乞丐1961

Pier Paolo Pasolini has been one of the greatest directors in the world. Through astonishing imaginations and a peculiar perspective, he creates a distinct cinema style that visually and morally shocks many spectators. Having a complicated, disputed background and social belief, Pasolini’s work includes a whole range of contradictorily political and aesthetic features that are against moral decency and conventional social values. In the process of delineating reality, his film exceeds reality itself. Therefore, Pasolini’s film is a true combination of contaminations and poetry.
In his essay The Cinema of Italy, Patrik Rumble comments on Pasolini’s work,“Pasolini’s work has always been haunted by an often-unexpressed moral repugnance- often attributable to distress about the director’s homosexuality as well his identification with the historically marginalized and politically under-represented lower classes.” (The Cinema of Italy, 103) Indeed, in Pasolini’s film, it is difficult to find any elegant young lady or educated gentlemen. There is neither dream-like landscapes nor luxurious palaces. Pasolini concentrates on the lives on the lowest rungs of the social ladder: thieves, prostitutes, pimps, gangs who are always considered as the contaminants of the society. This theme was embedded early in his first film Accattone(1961), and consecutively presented in his later works as well. In Accattone, Pasolini tells the story of a young man-Accattone who has recently abandoned his wife and his son in order to become a pimp. Without any job, Accattone totally depends on the income of Maddalena who is a prostitute. The black and white pictures virtually show the everyday life of these people who have always been treated with contempt. For example in the sequence of Maddalena’s work, Maddalena is wearing a white dress. It is a huge contrast not only between the entire color setting of this scene but also between what she expects for her life and what she does for a living in reality. Later on, the pimps drive her to an isolated farmland. After Maddalena finishes her “job” with one of the pimps, they turn on the bright headlights and start beating her. The headlights cruelly show their degrading and abusive treatments; also violently accentuate the unequal treatment of Maddalena even in the lower class.
However, such portrayals were not pleasant to the majority of the audience. Pasolini’s another movie: Mama Roma (1962), depicting the relations between a prostitute and her son, was considered as an affront to the morality of his time. His last masterpiece, Salò o le 120 giornate di Sodoma (1975), was banned by many countries for years. On the other hand, Pasolini’s films are not merely about contaminants. We can always catch some original pure traits of human beings from his “degrading” characters. For example, before the beating scene in Accattone, the other pimps are lying down on the ground while Maddalena does her job. While waiting for her, they are watching the sky and singing a beautiful Italian song. This natural action alludes to their initial pursuit of happiness and beauty. In Ricotta, when Stracci ferociously devours his cheese, it is obvious to see his pure human desire through his melodramatic body gestures. Therefore, Just like Pasolini mentioned in his interview, “ I love the huge mingling of enormous amounts of people, races. The mixture of cruelty and innocence.“ Without adding any other elaborated techniques and extras, Pasolini’s pornographic and violent images truly represent the mixture of cruelty and innocence. Accordingly, his truculent and rebellious mixture completely subverts the mainstream ideology of the bourgeois. Therefore Pasolini’s literature and films have been accused thirty three times in counts due to the “harmful contents” in his work
As a great realism poet, Pasolini also intersperses the elements of poetry in his films: He establishes a unique Pasolinian style of self-expression- the cinema of poetry. Pasolini first provides a certain type of aesthetic intuition to demonstrate the reality. The famous Soviet Armenian director Sergei Parajanov comments on Pasolini, “He is like a god to me, a god of the aesthetic, master of style, one who created the pathology of an epoch.” Such sincere admiration is powerful enough to highlight Pasolini’s accomplishments in cinema aesthetics. His peculiar interpretations of beauty draw a completely different perspective from our original expectation. In the beginning of Accattone, we see a man holding flowers. The frontal close up magnifies his lower class features, which make this image perturbing: a distorted hatchet-face without teeth. This strong contrast between the flower and this ugly-looking man visually shocks the spectators because the audience cannot easily draw a parallel between these two figures from the standard aesthetic mode. Pasolini makes this combination not only to illustrate the beauty of the lowness but also to show and construct the reality. In A Film Maker's Life (1971), he suggests, “When I make a film I'm always in reality, among the trees and among the people; there's no symbolic or conventional filter between me and reality as there's in literature. The cinema is an explosion of my love for reality. “ In this sense, we can conclude that Pasolini’s film is the celebration of the beauty of reality. At the same time, it also reflects the poetic essentials of the reality itself.
Just like his poems, Pasolini uses dialects, which he considers as the language of poetry in his movies. More importantly, he enriches his films by combining western paintings and dialectal languages. Therefore we see the man lying on the ground with his arms crossing in Accattone; the settings of Pontormo and Rosso Fiorention’s paintings in La Ricotta; the “Gods” and “Goddess” dancing on the grass, talking in dialect, and even being entertained with a striptease at lunchtime; and Stracci who is tied up on the huge wood cross under the sun as the background of the movie. (La Ricotta) Pasolini utilizes the famous religious paintings and reconstructs them by changing individual figure with the lower class people. These imitations are profound. “Cinematic images work as mirrors that allow viewers to look beyond the immediately perceptible pictures, to go beyond the logos, opening themselves to subjective interpretations, while reflecting on the gaze as a subject and object of its reflection.” (Cinepoiesis: The visual poetics of Pier Paolo Pasolini, Michelangelo Antonioni and Franco Piavoli) Through this way, “the cinema of poetry” depicts the connections of the images and the reality. Pasolini employs the poetic expression to show his sympathy toward the petty-criminal underworld of the Roman borgate and to criticize the Roman bourgeois.
Pasolini is known as one of the most significant directors in the 20th century. However in my opinion, instead of being “the most significant director”, Pasolini is more like a wizard of cinema. He uses his “black magic” to create an illusion of reality. What makes the illusion distinct is that the illusion is so real that in some ways it replaces the reality itself. His films reflect a whole range of whom we’ve become as human beings. He illustrates that the ugly sides of us as well as the most beautiful sides of us. He is far beyond his time thus he has the courage to open Pandora’s box and to set all of the dark secrets under his bright spot light. In this way, he embraces both sides of life with all of his love and passion through the means of cinema. Therefore in the Pasolinian world, everything becomes beautiful and precious, just like an endless poem.












Works Cited:
1. Movie: Pier Paolo Pasolini. Accattone (1961). La Ricotta (1962). Mama Roma (1962). Salò o le 120 giornate di Sodoma (1975)
2. Movie: Carlo Hayman-Chaffey, Pier Paolo Pasolini: A Film Maker's Life (1971)
3. Book: Patrik Rumble. Accattone. The cinema of Italy, Ed. Giorgio Bertellini. New York & London: Wallflower Press. 2004
4. Essay: Pasolini on Pasolini-Interviews with Oswald Stack. Indiana University Press. Bloomington and London.
5. Essay: Silvia Carlorosi, "Cinepoiesis: The visual poetics of Pier Paolo Pasolini, Michelangelo Antonioni and Franco Piavoli" (January 1, 2006).
6.Essay: Gino Moliterno, Senses of Cinema-Pier Paolo Pasolini : http://archive.sensesofcinema.com/contents/directors/02/pasolini.html#film