Introducing Mamma Roma
2023; Wayne State University Press; Volume: 64; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/frm.2023.a914982
ISSN1559-7989
Autores Tópico(s)European history and politics
ResumoIntroducing Mamma Roma Giorgia Alù (bio) Pier Paolo Pasolini's Mamma Roma (IT, 1962) was first screened at the 1962 Venice Film Festival, two years after the release of La Dolce Vita (IT/FR, 1960), Federico Fellini's famous portrayal of the decadence of modernizing postwar Italy. If Fellini's film articulated the glamour and contradictions of Italy's economic boom, Pasolini's portrayed the underside of Rome's urban expansion and the underworld of the city's poorest neighborhoods of the same period. Typical of Pasolini's life and works, Mamma Roma scandalized its audiences. The film was attacked by both right-wing and left-wing political parties and the Church. It was also accused of offending common moral sense and containing obscene content, contrary to public decency. Although the case was quickly dismissed, at the film's premiere in the Quattro Fontane Cinema on September 22, 1962, in Rome, Pasolini was verbally attacked once again by a protesting neofascist student, and the confrontation escalated to a physical altercation. In the United States, Mamma Roma was first shown only on the occasion of the 1990 retrospective, "Pier Paolo Pasolini: The Eyes of a Poet," at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. The film, set in Rome, is essentially about a prostitute, Mamma Roma (Anna Magnani), who aspires to a decent bourgeois life, selling vegetables with her 16-year-old son Ettore (Ettore Garofolo) whom she hopes to avert from a life of crime. But her former pimp, Carmine (Franco Citti), reappears in her life and exposes her past to Ettore who, traumatized by the knowledge, returns to his petty criminal ways. Caught stealing from hospital patients, Ettore dies in prison from a fever, leaving his mother distraught with grief. [End Page 35] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. 1962 Italian film poster by RIPALTA Industrie Graliche. There were three main inspirations for the film: a news item, an eroticfigurative vision, and a cinematographic memento. The original idea, Pasolini explained, came to me at least a year before I wrote the script for Accattone, when all the newspapers talked about the dramatic death of Marcello Elisei, a young prisoner who died in Regina Coeli [in an isolation cell of this Roman prison hospital] tied to a restraint bed. From that news event I matured a story whose [End Page 36] protagonists bear their misery as an indelible condemnation, rejected in the mud because their guilt is like an original sin.1 The second inspiration was meeting the adolescent Ettore Garofolo in a restaurant in Rome: the boy was carrying a basket of fruit, and, for Pasolini, it was a kind of Caravaggesque image, one that he reproduces in a scene in the film. The cinematographic memento relates to Anna Magnani, who had featured in Roberto Rossellini's Roma città aperta/Rome, Open City (IT, 1945), one of the most influential and symbolic neorealist films ever made. In Rossellini's film, Magnani played Pina, the woman who, in an evocative scene, is shot dead while running after the truck that takes away her lover, Francesco (Francesco Grandjacquet), captured by the Germans during the Nazi occupation of the city. Pasolini would reproduce her cry of agony in Mamma Roma. With her rough voice, passionate authenticity, and volcanic temperament, Anna Magnani had enchanted Pasolini. In Mamma Roma, she is one of only two professional actors—like so many of his films, the cast is mostly composed of non-professional actors, although a small number had appeared in his previous film, Accattone (IT, 1961). Nevertheless, there were tensions between the director and Magnani, as Pasolini tried to tone down her "excess" and the stylistic elements that were part of her cinematic persona. Magnani's absorbing, strong fictional character clashed with Pasolini's desire to represent reality. As he declared in an interview: I got her to do a woman of the people [popolana] with petite bourgeois aspirations, and Anna Magnani just isn't like that. As I choose actors for what they are and not for what they pretend to be . . . . I wanted to bring out the ambiguity of subproletarian life with a petit bourgeois superstructure. This didn...
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