Abstract
The 1960s in Italy marked a controversial period in which a rapid economic growth was accompanied by an equally rapid and inexorable social and cultural change of the nation. These years, destined to go down in history as the years of the “economic boom” or the “economic miracle,” witnessed the blooming of Italian industrial centers with the consequent movement of masses of people from the countryside to the cities and from the South to the more industrialized North. One of the effects of such a sudden geographical reconfiguration of the country was the destruction of particular marginal cultures who would not fit in the new economic and cultural system organized around consumption. Pier Paolo Pasolini’s early films aimed to capture the “scandalous” existence of such realities at the peripheries (borgate) of one the major economic and cultural centers of Italy, Rome. Living in a sort of postcolonial space within their very nation, these cultures represented for Pasolini the revolutionary forces of society that still resisted the homologizing consumerist threat. In this chapter, I will discuss Pasolini’s early films, known as “cinema di borgata,” with a specific focus on the last one of the trilogy, La ricotta (1963), in which the death of a sub-proletarian extra on the set of a film on the Passion is a revolutionary act against both mainstream cinema and neocapitalist societies. By taking a geocritical perspective, I will analyze the geographical, cultural, and cinematic space of Pasolini’s borgate through a multifocal view (Westphal) which takes into consideration Pasolini’s cinematic representation/recreation of the referenced space in a dialectical confrontation with Fascist culture, neorealist cinema, and the new consumerist society.
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Notes
- 1.
Portions of this chapter appeared in Italian in my book Spettacolo della morte e “tecniche del cordoglio” nel cinema degli anni sessanta (Facchini 2017). I would like to thank the editors of this volume for their comments and feedback on my first draft of this chapter and Jacob Klein for his help with revisions. I owe a particular thank-you to Scott Kapuscinski for assisting me with translations from Italian and for his valuable comments and insights on the chapter.
Pasolini’s broader comment reads as follows: “I did not want to reconstruct the life of Christ as it really was; instead, I wanted to do the story of Christ plus 2,000 years of Christian tradition, because it was the 2,000 years of Christian history that have mythicized that biography, which would have otherwise been insignificant as such. My film is the life of Christ plus 2,000 years of storytelling about the life of Christ. That was my intention” (Stack 1969, 83).
- 2.
“City of God” (città di Dio) was the phrase Pasolini used for the title of his collection of short stories on Rome: Stories from the City of God: Sketches and Chronicles of Rome, 1950-1966 (Pasolini 2003a). The book was originally published as Storie della città di Dio: Racconti e cronache romane (1950-1966), edited by Walter Siti (Turin: Einaudi, 1995).
- 3.
Pasolini discussed this topic on many occasions and in various articles, many of which have been collected in Saggi sulla politica e sulla società (Pasolini 1999): “Sfida ai dirigenti della televisione” (290), “Gli italiani non sono più quelli” (307–312), “Il vero fascismo e quindi il vero antifascismo” (313–318), “Ampliamento del ‘bozzetto’ sulla rivoluzione antropologica in Italia” (325–335), “Il genocidio” (511–517), “L’articolo delle lucciole” (404–412), and “Abiura dalla Trilogia della vita” (599–603).
- 4.
All translations in this chapter are my own unless otherwise indicated.
- 5.
“Relazione per il 1929 a S.E. il principe Francesco Boncompagni Ludovisi, Governatore di Roma, del delegato ai servizi assistenziali del Governatore, Raffaello Ricci,” in Capitolium, quoted in Insolera (1993, 106).
- 6.
The original source of the quote is Antonio Gramsci, Lettere dal carcere (lettera CCXVII) (Turin: Einaudi, 1949), 255.
- 7.
In his famous essay of 1965, “The ‘Cinema of Poetry’ ” (Pasolini 1988, 167–186), Pasolini theorizes a new way of making cinema that is opposed to the traditional “cinema of prose” of Hollywood and neorealist films. The latter sought to hide cinema’s oneiric nature to offer instead a falsely “objective” perspective on the events presented on the screen. With his “cinema of poetry,” Pasolini intends to bring the dream-like nature of the medium to the forefront and to present the events through a new subjective perspective born from the contamination (or “clash”) between his point of view and that of the characters through what he called the “free indirect point-of-view shot.”
- 8.
An exemplary case can be found in Roberto Rossellini’s film Rome, Open City (1945), and specifically in the dialogue between Pina (Anna Magnani) and her fiancé Francesco (Francesco Grandjaquet) the night before their wedding. Pina, a lower-class Roman woman, speaks dialect for the majority of the film, mostly to convey a lighthearted tone to the dark reality of Rome during WWII. However, when she is alone with Francesco (a Resistance fighter who speaks in standard Italian throughout the entire film), she switches to Italian to discuss the fate of the country and the liberation struggle with him. As Restivo (2002) suggests, “Neorealism can be looked at as just such an attempt to create an imagined community to replace the (equally media-constructed) imagined community of the fascist period” (24–25).
- 9.
On Pasolini’s representation of Rome’s lumpenproletariat as the “aristocracy of labour” that refuses to be integrated into the productive process, see Rohdie (1995, 120–23).
- 10.
See Boarini et al. (1982, 16–20).
- 11.
I use this term in reference to Pasolini’s own definition of his reflections on cinema, literature, and society (1988).
- 12.
- 13.
As Chiesi (1993) notes, although the director was nominally Paolo Brunatto, it is easy to detect Pasolini’s cinematic style in the framing of some shots and the “pictorial” montage of some scenes (n.p.).
- 14.
Welles was dubbed in Italian by the writer Giorgio Bassani.
- 15.
- 16.
See Pasolini (1966).
- 17.
Hereafter I will refer to the director of the film-within-the-film as “director Welles,” to distinguish him from Pasolini.
- 18.
Translation mine.
- 19.
With the exception of the opening and closing credits, which are also shot in color.
- 20.
See Pasolini (1977), 52; as well as “Diario al registratore” in the same volume (145).
- 21.
- 22.
Interestingly, Pasolini once again cast Giorgio Bassani (the actor who dubbed Welles’s voice in La Ricotta) as the narrator of La Rabbia.
- 23.
Pasolini suggests this aspiration in the script of the film, when he describes the director as “engrossed in his sublime thoughts … Cinema Nuovo, Antonioni” (1965a, 468, emphasis mine).
- 24.
Translation mine.
- 25.
See Subini (2009).
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Facchini, M. (2023). Revolutionary Peripheries: Pier Paolo Pasolini’s “Cinema of Borgata”. In: Everly, K., Giannini, S., von Tippelskirch, K. (eds) Spatiality at the Periphery in European Literatures and Visual Arts. Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30312-8_3
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