medium without any cinematic training. One sees something similar in Jean Cocteau and in the young Fassbinder. Pasolini’s aesthetic was one of a sober but uncompromising observation of human expression. He achieved his greatest impact with his film adaptations of ancient tragedies, “Edipo Re” and “Medea” and before that with the radical-purist Jesus film “The First Gospel – Matthew”.
His path to the championship can be discovered using the example of “Mamma Roma”. A restored version, which will be released in German cinemas this week to mark the 100th birthday, shows the film in a new light. Pasolini was always unhappy with the portrayal of Anna Magnani in the role of a prostitute and a single mother trying to break out of the milieu: “In fact, if I had taken Anna Magnani to play a real bourgeois woman, I probably would have had a good performance taken out of her; but the trouble is I couldn’t get her to do it. I (just) made her portray a common woman with petty-bourgeois aspirations.”
In fact, whether intentional or not, Magnani plays one of her strongest roles here. And even if Pasolini perhaps didn’t steer her expression in the desired direction, the way he filmed her is no less terrific: In thrilling reverse driving shots, the camera follows the main actress on her way.
Now, in the restored version, copied directly from the negative, we see all the richness of the night shots. It is this simultaneity of closeness and distance that characterizes Pasolini more than anything else, this avid observer of life who always pushes the painful limits of emotional participation.
Rubriklistenbild: © Missing Films
