Pasolini Requiem by Barth David Schwartz

Author:Barth David Schwartz [Schwartz, Barth David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-226-33516-2
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2017-04-12T04:00:00+00:00

So much for critics who dared to praise him with insufficient erudition. As though unable not to remind everyone that he is the brightest boy in the class, he insists that being properly understood is more important than being liked.

Ettore calls for his mother, who has no idea where he is. He dies alone in prison, without Tommaso’s facile deathbed conversion to ideology. For Accattone, death was liberation; for Ettore, as for Tommaso, it is condemnation. Pasolini’s message is unvarnished: only a poor kid from the wrong neighborhood could find himself in an Italian jail awaiting trial for petty theft, and end up dead. When people from a peasant culture are uprooted and they come into the culture of the bourgeois city—a place they cannot enter or understand, and where they are neither welcome nor at home—they die.

Mamma is behind her vegetable stand in the market when news reaches her that Ettore has died in the prison hospital. At the news, she launches an animal howl: Crying “Ettore, Ettore,” she first “falls into the arms of the two people who have brought her the news,” and then “like a crazy woman, starts running through the streets.” According to Pasolini’s script, she runs from the market, which “appears dark, like a stormy sea,” into “dazzling sunlight, like a crazed horse.”

Reaching her apartment in the Cecafumo project, a place (like Rebibbia) neither city nor country, she races to the room where she danced with Ettore. She tears open the cupboards, grabbing the clothes she bought him, symbols of her hope for his social integration and rise. Screaming, she presses them to her breast. Suddenly, she leaps up and races for the window, and starts to throw herself out. Pasolini’s camera is waiting outside, looking into that window so that she fills the frame, staring at the audience. Her friends (one of them played by the actor Piero Morgia, whom Pasolini also used in Accattone) pin back her arms. “Finally, her cry bursts out . . . unexpected, useless, heart-rending.”

The script as written, but not shot, called for her to bellow at the window: “I responsabili! I responsabili! [The responsible!]” She wants not only mourning, but justice. Someone is to blame. But the political angle was cut, leaving her final scream one of generic grief without a call to accounting. Pasolini kept “I responsabili!” in the book version, published in July 1962.

So the film closes, the script noting, “Under her window, Rome stretches out, its buildings and its fields all smoky, opening immense and indifferent under the sun.”6 The sun is patron-boss (padrone) and father (padre) of all in Pasolini’s poetry, perhaps also patriarch Carlo Alberto. The sun sees all that the son does; it watches, “indifferent” to suffering.

Nervousness in both director and star was inevitable: he had to match or beat the success of Accattone, and she was in a difficult effort at a comeback. Magnani was known as la belva (the beast), also as la lupa (the she-wolf), a wild animal on the set, determined to be boss.

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