The mark which has dominated all my work is the longing for life, this sense of exclusion, which doesn't lessen, but augments this love of life. - Pier Paolo Pasolini
Today would have been the 87th birthday of director Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922-1975). A man of contradictions, he was both a journalist and a poet; once a devout Catholic and later an atheist and Communist. The circumstances of his death are lurid. Brutally murdered in November 1975 by being run over a number of times by his own car, there have been many largely unsubstantiated rumors as to who was behind Pasolini's death. Some said it was an anti-communist conspiracy. Others said he staged his own death, due to the eerie similarities that can be found in his films. A young hustler was arrested, and confessed, to the murder of the openly gay director who - as his closest friend writer Alberto Moravia (
Il Conformista) acknowledged - had a proclivity for violent, young men since his early days as a novelist (
Ragazzi di vita). Pasolini's first film,
Accattone (1961), portrays the lifestyle of these street people - or as he would often refer to them, the sub-proletariat - that lived outside the conflicting political currents that engulfed Italy and instead, held onto a fading code of morality.
Vittorio (Franco Citti), known as "Accattone" to his buddies, is a pimp whose days are spent scrounging for food, lamenting his existence, and making bizarre wagers in order to get enough money to get buy. He could just get a real job, but as he observes about the blue collar life: Accattone: We're all washed-up and everybody avoids us. If we've money we're alright, if not we're nothing. We're finished because we're incapable of making it on our own. Today its better to be a thief than follow this despicable trade.
When his prostitute is sent to jail, he finds himself without income. He meets a naive young woman, Stella (Franca Pasut), who he falls in love with. But before long his desperation for money, and his inability to conform to the mainstream work force, lead him to persuade her to take up the life of a streetwalker, corrupting the only innocence left in his life.
Pasolini's early films were often mistaken for a new kind of neo-realism. There is a grittiness, to be sure. But even Accattone, his first film, shows a sense of style not found in the documentary-like work of his Italian predecessors. The credits roll under the strains of Bach's "Wir setzen uns mit Tränen nieder" from St. Matthew Passion, a piece Martin Scorsese would use to opposite effect in the opening credit sequence for Casino (1995) many years later. Pasolini uses the operatic tune to elevate his tragic lower class heroes. In one fight scene midway through the movie, the theme aggrandizes the wide-angled perspective on two men grappling in the dirt to an epic battle of honor. Scorsese used the same musical motif to diminish the explosive propulsion of Ace Rothstein (Robert De Niro). A man flying through the stratosphere of Vegas becomes just another leaf falling from a tree, beautiful but insignificant.
This is but one instance of Pasolini's influence on the young Italian-American directors of the seventies. Like Scorsese used De Niro as his cinematic doppelganger, Pasolini formed a long and productive relationship with Franco Citti. Citti's ugly sad-eyed mug spoke of the streets of provincial Italy, the same way De Niro's grimace did of New York's backalleys in Scorsese's Mean Streets (1973) a movie that centers on a subculture similar to the one in Accattone. Is it any surprise then that when Francis Coppola was seeking an authentic Italian actor for the part of Michael's Sicilian bodyguard, Calo, in The Godfather (1972), that he chose Citti to play him?
Having already worked as a writer on some of Fellini's films (Nights of Cabiria) in the fifties, Pasolini would also mentor his young assistant director in Accattone whose career would eventually eclipse his, Bernardo Bertolucci (Last Tango in Paris). Pasolini would also reinvent himself a few times in the short span before his death. Ironically, the music from St. Matthew Passion would inspire one such instance of reinvention 3 years later, when he directs one of the most acclaimed takes on the Gospels, Il Vangelo secondo Matteo (The Gospel According to St. Matthew). His constant mutability and knack for courting controversy soon made Pasolini a pivotal figure in Italian cinema.
This is the first in a series of posts on some of Pier Paolo Pasolini's most notable works.
In 1968, students protested in France over what were some archaic rules that called for strict separation between the sexes in the universities. Through a complicated chain of events, this led to the involvement of the revolutionary film directors and actors of the French New Wave after the closing of the Cinémathèque Française, and the ousting of its founder, Henri Langlois. Many have traced the beginnings of the liberated French culture of today to the days of the protests when the anarchic students of France, emulating the revolutionary nature of their distant brothers in America, took a stand against the antiquated mores of the previous generation's society. Eventually after several months of confrontations between the students and the police, it all culminated in a general strike that lasted for weeks in May, involved over 10 million workers despite no authorization being given by any labor unions, and ended changing French society forever.
Bernardo Bertolucci's The Dreamers sets its story against the tumultuous backdrop of those events. It focuses on the near-incestuous relationship between French twins Theo (Louis Garrel) and Isabelle (Eva Green), as seen through the eyes of American student, Matthew (Michael Pitt). When the twins' parents go on an extended holiday, leaving them alone in their apartment, Michael soon gets lured into a perverse triangle with the immature siblings, enabling their transgressive sexual desires through him, if not necessarily through each other.
Bertolucci uses the relationship to parallel France's violent rebellions, implying that American culture was the inspiration behind the country's social upheaval. We first see, Isabelle and Theo's fascination with Matthew, a strong silent type they are unaccustomed too in their native land. This is a reflection of their idolization of American cinema and its directors (Bertolucci directly quotes films as diverse as Samuel Fuller's Shock Corridor and Frank Tashlin's The Girl Can't Help It, among others). Once Matthew is drawn in by the two, the three bond over their different takes on American culture, debating the virtues of Chaplin vs. Keaton, Clapton vs. Hendrix.
Theo's revolutionary spirit is lit by the gritty gangster films and rock-and-roll music slowly making its way overseas from the U.S. Isabelle, representative of the beauty and culture France has been so protective of for so many years, is a tad more resistant to follow her brother down the path of protest he seems intent on travelling. Finally, it is Michael who gives Theo the initiative to act and join the protesters outside the apartment where they've been conducting their taboo affair, by criticizing Theo's constant intellectual regurgitation of Maoist doctrine. He points out that Theo, and in fact, the French, only seem to approach revolution from a cerebral standpoint instead of engaging it viscerally.
Unfortunately, Matthew, who so perceptively diagnosed Isabelle and Theo's dysfunctional infantilism in regard to their strange relationship, is unable to consummate the spark he lit within Theo, refusing to join him once the protests escalate into violence. It is this that points to Bertolucci's notion that Americans, so shining an example in its pursuit of change with its own protests during the Vietnam war, the civil rights movement, women's liberation, etc., ultimately gave up too easily. Watergate, the consumption era of the eighties, the refusal to let go of antiquated dependence on foreign oil, all can arguably be said to stem from our inability to stand up to the establishment the way the French did. Thus, it is the French who continued on to a new age of idealism, while leaving us behind.
This post was first published at Film for the Soul for its continuing series on the best movies of the 2000s, Counting Down the Zeroes, on 7/19/09.
