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  • The Place of Pasolini
  • Karl Schoonover (bio)
Stupendous, Miserable City: Pasolini's Rome by John David Rhodes. University of Minnesota Press, 2007. £20 pb. ISBN 978 08 1664 9303

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 [End Page 450] 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-enscène 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 [End Page 451] 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...

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