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Article Excerpt
Signore, siamo soli, non ci chiami piu! Non ci guardi pu, anno per anno, giorno per giorno! Di qua il nostro scuro, di la il Tuo splendore, per il nostro male non hai ne collera ne compassione. Niente da trenta secoli, niente e cambiato: Si e unito il popolo, e unito combatte, Ma il nostro male e male di ognuno di noi, E spartire male o bene lo sai solo Tu!--Pier Paolo Pasolini, "La meglio gioventu" (2003: 157)
2 November 2005 marked thirty years since the murder of Pier Paolo Pasolini, a tragic anniversary remembered by a series of conferences, film series, television programs, and exhibits (1). Pasolini's name, of course, evokes an era of social revolt, as much of his writing and filmmaking (documentary and otherwise) directly critiqued the serious face of power. The period to which Pasolini's most well known work can be dated was fraught with political and social unrest and economic uncertainty and is remembered by student and worker strikes, the rise of terrorism and spread of the mafia, government corruption and the development of a feminist movement. This article is interested in how Nanni Moretti in Caro diario (1994), Bernardo Bertolucci in The Dreamers (2003) and Marco Tullio Giordana in I cento passi (2000) and La meglio gioventu (2003) utilize the cultural status of Pasolini to their own ends. Implicit and explicit references to Pasolini in these films recall an engaged (socially, politically, etc.) Italy. However, Pasolini's status as martyr is continually problematicized and undermined. Oftentimes, his memory is associated with liminal spaces; in Caro diario, the periphery of Rome, elsewhere, the interior (The Dreamers,) madness and suicide (La meglio gioventh) or Oedipal conflicts (I cento passi). Rarely, if ever, is Pasolini directly linked to the urban sphere and all of its accompanying political, social and economic struggles (2).
One of the most poignant moments of Moretti's Caro diario takes place towards the end of the film's first vignette, "In vespa," when protagonist Michele leaves the abandoned urban center of Rome (it is the middle of August) after a chaotic array of encounters such as touring various neighborhoods on his vespa, watching a group dance the merengue, fantasizing about interrogating a critic who positively reviewed Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, and questioning an alarmed Jennifer Beales about her footwear, to journey to the site where Pasolini was violently murdered early in the morning just over 30 years ago. The vespa ride to the neglected memorial in Ostia lasts a protracted 3 and 1/2 minutes, and its cinematography undoubtedly accentuates the drawn out nature of the shot: the single long take is comprised of a following shot (typical of Moretti's cinema) without dialogue, and the extra-diegetic music is haunting, and distinct from the upbeat Latin soundtrack predominant in this episode. Like several of Pasolini's own characters such as Accatone from the eponymous film of 1961 or Toto from Uccellacci e uccellini (1964), or Lidia from Antonioni's L'eclisse (1961), Michele is demonstrated to be most at ease on the fringes of the urban center.
As Michele journeys from city to periphery, the film becomes more akin to Pasolini's opus in both technique and mise-en-scene: Here, the barren and impoverished landscape of the Ostian seaside (replete with weeds, garbage, stray dogs, hall finished construction and dilapidated buildings) could easily be transferred to one of Pasolini's earlier films such as Mamma Roma (1962) or Uccellacci e uccellini, to a series of his novels set in the squalor of the Roman borgate, or to the collection of poems Le ceneri di Gramsci (1957), replete with ragazzi di vita.
Clearly, director Moretti draws his inspiration for his cinematography in this sequence, and for the vignette as a whole, from a variety of Pasolini's films and treatises on cinema. In particular, Moretti approximates a "cinema of poetry"--to borrow Pasolini's terminology--in that the juxtaposition of shots and points of view creates a psychologically charged space that surpasses the celluloid image. Much like the language of poetry where sense is evoked not from the words themselves, but from their interplay within the text, meaning in this segment of Moretti's film is created through its visual style (3). The spectator not only sees what Michele sees, but how he sees and reacts to it. The following camera is combined with deep-focus in order to track Michele through the cityscape and beyond, allowing slow, evocative disclosures of how he reads his environments. Pasolini's "soggettiva libera indiretta" disavows a personal view of the world--whether that of the actors or the director--replacing it with a type of cinema whose primary focus is style.
Moretti retraces the path that Pasolini might have taken himself on the night of his death. This is significant as the previous sequence of Caro diario recalls another type of atrocious demise: that of the splatter film, epitomized here by John McNaughton's Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer of 1986. As one form of violent murder turns to the next, the viewer is left to ponder the weight of such a thematically loaded transition. The thanatos leitmotiv is furthered in the...
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