Heretical Epiphanies
at Film Socirty of Lincoln Center
“Pasolini is me,” Morrissey sang on his last album in a song connecting his artistic autobiography to totems of Italian cinema like Visconti, Magnani and, of course, Rome’s great vulgar urban poet, Pier Paolo Pasolini. Heretical Ephiphanies: The Cinematic Pilgrimages of Pier Paolo Pasolini, a retrospective of some of Pasolini’s best films at the Film Society of Lincoln Center, summarizes how Pasolini went against the classical conventions of Italian cinema (heresy) and innovated ways to find the sublime in the lowest, meanest aspects of social experience (epiphanies in the sense of transcending ordinary Italian Neorealism).
Starting with Accattone, the 1961 debut film Morrissey name-checks and that Pasolini’s assistant director Bernardo Bertolucci described as “like being present at the birth of cinema,” Pasolini defined his unique approach to art and life. Accattone’s story of a small-time pimp (Franco Citti, a find as naturally expressive as Belmondo) opens one’s eyes to city squalor and underclass defeat but then turns into a moving tale of political and personal suffering. Climaxing with the pimp’s rising spiritual consciousness (his birth name, Vittorio, was replaced by the street tag “Accattone”) recalls the extraordinary, sorrowful transformation of Zampano the Brute in Fellini’s La Strada. This epiphany fulfilled Pasolini’s ambivalent regard of social agony and individual passion—a richer, livelier paradox than the simple Marxist critique critics usually acknowledge.
Scoring a dusty street fight between Accattone and his wife’s brother to a Bach passage illustrates the conflicting roughness and classicism of Pasolini’s vision—his special gift for life’s ugly-beauty. Working with gifted cinematographer Tonino Delli Colli, Pasolini developed his hard-nosed point of view into images that look refined yet feel immediate. This vision is extended in Pasolini’s one-of-a-kind religious parable The Hawks and the Sparrows (1964, featuring Italy’s Buster Keatonish comic Toto and Ninetto Davoli), a miraculous combination of bucolic slapstick and folkloric social theory. This on-the-road fable more than updates Rossellini’s The Flowers of St. Francis and De Sica’s Miracle in Milan, but their classical humanism informs Pasolini’s harsh political and sexual themes.
These advances reveal Pasolini to be the crucial link between the sexual/political radicalism of Cocteau and Jean Genet and the brazen political/sexual stances of contemporary filmmakers from Gus Van Sant and Todd Haynes to Gregg Araki and Larry Clark. Superior to all of them, Pasolini made movies that now illustrate the pivotal moment when sexual and political rebellion could merge into social, spiritual foresight, transcending Van Sant and Haynes’ coterie privilege.
None of these modern gay filmmakers has any achievement to match Mamma Roma (1962) in which Anna Magnani embodies Pasolini’s rude and affectionate appreciation of unprivileged life. Mamma Roma seems like the best Brechtian movie ever made as Magnani magically, magnificently, shifts from embodying both the eternal mother and the eternal city, bawdy and serious, dominating and endearing. It is perhaps the greatest tribute to feminine strength and fascination by any gay male filmmaker since Visconti’s Bellissima.
Yet, Pasolini is primarily known as cinema’s homosexual provocateur and his movies are, undeniably, outrageous propositions—deliberately improper but with a beautiful grasp of what is poignant and vulnerable in the human condition. His masculine figures show an unmistakable yen for “trade” and yet his sensitive, rough-hewn performers Citti and Davoli make for fascinating camera subjects and memorable protagonists. Pasolini’s art went beyond today’s overrated, apolitical sexual outlawry. Certainly his craving was the basis for an unabashed, inquiry into the underclasses, but it is also what imparts an extraordinary, non-exploitive sympathy. That’s the link between Accattone and Morrissey’s plangent identification with social outsiders (a rock ’n’ roll perspective that was also apparent in Scorsese’s shy approach toward Pasolini’s homoeroticism in Who’s That Knocking at My Door). Even hip-hop fans should get to Heretical Epiphanies to see how Pasolini turned bad boy moviemaking into art.
at Film Socirty of Lincoln Center
“Pasolini is me,” Morrissey sang on his last album in a song connecting his artistic autobiography to totems of Italian cinema like Visconti, Magnani and, of course, Rome’s great vulgar urban poet, Pier Paolo Pasolini. Heretical Ephiphanies: The Cinematic Pilgrimages of Pier Paolo Pasolini, a retrospective of some of Pasolini’s best films at the Film Society of Lincoln Center, summarizes how Pasolini went against the classical conventions of Italian cinema (heresy) and innovated ways to find the sublime in the lowest, meanest aspects of social experience (epiphanies in the sense of transcending ordinary Italian Neorealism).
Starting with Accattone, the 1961 debut film Morrissey name-checks and that Pasolini’s assistant director Bernardo Bertolucci described as “like being present at the birth of cinema,” Pasolini defined his unique approach to art and life. Accattone’s story of a small-time pimp (Franco Citti, a find as naturally expressive as Belmondo) opens one’s eyes to city squalor and underclass defeat but then turns into a moving tale of political and personal suffering. Climaxing with the pimp’s rising spiritual consciousness (his birth name, Vittorio, was replaced by the street tag “Accattone”) recalls the extraordinary, sorrowful transformation of Zampano the Brute in Fellini’s La Strada. This epiphany fulfilled Pasolini’s ambivalent regard of social agony and individual passion—a richer, livelier paradox than the simple Marxist critique critics usually acknowledge.
Scoring a dusty street fight between Accattone and his wife’s brother to a Bach passage illustrates the conflicting roughness and classicism of Pasolini’s vision—his special gift for life’s ugly-beauty. Working with gifted cinematographer Tonino Delli Colli, Pasolini developed his hard-nosed point of view into images that look refined yet feel immediate. This vision is extended in Pasolini’s one-of-a-kind religious parable The Hawks and the Sparrows (1964, featuring Italy’s Buster Keatonish comic Toto and Ninetto Davoli), a miraculous combination of bucolic slapstick and folkloric social theory. This on-the-road fable more than updates Rossellini’s The Flowers of St. Francis and De Sica’s Miracle in Milan, but their classical humanism informs Pasolini’s harsh political and sexual themes.
These advances reveal Pasolini to be the crucial link between the sexual/political radicalism of Cocteau and Jean Genet and the brazen political/sexual stances of contemporary filmmakers from Gus Van Sant and Todd Haynes to Gregg Araki and Larry Clark. Superior to all of them, Pasolini made movies that now illustrate the pivotal moment when sexual and political rebellion could merge into social, spiritual foresight, transcending Van Sant and Haynes’ coterie privilege.
None of these modern gay filmmakers has any achievement to match Mamma Roma (1962) in which Anna Magnani embodies Pasolini’s rude and affectionate appreciation of unprivileged life. Mamma Roma seems like the best Brechtian movie ever made as Magnani magically, magnificently, shifts from embodying both the eternal mother and the eternal city, bawdy and serious, dominating and endearing. It is perhaps the greatest tribute to feminine strength and fascination by any gay male filmmaker since Visconti’s Bellissima.
Yet, Pasolini is primarily known as cinema’s homosexual provocateur and his movies are, undeniably, outrageous propositions—deliberately improper but with a beautiful grasp of what is poignant and vulnerable in the human condition. His masculine figures show an unmistakable yen for “trade” and yet his sensitive, rough-hewn performers Citti and Davoli make for fascinating camera subjects and memorable protagonists. Pasolini’s art went beyond today’s overrated, apolitical sexual outlawry. Certainly his craving was the basis for an unabashed, inquiry into the underclasses, but it is also what imparts an extraordinary, non-exploitive sympathy. That’s the link between Accattone and Morrissey’s plangent identification with social outsiders (a rock ’n’ roll perspective that was also apparent in Scorsese’s shy approach toward Pasolini’s homoeroticism in Who’s That Knocking at My Door). Even hip-hop fans should get to Heretical Epiphanies to see how Pasolini turned bad boy moviemaking into art.
