John David Rhodes,
Stupendous, Miserable City: Pasolini’s Rome.
Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2007.
ISBN-13: 978-0-8166-4930-3
US$20.00 (pb)
240pp
(Review copy supplied by University of Minnesota Press)

Pasolini was born in Bologna and spent his early years in a number of northern Italian cities as the family followed the father around in his military postings. He eventually returned to study at the University of Bologna but with the outbreak of the war he and his mother took refuge in his mother’s native town of Casarsa in the region of Friuli. It was there that he published his first collection of poems, written in the dialect of his mother’s region. In Italian terms, then, Pasolini was very much what Italians themselves would have considered ‘a northener’. As fate would have it, however, the city that would come to be at the centre of his life, his work and his tragic death, would be Rome. Pasolini was immediately fascinated by especially the poorer and lower-class quarters of Rome when he and his mother were forced to move there in 1950 and for the next two decades this ‘stupendous and miserable city’, as he characterized it in one of his poems from the period, would remain the focus of his attention and the gravitational centre of his creative activity. After being the object of prose studies, short stories, poems, journalistic articles and two acclaimed novels, both of which vividly portrayed the intense precariousness of life in the borgate or shanty-towns that ringed the city, the Roman periphery again came to take centre-stage in Pasolini’s early films. Indeed, in many ways Rome wasn’t just the setting for these early films but was their actual subject, and it’s this ‘profound connection’, as he quite rightly terms it, between Pasolini’s early filmmaking and Rome that John David Rhodes sets out to explore in this relatively slim but illuminating volume.

A great deal, of course, has already been written about Pasolini’s obsessive love affair with Rome – at least with a certain Rome – but Rhodes’ novel approach, based on a close knowledge of the urban and architectural history of the city, manages to open up a new perspective which serves to shed quite a bit of further light on both the city and on Pasolini’s early films.

Pasolini’s intense fascination with lower-class sub-proletarian Rome, and his strong desire to somehow capture the world of the borgate on paper, is everywhere apparent in his early writings of this period. Rhodes’ study thus bases itself quite reasonably on the idea that Pasolini’s early films should be seen as not only aesthetic responses to, but also as attempts at materially documenting, the Roman periphery as it existed when he chose to film there in the early 1960s. At first sight this might seem to run the risk of locating the films once again within the ambit of neorealism, even if in its more objective documentarist wing, and one knows how vehemently Pasolini himself always sought to throw off the neorealist tag. However, by supplying the wider context of a history of the borgate and some strategic but perceptive textual analyses of the films themselves, Rhodes manages to demonstrate quite persuasively how these films can be seen to be actively polemicising with ‘classical’ neorealism and, via a technique of contamination and misappropriation, actually utilising some of the trademark elements of neorealist filmmaking to operate a fierce critique of what Pasolini always loudly deplored as the movement’s ‘bourgeois’ and lyrical sentimentality. What emerges as an important factor in the terms of this critique is a valorisation of the connection between cinematic neorealism and what came to be known as ‘architectural neorealism’, both flourishing at around the same time and fuelled by similar ideals and concerns, and with architectural neorealism nowhere better exemplified than in the well-intentioned urban planning projects designed to ‘redeem’ the borgate.

As Rhodes points out in his first chapter, ‘A Short History of the Roman Periphery’, the borgate pullulating on the outskirts of the city in the 1960s – “Rome, ringed by its hell of suburbs”, as Pasolini put it in one of his early letters from the capital – had a history that went back to the social disruptions caused by the large urban projects which had sought to transform Rome from a provincial city to the capital of a united Italy in 1870. At first just makeshift encampments, the borgate became both more extensive and more official as a result of the process of sventramento or ‘disembowelment’ of the city instigated by Mussolini in the early years of the fascist period, in his efforts to open out the city further and construct greater spaces for military parades and large controllable assemby areas. As part of this fascist remodelling of the city’s historic centre, entire working-class neighbourhoods were uprooted and relocated to what were called borgate rapidissime (hastily-built suburbs) outside the city walls. This casting into the wilderness, so to speak, of what had been functioning communities, placing them far away from their previous workplaces and amenities, naturally provoked a high level of unemployment, social dysfunction and alienation which eventually became endemic. The situation was then further exarcebated in the immediate postwar period by the mass migration to the city of rural workers from the countryside searching for employment and a better life.

It’s true that much of this urban history had already been made available in Mark Shiel’s Italian Neorealism: Rebuilding the Cinematic City (Wallflower, 2006) but Rhodes’ recapitutation of its major lines is useful in prompting us to re-read some of Pasolini’s early prose studies and journalistic pieces about the city with a new eye, and to begin to appreciate how familiar Pasolini himself was with not only the hell of life in the borgate but also with the history and the urban planning practices that had brought them about. The decisively urban dimension of neorealist cinema had also already been highlighted in Shiel’s earlier work but once one begins to adopt an urban planning perspective, as Rhodes does, it becomes obvious just how much neorealist cinema – or, at least, so many of the neorealist films set in Rome in the postwar period – was “heavily invested”, as Rhodes puts it, “in the history of the borgate, the crises of housing shortages, the growth of the periphery, and the concomitant redefinition of Rome’s geography in the postwar period” (p. 13). This would include not only films like De Sica’s Umberto D (1952) and Il tetto (The Roof, 1956) or Zampa’s L’onorevole Angelina (Angelina M.P., 1947), where these themes are explicit, but even a film like the lighter-hearted Zavattini-inspired omnibus film, Amore in città(Love in the City, 1953), the final episode of which ends, rather significantly, as Rhodes points out, in the middle of nowhere, at the very edge of the ever-spreading city. And even if De Sica’s classic neorealist masterpiece, Ladri di biciclette (Bicycle Thieves, 1948), doesn’t appear on the surface to be addressing itself specifically to the problems of housing and urban planning, it’s telling that the area where Antonio and his family are forced to live is the borgata of Val Malaina, one of the last of the borgate rapidissime built under Fascism to house people who had previously lived in the area between Piazza Navona and the Pantheon. How different, Rhodes legitimately wonders, might the circumstances and the fortunes of the Ricci family have been if it had still been living where its parents had traditionally lived, in the very historic centre of the city! As Pierre Sorlin had perceptively pointed out in his European Cinemas European Societies, 1939-1990 (Routledge, 1991) distance is a fundamental feature of the film, and not a neutral space but rather an alienating and dilated distance created precisely by the urban planning practices of the sventramenti.

In a number of journalistic articles written in the later 1950s Pasolini himself acknowledges that neorealist cinema has made a real effort to bring to light the harsher aspects of this contradictory city, including the problem of the borgate, but he is quick to judge all these presentations as simplistic and superficial. No-one, he says, has yet been able to really portray the magma and chaos that is Rome, and in particular no-one has had had the courage to look directly and unflinchingly at the ‘concentration camps’ of the borgate. This was obviously, then, the task he was himself taking on in Accattone (1961) for, as Rhodes helpfully points out, the principal setting of Pasolini’s first film is none other than the borgata Gordiani, another of the borgate created by the Fascist sventramenti, and one that Pasolini had specifically discussed in some detail in an article on the borgate written for the journal Vie nuove in 1958 and entitled, in fact, ‘The Concentration Camps’.

A much richer interpretation of Pasolini’s first film thus emerges as Rhodes is now able to read Accattone from within the context of both a history of the borgate themselves and of Pasolini’s disdain for neorealism’s all-too-simplistic portrayal of them. The much-discussed sequence in which Accattone is juxtaposed with the Bernini angel, a sequence always cited as an exemplification of Pasolini’s contamination of the sacred and the profane in the film, now takes on an added layer of meaning as we realise that what Accattone and his cronies are undoubtedly doing here, over and above their skylarking, is returning from the periphery, to which they had been exiled, in order to momentarily reappropriate a central space of the city which had been historically theirs but from which they had been ejected as a sacrifice to progress. Indeed, in an early prose piece of 1953 called Notes for a Popular Poem, Pasolini had specifically discussed the sventramento of Borgo Pio, the area behind the Castel Sant’Angelo (and thus just offscreen of the shot in question) and the way in which it had contributed to the destruction of normal social life and to the swelling of the borgate. The seldom-noticed graffiti on the hovel that Accattone passes as he tries to avoid Ballilla’s entreaties to come stealing with him (the action which, after all, will eventually lead to Accattone’s death) now also begins to take on a new significance for, if we look at it closely, it reads quite clearly (why had we never noticed?): “Vogliamo una casa civile” (“We want a decent house”). One might remember that in an article for the Communist daily, L’Unità, published only a few months before Accattone was released, Pasolini himself had written: “It seems to me that the very least that people should be given – even just adopting the paternalistic Christian Democrat point of view for a moment – in order for anyone to expect them to make even the least show of virtue in return, is a decent house.”

Yet, for all this talk of common decency, it’s clear that Pasolini’s denunciation of the scandalous existence of the borgate in Accattone refuses to follow the footsteps of neorealism’s appeal to universal humanitarian values, and Rhodes’ analysis of the film is particularly enlightening in showing how Pasolini manages to critique this aspect of neorealism while at the same time also avoiding the naturalism which he so detested. As Rhodes demonstrates, the film’s paratactical compositional and editing strategies all function to consistently undermine any coherent sense of space or character subjectivity with which the viewer might be able to identify. This alienating/alienated sense of both place and self, Rhodes argues, is a further manifestation of that poetics of the periphery that Pasolini had been plying in all his work of the period, and it yields a profoundly more disturbing portrayal of existence in the borgate than any of the more picturesque representations of poverty in the periphery in any previous neorealist film. Indeed, as Rhodes points out, in places the film appears to carry out its critique of neorealism’s naively optimistic portrayals precisely by misappropriating some of the trademark neorealist elements. A particular and significant case in point, Rhodes suggests, is the uncharacteristically long one-shot sequence in which Accattone is trying to talk to his estranged wife, Ascensa, as she comes away from her workplace, hurrying, presumably, to the shack which she occupies with the rest of her family and which we had seen earlier in the film.

‘Presumably’ because, for all its naturalistic appearance and its length, the shot doesn’t actually supply any of the normal spatial or geographic information that one might expect. The camera continues to dolly back along the cobbled road as the figures walk resolutely towards it, arguing all the while. The length of the take – a minute and forty seconds – and the refusal to cut away to a more traditional shot/counter-shot format inevitably evoke the reverence for the long take in neorealist cinema. However, a brief comparison with the locus classicus of the neorealist long take, the famous maid’s morning scene in Umberto D, allows Rhodes to highlight the way in which Pasolini’s camera is excessive on all counts: both more reverential and awe-struck before its pro-filmic reality (it continues to move back to allow it to come forward) and at the same time more intrusive and desecratory, stubbornly refusing to stop looking, unwilling, like a determined terrier, to let go of this ‘shred of reality’. The shot thus operates a sort of deconstruction of neorealism from within its own practices. Furthermore, Rhodes argues, the distended distance and indeterminate geography of the space that Accattone and Ascenza traverse during the shot also synechdochically present the distortion of urban space and the tyranny of distance which characterise the borgate. As a result, Pasolini’s jagged, rough-and-ready realism – the shadow of the boom mike is clearly visible for part of the time – is able to present a much better experience of the hell of life in the periphery than the polished and comforting naturalistic portrayals in earlier neorealist films.

Rhodes’ interest in the issue of urban planning naturally leads him to also focus attention on the ubiquity in the film of the new white apartment blocks, continually hovering at the periphery of the periphery, ominous reminders of the ineluctable encroachment of the expanding city into the borgate themselves. Constant reminders of the centre from which the borgatari have been excluded, these new apartment buildings might seem to represent the possibility of social inclusion or, at the very least, an improvement in basic living conditions.

It’s interesting to note, in fact, that the borgata Gordiani itself was in the process of being demolished in order to be replaced with such buildings in the very period Pasolini was filming there. However, in his article on ‘The Concentration Camps’, Pasolini himself had already expressed a deep scepticism about whether such changes could bring about any real improvements for a subproletariat for so long ostracised. It was this scepticism that appears to have been given voice in his next film, Mamma Roma (1962).

As Rhodes shows, Mamma Roma continues and intensifies Pasolini’s critique of neorealism but this time the failure of cinematic neorealism to bring about its much-desired social revolution comes to be specifically linked with the well-intentioned urban planning projects of the state-run INA-Casa scheme, many of which were executed in the style of what came to be called ‘neorealist architecture’. In Pasolini’s second novel, A Violent Life (1959), the male protagonist’s ill-fated attempt to escape from the borgata involves his relocation to a new apartment building in the Tiburtino Quarter, a building project often regarded as the manifesto of architectural neorealism. Tommaso’s bid for social improvement ultimately fails and he dies a fairly miserable death. Anna Magnani’s attempt to escape from life in the borgate in Mamma Roma, undertaken for the sake of her teenage son, Ettore, who also dies a miserable death in a criminal asylum, similarly involves an attempt to relocate to one of the newer apartment blocks, in particular to the Muratori building of the Tuscolano II quarter.

Although the building referenced in the film is not specifically regarded as neorealist, Rhodes argues, it’s close enough in spirit for Pasolini to have chosen it to exemplify the inadequacies of neorealist architecture, the location and structure of the building better suiting, Rhodes suggests, “Pasolini’s notion of the obsolescence of the neorealist project, in film as well as in architecture and other cultural forms” (p. 108). Most important, perhaps, is the fact that the entrance to the building, which we are shown a number of times in the film (although it’s not always clear from exactly whose perspective), is cruciform, a fact which comes to gain in significance when Ettore is shown dying in a position that alludes quite patently to Mantegna’s portrait of the Dead Christ.

Pasolini’s critique of neorealism in Mamma Roma would thus appear to be even more caustic and thorough-going than in Accattone. The title of the film and Anna Magnani’s participation can’t help but bring to mind the foundational film of neorealism, Rossellini’s Roma città aperta (Rome, Open City, 1945). Tellingly, however, the good-hearted popolana and pregnant mother of a decade and a half earlier, sacrificed on the altar of the Resistance, has here become a social-climbing ex-prostitute misled and brought undone by her aspirations to a petty bourgeois life. And, of course, to judge from the crowded, claustrophobic and inhuman cityscape repeatedly shown in Pasolini’s film, the hopeful promise inherent in the young boys marching off at the end of città aperta, presumably to build a better Rome, has clearly also not materialised. In another pointed inversion of classic neorealism, it’s Lamberto Maggiorani, in one of his very few film appearances outside Bicycle Thieves, who is cast as the hospital patient to yell ‘Thief, Thief’ when Ettore tries to steal the radio from his bedside, thus causing the boy’s arrest and, ultimately, his death.

But, suggests Rhodes, over and above such obvious allusions, Pasolini’s continued critique of neorealism in Mamma Roma takes place, as in Accattone, at a formal and technical level. Indeed, Rhodes is able to point to an otherwise unexplainable extremely long one-shot sequence in Mamma Roma which is very similar to the one of Accattone and Ascenza walking and arguing in the previous film. Here Magnani strolls forward alone in a darkness punctuated only by odd points of light, not enough to give us any bearings at all, and towards a camera that continues to dolly backwards in order to keep her stubbornly in frame. The inordinate length of the shot, Rhodes suggests, can again be read as Pasolini’s attempt to deconstruct classic neorealism by miming its naturalistic strategies into the ground. As she walks and talks (‘alla Magnani’) she’s casually joined, and then just as casually abandoned, by a number of otherwise unknown characters. Significantly, the story she blithely recounts (to them? to us? to herself?) concerns a rich old man who made his money through building speculation, beginning in the old days with the construction of Mussolini’s borgate and now continuing to build entire neighbourhoods of nothing but toilets. The story inevitably loses something in the translation but, as Rhodes points out, one could hardly discover stronger confirmation that it’s the issue of public housing and the failed attempts to address it that lie at the very centre of the film’s concerns. And yet, says Rhodes, in the final analysis, and in spite of its continuing critique of both neorealist cinema and neorealist architecture,Mamma Roma, unlike Accattone, ultimately acknowledges its own inability to adequately represent the unspeakable reality that it has set out to portray.

Directly following Mamma Roma’s continuous but disorienting nighttime stroll we are given a blindingly-lit wide-angle daytime shot of a cityscape which we subsequently surmise is Mamma Roma and Ettore’s new neighbourhood of Cecafumo. This stunning, silent shot – ‘mute as a fish’, as an Italian might say – resurfaces obsessively and enigmatically throughout the film, eight times in all, and often with no real indication of who ‘owns’ it or what it may mean. It also appears as the final image of the film where it seems to be what the distraught Mamma Roma and her comforters are looking at in horror from the open window from which she is threatening to jump. And yet, as Rhodes points out, logically it cannot be their point of view here because the apartment in which Mamma Roma lives is situated inside this cityscape, which logically couldn’t be visible from their position. Adopting a Kantian notion of the sublime as a cleavage between Reason and Imagination, as an overwhelming experience of the world which is available to our reason but which we experience as beyond our imaginative capacity to represent, Rhodes argues that this enigmatic and repeated shot is a manifestation in the film of an aesthetics of the sublime, which Pasolini had been developing throughout his Roman period. The shot, Rhodes suggests, bespeaks the film’s inability to be anything more (but also nothing less) than the visual translation of those suggestive anaphoric lines from Pasolini’s earlier poem, significantly titled The Tears of the Excavator: ‘stupendous, miserable city…’, ‘stupendous, miserable city…’.

And yet, for all its undoubtedly-intense power of suggestion, any manifestation of the Kantian sublime must also mark the point of a crisis in representation. Consequently, if Pasolini’s recourse to a rhetoric of the sublime in Mamma Roma is also an implicit acknowledgement of the fact that Rome’s urban and social reality may be, as Rhodes puts it, “a reality too immense, too various, too complex to be represented accurately, or perhaps, at all” (p. 135), then the question must naturally arise: where could Pasolini possibly go to from here? Rhodes’ very credible suggestion is that Pasolini’s solution to the representational impasse he perceives himself to have reached with Mamma Roma is a gradual turn to allegory.

While Pasolini’s later and more allegorical films are clearly outside the brief that Rhodes has set himself in this volume, he does indicate that the trajectory of Pasolini’s transition to allegory would seem to have to first make its way first through the meta-cinematic self-critique of La ricotta (1963), where the Roman periphery still appears massively as the setting but increasingly more as setting and ever less as principal subject. This change of emphasis becomes palpable, Rhodes suggests, in a shot like the close-up of the crown of thorns which follows the call for ‘the crown’ made by the director and then ludicrously repeated ad nauseam by the film crew. As is amply borne out by the still, which Rhodes reproduces in the book, the metaphorical crown in the shot is foregrounded and in sharp focus, while the landscape of the Roman periphery in the background is out of focus. So. while La ricotta is obviously still set in the Roman periphery, it’s clear that Pasolini himself is beginning to move away from it.

In retrospect there would seem to have been a natural segue from the metaphorical crown of thorns and the crucifixion that closes La ricotta to their re-appearance in Il vangelo secondo Matteo (The Gospel According to Matthew, 1964) although, with The Gospel, Pasolini appears to be temporarily postponing his turn to allegory in order to work squarely by analogy. Having spent some time scouting real biblical locations in Palestine but judging them unsuitable for his purposes, Pasolini opted to film The Gospel in the Basilicata region of Southern Italy, with the primitive habitations of the Sassi of Matera standing in for the historical Jerusalem. Curiously enough, issues of urban development surface even here, for the Sassi of Matera were not only in every way analogous to the Roman borgate but the public housing project of La Martella, which had been designed to relocate the inhabitants en masse from their millenarian cave-like dwellings to decent houses of the sort which Pasolini himself had once called for, had been widely hailed as one of the greatest triumphs of urban planning and neorealist architecture. In typical style (and perhaps by now uninterested), Pasolini appears to have simply disregarded these positive developments, choosing instead to reinstate their archaic value and re-sacralise the Sassi by turning them into Jerusalem.

But it’s with Uccellacci e uccellini (Hawks and Sparrows, 1966), Rhodes suggests, that Pasolini finally takes the allegorical autostrada out of Rome. As Totò and Ninetto begin their journey to wherever and whenever, “the city recedes, literally and figuratively from view in Pasolini’s cinema – almost like something disappearing in a rearview mirror.” (p. 148) While the landscape of the borgate does reappear briefly in the two later short films, La terra vista dalla luna (The Earth Seen From the Moon, 1967) and Che cosa sono le nuvole? (What Are Clouds, 1968), it is clear by this stage that, as Rhodes writes, “Rome as an embodiment of a set of specific urban histories and urban practices is no longer of the same interest to Pasolini that it once was”. (p. 147)

In an interview for the Rome daily, Il Messaggero, in June, 1973, when asked how he felt about the city after 23 years, Pasolini promptly quoted his own lines from the The Tears of the Excavator, ‘Stupendous, miserable city…, stupendous, miserable city’, before going on to say how completely he now rejected the city since, in his view, it had degenerated beyond hope, together with the rest of Italian society. And yet in spite of Pasolini’s eventual repudiation of the city, as Rhodes’ study makes abundantly clear, it had been his fateful encounter with Rome – with that miserable Rome that bodied forth what in one poem he had called the ‘squalid halo of things’ – that had catalysed his development both as writer and filmmaker. And, as his death in Rome two years later attested, it was indeed, as Rhodes puts it, “an encounter from which Pasolini would never recover” (p. 154).

Compact and clearly written, and studiously avoiding fashionable theoretical jargon, Rhodes’ book amply succeeds in its stated aim of exloring the deep connection between Rome and Pasolini’s early filmmaking and is therefore a valuable addition to the vast array of literature that already exists on this great director. Indeed Rhodes’ historically-based urbanistic approach neatly complements the documentation of the ‘poetic tranfiguration of Rome’ which Pasolini’s early films operate via their painterly references in Colusso, Da Giau and Villa’s Le città del cinema: Pier Paolo Pasolini(Biblioteca dell’ Immagine, 1995). A minor quibble for this reader, given the obvious comparison, was the disappointing quality of the stills which illustrate Rhodes’ book and which often makes the figures appear flattened and almost comical. In the end, however, this is probably a small price to pay for the intellectual stimulation and insight provided by the text.

Gino Moliterno,
Australian National University, Australia.

Created on: Wednesday, 17 September 2008