TY - JOUR
AU - Schoonover, Karl
AB - According to the common orthodoxies of film history, neorealist films ground themselves in the ravaged soil of postwar Italy both literally and figuratively. Rubble, debris, and wreckage dominate Roberto Rossellini's and Vittorio De Sica's canonical films for example, and for many audiences these fraught cityscapes have represented the country's devastation by totalitarianism, occupation, endless combat, and extreme poverty. In fact, to distinguish what is newly real about Italian cinema after 1945, students are often taught to recognise how this mise-en-scène operates as testimony to and metonym for Italy's ruination. It is through this pictorial emphasis on Italy's scarred topography that a new practice of realism makes itself known: landscape attests to the camera's faithful indulgence of postwar ‘profilmic’ reality. In the history of film style, the neorealists' emphasis on actual locations comes to signal the victory of in situ authority over backdrop verisimilitude; here, material reality triumphs over Hollywood illusion, history over artifice, democratic humanism over totalitarian ideology, truth over fabrication, and so forth. Indulging the particulars of place, it seems, endows these fictions with documentary urgency. Alongside this canonical account of neorealism's place in history, cinema scholars working with other national traditions have increasingly turned their attention to the landscapes, locations, and architecture captured in a variety of films. This recent work aims to redress the conceptual emphasis on space found in earlier film theory by asserting the particulars of place. Spectator theory of the 1970s had argued that the cinematic apparatus was actually a set of spatial relations that both channelled the viewer's gaze and definitively constituted the viewer as a subject. Recent work on place troubles what it sees as the earlier theory's dependence on abstract spatial metaphors and schemata. It argues that, in over-emphasising mainstream cinema's construction of a seamless diegesis (or narrative space), 1970s film theory neglected to recognise cinema's unique ability to capture the specificities of profilmic place and ignored the viewer's potential investment in those specificities. Given this trend towards complicating space with place, and remembering neorealism's long association with landscape, it is surprising how few studies have investigated the profilmic particulars of the locations that ostensibly define neorealism. A new literature has, however, begun the work of interrogating the geography of postwar Italian cinema.1 John David Rhodes's Stupendous, Miserable City: Pasolini's Rome leads this pack, revisiting the terrain that obsessed the director in the 1950s and early 1960s: the shanty towns, rundown vistas, and the always already devastated public housing projects that typified Rome's periphery at mid-century. Throughout the middle years of the twentieth century political, social, and economic hegemonies conspired to gentrify Rome's city centre by displacing working-class communities. As a result, the city's outlying areas rapidly expanded as zones of containment where disfranchised populations were relocated in shoddy, state-sponsored housing schemes. According to Rhodes, the ravaged landscape of these peripheral zones was Pasolini's fertile ground, the materia prima for his poetry and his early popular novels, as well as for what are his most riveting films – Accattone, Mamma Roma, and The Hawks and the Sparrows. A quick glance at this book might lead one to group it with other historicist projects that counter film theory's apparently totalising readings of films with industrial data and archival discoveries. Yet although Rhodes demonstrates an art historian's steadfast eye for detail and context, he also provides much more than just mise-en-scène archaeology; his expeditions to Pasolini's Rome are not purely fact-checking missions. The self-admittedly ‘stubbornly empirical mode’ of Rhodes's analysis (p. 67), rather than being tiring, leads the reader through into the author's deeply theoretical concerns. So while Rhodes insists on making place matter to our understanding of Pasolini's art, when his argument summons the authority of documents – such as architectural plans, articles from popular home design magazines, and government reports – it does so to provoke questions of representation, never to evade them. For example, Rhodes argues that the historical peculiarity of Rome's urbanity, as compared to that of Paris or London, determines Pasolini's aesthetic. City life in mid-century Italy – particularly in the borgate, or peripheral areas of Rome – provoked a practice of modernism quite different from the historical avant-garde associated with Europe's northern cities. Rome's unique – perhaps non-synchronous – modernity produced its own vernacular of modernism. Earlier readings of Pasolini's films, Rhodes argues, have hurried past this distinction to consign his aesthetic innovations – such as the extended sequence shoot, unhinged point of view, use of dialect, etc. – to a familiar schema of modernist experimentation. A central project for Rhodes is to liberate Pasolini's work from these typically modernist readings. His new readings continually assert this distinction, urging us not to mistake the parataxis in Pasolini's work for homology. It is misappropriation that dominates the director's work, he argues, and not pastiche; seepage operates in place of bricolage. Roman urbanity induces subjective contamination more than shock, drift rather than the flâneur's roving gaze, languor instead of neuraesthenia. Furthermore, Pasolini's ‘passion for the unlovely’ and his ‘poetics of the periphery’ (pp. xi, 29) do not simply reflect the modernist impulse to embrace detritus in order to invert aesthetic hierarchies. Instead, Pasolini's intimacy with Roman particularity aims to uncover the messiness of geopolitics. Rhodes writes: ‘the vision of the world that these films provide us with is a sticky sort of vision’ (p. 55). What mainstream mid-century imaginings of Rome strive to evade, Pasolini fervently sought out. The qualities of the sub-proletariat that others try to contain or ennoble, Pasolini obstinately embraced. To understand his early works, Rhodes argues, we must explore – as Pasolini did – the specificity of place that these works were asserting, sticking to, and contaminated by, and we must accept the stubborn persistence of particularity in Pasolini's most poetic appropriations of Rome's mise-en-scène: ‘[even] the bodies, buildings, and places that are posed as allegorical vehicles continue to assert their own irreducible specificity: this body, this building, this place’ (p. 137). Like Barthes's ‘thisness’ in Camera Lucida or the pointing finger of Peircean indexicality, the deictic quality of Pasolini's cinematic images refuses to surrender particularity to the general or allegorical.2 One great strength of this book, then, is how Rhodes resists the impulse to read Pasolini's Roman landscapes as metaphors or even symptoms, yet provides substantive analysis of them nonetheless. He convinces us that Pasolini's literature and cinema from this period betray an inescapable intimacy with the city which never fully surrenders itself to either abstraction or figuration: ‘The city and its periphery, desire and the cinema are all here rather sensually – even carnally – intertwined’ (p. 28). Rome never ascends to the purely symbolic register. So when earlier critics engage with Pasolini's landscapes as figuration, they impose a misguided hermeneutic, obscuring a compulsive intimacy that drives vision in these films. Rhodes reveals how locating symbols and metaphors in the image fails as transcription and, more importantly, misses the reformulation of cinematic seeing that Pasolini's early works try to effect, hence robbing them of their experiential and subjective weight. But if ‘the real’ abounds in Pasolini's early films, how are we to characterise their relationship to their canonical neorealist predecessors? What would motivate a radical young Italian film-maker to adopt the conventions of neorealism well into the 1960s? It is perhaps easiest to read Pasolini's assertion of the periphery's material, geographical, and architectural specificity as simply an overt retort to the era's ideological investment in the rehabilitation and renewal of Italian society. In this reading, the particulars of place would represent the return of the repressed in the context of Italy's economic miracle and the period's fantasies of universal class mobility. Pasolini's use of actual landscape as social critique would extend the neorealist impulse, with gritty realities poking holes in the veneer of Italy's narratives of progress and correcting perceptions of the nation for an international arthouse audience. It is here that Rhodes's approach – his careful geography – again pays off as a metacritical invention. Adding a crucial nuancing to how we understand Pasolini's place in the history of Italian film, Rhodes insists that the director's aesthetic neither regurgitates nor reproaches the legacies of Rossellini and De Sica. He refuses to see this cinematic deployment of the Roman periphery as simply an ironic counterpoint to postwar recovery. Through a close textual analysis, Rhodes reveals how the early films engage landscape in order to call neorealism's liberal humanist bluff. For example, the cityscape depicted in a central shot in Mamma Roma should be interpreted as ‘a corrosive allusion to Rome, Open City’s last shot' (p. 120), introducing doubt into the latter film's prophecy of national regeneration. Here, Mamma Roma builds on the base provided by earlier films, but only through a caustic gnawing away at that same base; it parasitically nourishes itself on the neorealist aesthetic while breaking down the operating presumptions of that movement. Identifying this parasitic, even cannibalistic, Oedipality – finding sustenance in devouring your forefathers – is only one way in which Rhodes grants his reader access to Pasolini's particular practice of realism. By detailing the borgate, Pasolini exposes how postwar liberal humanism may have done more to delimit the new prosperity than it did to universalise wealth or democratise resources. In the extensive analysis of Accattone at the core of the book, Rhodes demonstrates how the film deploys the referentiality of the image to refute liberal sympathy. While Accattone grants the viewer an intimate experience of the Roman landscape inhabited by the sub-proletariat, it refuses both a sympathetic correlation of ‘them’ with ‘us’ and the safe distance of the ethnographic gaze. The refusal of a psychologised point of view disallows the conflation of the viewer's after-the-fact gaze with historical subjectivity. In other words, Accattone's realism is grounded not just in a commitment to the evidentiary force of the cinematic image's referential plenitude, but also in the epistemological instabilities brought on by that plenitude. Its images remain dense with tracings from the real, but they are never purely reflective of that real. Instead, we might say that the film's realism deploys the referential image to provoke social, political, and historical questioning. While we may find viewing these particular conditions unsettling or distressing, this book urges against shuttling our uneasiness to the comfort zone of metaphor. Furthermore, Rhodes suggests that Pasolini's films never simply empathically channel historical seeing. His films may ask us to employ a particular mode of vision, but they always reveal to us how period and place determine that mode. Through his use of point of view and other structures of address, then, Pasolini acclimatises his audience to the historicity of seeing, de-universalising vision and the visual. In other words, cinematic form may provide a means of experiencing perception's historicity: if vision remains forever historically contingent, then the film image may allow an aesthetic method of disentangling the historical from the grand sweep of history. What makes this book's project so compelling is how subtly it redirects our understanding of historiography's value. Explicating the ‘placeness’ of these films amounts to much more than an art-historical addendum. Here, attention to detail – such as the debates about Rome's urban planning or architectural plans for housing projects – illuminates why an artist might fixate on the particulars of his moment in a manner quite foreign to naturalism's fetishisation of detail. By keeping taut Pasolini's careful intertwining of landscape, historical subjectivity, and economics, Rhodes has reanimated a crucial cinematic praxis for new audiences and scholars. In fact, this book's focus on landscape masterfully maintains that tension while making its intervention palpable to those outside Pasolini's historical and geographical situation, making Pasolini's vision of the world germane and even carrying his politics into the present. Could the Pasolinian detailing of Rome's urban spaces eventually lead us away from Rome's specificity and towards larger politics? At our current historical juncture, it seems a matter of some urgency to reacquaint ourselves with a cinematic praxis, like Pasolini's, that so vividly transmits the specific mental, spiritual, and social damage brought about by late capitalism. Returning to Pasolini's perspective may be especially useful today as our current world system threatens to condemn most human beings to inhabiting a single Stupendous, Miserable City. 1 David Forgacs, Rome Open City: Roma città aperta (London 2000), Angelo Restivo, The Cinema of Economic Miracles: Visuality and Modernization in the Italian Art Film (Durham, NC 2002), and Noa Steimatsky, Italian Locations: Reinhabiting the Past in Postwar Cinema (Minneapolis 2008). 2 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections of Photography, 1st American edn. (New York 1981) pp. 4–5; Charles S. Peirce et al., The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings, 2 vols. (Bloomington 1992) p. 14. © The Author, 2008. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Cambridge Quarterly. All rights reserved. For permissions please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org
TI - The Place of Pasolini
JF - The Cambridge Quarterly
DO - 10.1093/camqtly/bfn021
DA - 2008-12-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/the-place-of-pasolini-makQG6i0Hc
SP - 450
EP - 455
VL - 37
IS - 4
DP - DeepDyve
ER -