East-German postcard by VEB Progress Film-Vertrieb, Berlin, no. 2823, 1967. Sent by mail in East Germany in 1974. Anna Magnani in Mamma Roma (Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1962).
Passionate, fearless, and exciting Anna Magnani (1908-1973) was the ‘volcano’ of Italian cinema. The unkempt, earthy actress radiated such fierce intelligence and sensuality that she became a major star with Roma, città aperta/Rossellini's Rome, Open City (1945), and won an Oscar for her portrayal of a Sicilian widow in The Rose Tattoo (1955). She also gave dynamic and forceful portrayals of working-class women in Il miracolo/The Miracle (1948), Bellissima (1951), and Mamma Roma (1962).
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Swiss postcard by Musée de l'Élysée, Lausanne / News Productions, Baulmes, no. 56409. Photo: John Philips. Caption: Pier Paolo Pasolini, Rome, 1962.
Italian film director Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922-1975) was also a poet, painter and novelist. He achieved fame and notoriety long before he entered the film industry. Emerging during the 1960s, Pasolini broke from his New Wave-inspired peers, drawing influence for his work not from other cinematic sources but from art, literature, folklore, and music. He was also among the few directors of his era to focus less on the process of filmmaking than on his subject matter, bringing to the screen the gritty desperation of life on the fringes. His films created confusion and were controversial. His final film, Salò o le 120 giornate di Sodoma (1975) was banned in various countries.
Pier Paolo Pasolini was born in 1922 in Bologna, Emilia-Romagna, Italy. His parents were Carlo Alberto Pasolini, a lieutenant of the Italian army, and his wife Susanna Colussi, an elementary school teacher. His father was famous for saving Benito Mussolini's life. He had a younger brother, Guidalberto. Pasolini grew up at various points throughout the country, and began writing poetry at the age of seven. In 1939, he went to study at the University of Bologna. He published his first book of poems, 'Poesia a Casarsa' in 1941. His artistic work was put on hold in August 1943 when he was conscripted into the Italian army, at that time allied with the Germans. A few days after Italy's capitulation, Pasolini's regiment was captured by two Germans in a tank. He became a German prisoner of war, from which he managed to escape. He fled to the small town of Casarsa, where he remained for several years. His younger brother had been killed as a partisan during the war. From 1947 to 1949, he was a member of the Italian Communist Party, but he was expelled when he openly confessed to being a homosexual. Regardless, he remained under the sway of Marxist doctrine, finding particular inspiration in the writings of Antonio Gramsci and his belief in the revolutionary power of the Italian peasantry. After his studies in Bologna, he settled permanently in Rome with his mother in the early 1950s, where he worked as a teacher. Mother and son initially found it difficult to make ends meet. They lived in an impoverished suburb of Rome, where he worked as a teacher. Pasolini published novels and essays and his first screenplay in 1954. A homosexual, he fell in with the local underworld of prostitutes, hustlers, pimps, and thieves. Pasolini himself was often arrested in their company and he once attempted to rob a filling station and later helped a wanted criminal flee the police. His first novel about slum life, 'Ragazzi di vita' (1955), received literary praise but also caused national controversy for its obscene nature. Another examination of the same themes was 'Una vita violenta' (1959), translated as 'A Violent Life'. Pasolini was also earning notice as a poet, and his 1957 collection Le Ceneri di Gramsci earned the Viareggio Prize. From 1955 to 1958, he also edited the avant-garde magazine Officina, which was later forced to cease publication following a Pasolini poem attacking Pope Pius XII on his deathbed.
Pier Paolo Pasolini'sinvolvement in the cinema began rather quietly, with the screenplay for Mario Soldati's La Donna del Fiume (1954), starring Sophia Loren. Over the next several years, he also collaborated on scenarios for projects by Federico Fellini, Mauro Bolognini, and Luis Trenker, but in light of his other, more scandalous work his film material earned little notoriety. By the early 1960s, however, the cinema became Pasolini's central focus. Jason Ankeny at AllMovie: "After scrapping the completed screenplay for a project titled La Commare Secca (which he then passed along to Bernardo Bertolucci), he wrote another script, Accatone, which he directed in the slums with a non-professional cast in 1961." The violent depiction of the life of a pimp in the slums of Rome caused a sensation. Moralists held up the picture as proof of the need for stricter censorship guidelines. Abroad, the feature garnered honors at the Montreal and Karlovy Vary film festivals, and with his sophomore feature, Mamma Roma (1962), starring Anna Magnani, he won both the International Critics' Prize at the Venice Film Festival in addition to Italy's Silver Ribbon. His contribution to the portmanteau film Ro.Go.Pa.G. (1963), the short film La Ricotta with Orson Welles as a filmmaker directing a film on the life of Christ, was considered blasphemous. He was arrested and given a four-month suspended prison sentence. It might have been expected that his next film, Il vangelo secondo Matteo/The Gospel According to St. Matthew (1964), which presented the Biblical story in a totally realistic, stripped-down style, would cause a similar fuss but the worldwide critical response was highly favorable, and in addition to a pair of awards at Venice it also won the grand prize from the International Catholic Film Office. The comic fable Uccellacci e Uccellini (1966) followed, featuring the comic actor Toto.
Pier Paolo Pasolini's film career would then alternate distinctly personal and often scandalously erotic adaptations of classic literary texts, with more personal projects. Edipo Re/Oedipus Rex (1967) with Franco Citti, Alida Valli and Silvana Mangano, was a deeply personal adaptation of Sophocles' Oedipus Rex. Both Teorema/Theorem (1968) starring Silvana Mangano, Terence Stamp, and Massimo Girotti, and Porecile/Pigsty (1969) with Pierre Clémenti and Jean-Pierre Léaud, expressed his controversial views on Marxism, atheism, fascism, and homosexuality. Then followed a trilogy of medieval tales, Il Decameron/The Decameron (1971) with Ninetto Davoli; I racconti di Canterbury/The Canterbury Tales (1972) with Laura Betti; and Il fiore delle mille e una notte/Arabian Nights (1974) with Ninetto Davoli. His final film was in many respects the most disturbing of all of his pictures. The notorious Salò o le 120 giornate di Sodoma/Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975), is a relentlessly grim fusion of Benito Mussolini's Fascist Italy with the 'Marquis de Sade' which was banned in Italy and many other countries for several years. On 2 November 1975, the Day of the Dead in the Roman Catholic faith, Pasolini was found murdered on a beach in Ostia (near Rome). The murder was gruesome, his heart had been burst, his face torn apart and he had been run over several times by a car. Though Giuseppe "Pino" Pelosi, a 17-year-old hustler was arrested for the murder after being caught in Pasolini's car and confessing to the murder, to this day the case remains unsolved. In 2005, Pelosi revealed that Pasolini was killed by three men linked to political groups opposed to the director's films and politics. The case was briefly reopened and later dismissed due to lack of evidence. Another story revolves around Pasolini meeting with extortionists who stole footage from Salò. Pier Paolo Pasolini was only 53. He is buried at the cemetery of Casarsa. In 2014, the American director Abel Ferrara made a biographical film about Pasolini starring Willem Dafoe. Giuseppe Pelosi died in 2017 in a hospital in Rome of lung cancer.
Sources: Jason Ankeny (AllMovie), Michael Brooke (IMDb), Wikipedia (Dutch), and IMDb.
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Big programme card by Cineteca Bologna for Il Cinema Ritrovato, XXXVI edizione, Selezione Cinema Ritrovato Young, 30 June 2022. Pierr Paolo Pasolini and Orson Welles on the set of La Ricotta (Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1963).La Ricotta was an episode of the anthology film Ep.di.Ro.Go.Pa.G. (1963).
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