Pier Paolo Pasolini was born in Bologna on March 5, 1922, and died in a violent, mysterious circumstance on the outskirts of Rome in November 1975. This year marks the centenary of the Italian poet's and filmmaker's birth, and this Sunday at 1pm, the Thai Film Archive will screen Pasolini's first film as director, Accattone, a gloriously austere ode to underclass plight. It will be the first time the 1961 film is screened in Thailand.
The screening of Accattone is part of "Dolce Vita: Italian Cinema And Culture", an exhibition on Italian film history hosted by the Thai Film Archive, in collaboration with the Embassy of Italy in Thailand and the National Museum of Cinema in Turin.
To most Thai film students, the name Pasolini is often associated with his last film from 1975, the disquieting adaptation of de Sade's Salo or 120 Days Of Sodom, and the image of raw violence inflicted on human flesh -- as an unblinking critique of fascism -- somehow became synonymous with the filmmaker who dared to envision it (the reason 120 Days Of Sodom is known here while Pasolini's other films are rarities in Thailand is simply due to the availability of the title in VHS and DVD). But Pasolini, who studied literature and made his name as a poet and essayist, was an artist of such remarkable sensibility, and his films display an astonishing confluence of Marxism and Catholicism and he switched back and forth, with formal ease, from neo-realism to modernism and classicism. During his 15-year filmmaking career, Pasolini made pointed ideological films such as Porcile (Pigsty, 1969), the Maria Callas-starring Medea (1969), and The Gospel According To St. Matthew (1964), and a biography of Jesus Christ hailed by the Vatican (no less) as an ecclesiastical masterpiece.
It all began with Accattone, a 1961 film about a pugnacious pimp in a working-class suburb of Rome. It is also a film that signalled a shift in post-war Italian cinema: The peak of neo-realism -- the socially-conscious films shot on the ruined streets of Italy by the likes of De Sica, Rosellini and Visconti in the late 1940s and the 1950s -- had waned, and while Pasolini came to cinema laden with a debt of influence and gratitude to the existing masters, his aesthetic desire was clearly different. Edgier, perhaps, and more spontaneous, driven as much by blood as by brain, by instinct as much as by intellect. His poetry is beauty served raw. His cinema is that of the human face -- the creased, coarse, subversive faces of lowlifes, idlers, hoodlums, prostitutes and saints, their mouths stretched, the hands callused, their souls awaiting salvation while their bodies stuck in the gutter. Perhaps the Marxist view in Pasolini pushed his brand of "realism" a few notches higher -- the vulgar body, the squalor, the tragic irony, the cruel redemption. In that grime-stained milieu, Pasolini's characters wander in search of impossible splendour.
It's no wonder that when Pasolini showed the sample footage of Accattone to Federico Fellini, the renowned filmmaker of La Strada and La Dolce Vita told the newcomer flat-out that he didn't like it. Pasolini, who deeply admired Fellini, later said in an interview with the newspaper Il Giorno: "What is it, in essence, that Fellini doesn't like? The poverty, the sloppiness, the coarseness, the awkward, almost anonymous pedantry with which I've shot the scene. Fine, I agree …" but then, "if I had to shoot the scene again, yes, I would shoot it with the same rhythm: fast, rushed, sloppy, tossed out, without shading, without atmosphere … In fact, I'd like to shoot the whole film that way."
Franco Citti, sniffing the ghetto like an undomesticated bulldog, plays Accattone. He's a pimp, not a successful one, and he haunts the sordid part of Rome where he looks for trouble, plays cards with his gang of thieves and idlers, and tries to recruit an innocent woman to walk the street for him. Business is bad, probably because the whole of Italy is still going through a tough time, and there's a point in the film when we realise that Accattone and his friends have had nothing to eat for days.
As we follow Accattone's wanderings, we realise that what Pasolini wants to show us is the world inhabited by these lowlifes -- not just the places, the squalid streets or the cramped houses, but also the language, the way these people talk, their everyday joys and miseries, their faces lit up by laughter and contorted by pain. Pasolini neither judges nor glorifies them; likewise, the film's stark realism presents proletarian poverty as a fact of life, not a condition to elicit bourgeois sympathy or patronising reactions. That's why Pasolini's films are often seen as more severe -- they leave a bigger knot in your throat -- than the early neorealist films.
In 1975, Pasolini wrote in an article that if he wanted to remake Accattone in the 70s, he wouldn't be able to, because he "wouldn't find a single youth who was remotely similar to the youths who played themselves in Accattone", and he wouldn't find "a single youth who could say the same lines, in the same tone of voice". In just 15 years, between Pasolini's first film in 1961 to his death in 1975 -- a murder whose real motive is still a matter of dispute -- Italy, or at least the part of Italy where he recorded in this film, had changed so much in his eyes. That's why Accattone feels special. It's the poet's first foray into the world of screen visuals, and what he sees is the tragedy of his own people, from the first frame to the last.
"Dolce Vita: Italian Cinema And Culture" is on view at the Thai Film Archive until Aug 28. Admission is free. Accattone will be screened at 1pm on Sunday. Free admission. Reserve your seat at fapot.or.th, or request a ticket on-site 30 minutes prior. The screening is supported by the Embassy of Italy in Thailand and the National Museum of Cinema in Turin.
