Stupendous, Miserable City: Pasolini’s Rome (review)

In Nanni Moretti's Caro Diario (Dear Diary, 1993), the protagonist (Moretti himself) devotes the first episode of his film to chronicling his mini-(mis)adventures while riding his Vespa through Rome. At one point, he pauses to criticize an inhabitant of the Casal Palocco, a sleepy residential quarter, for abandoning Rome proper when it was "bellissima" in the 1960s. Moretti suggests that the sprawl of suburbia—with its gated dogs, rented videos, and take-out food—have decentered the Eternal City and transformed parts of it into Anytown, Italia. Not incidentally, the episode concludes with an homage to the artist who, before Moretti, probably did more to question the place of Rome in the Italian imagination than anyone of his generation: Pier Paolo Pasolini. In an extended sequence devoid of commentary and set to music, Moretti rides his Vespa along the coast of working-class Ostia outside of Rome while the camera tracks his route amidst the surrounding hovels and shanties. The coastal journey culminates in equally desolate images of the abandoned monument erected to commemorate Pasolini's brutal murder in Ostia in 1975, by one of the ragazzi di vita (young male hustlers) whom the poet-filmmaker had spent his life pursuing and immortalizing in art. Fittingly, the cenotaph lies in the Roman periphery.

In the excellent Stupendous, Miserable City: Pasolini's Rome, John David Rhodes provides a much-needed re-evaluation of two major films by the director, Accattone (1961) and Mamma Roma (1962), in light of Pasolini's obsession with the interrelations between postwar Roman urban planning and the sociopolitical conditions of the marginalized classes that filled the housing projects in the 1950s and 1960s. The first chapter provides a useful précis of the history of Roman urban planning in the periferia, the periphery or suburbs that become the site of the borgate, the large-scale (and usually anonymous-looking and cheaply made) public housing projects built first by the Fascists and then the postwar government. In addition to detailed readings of Accattone and Mamma Roma, subsequent chapters analyze Pasolini's representations of the borgate in his poetry and prose, especially in "Il pianto della scavatrice" ("The Tears of the Excavator" [1956]), a poem about the massive and omnipresent machinery that helped build the projects. In the conclusion, Rhodes considers the discourse of the periferia in the few other films Pasolini shot in Rome as well as his tendency to allegorize non-Roman sites, including the burgeoning Italian highway system and film locations in economically underdeveloped countries, in an idiom derived from his analysis of the borgate.

The two overarching claims that fuse Rhodes's argument into a whole are, first, Pasolini's notions of the borgate stem from his Oedipal struggle with neorealist traditions in architecture and especially film; second (and more originally), the Roman periphery in Pasolini's films serves not only as a central thematic concern but also as an aesthetic mode that shapes his cinematic language and strategies of representation. For example, in his chapter on Mamma Roma, Rhodes focuses on the closing scene in which the grief-stricken title character (played by the great Anna Magnani) flees work for her apartment in Tuscolano II, part of an acclaimed public housing project believed to incarnate the homespun vernacular of neorealist architecture and its "urban village" feel. A former prostitute, Mamma Roma has just learned that her son Ettore, whom she brought to Tuscolano II with dreams of a better life for her family, has died of illness in prison after being arrested for petty theft. The film abounds in what Rhodes terms "corrosive allusions" to neorealism. Magnani previously starred in what most consider to be the inaugural neorealist film, Roberto Rossellini's Roma, città aperta (Open City, 1945); and Ettore steals from a hospitalized man played by none other than Lamberto Maggiorani, the non-professional actor who played the protagonist in De Sica's neorealist classic Ladri di biciclette (Bicycle Thieves, 1948...