Pigsty (Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1969)

Pier Paolo Pasolini's Pigsty is too much like what people think of when they hear the phrase "art house movie," especially when they have in mind films of the late 1960s. It's enigmatic and disjointed, and has a tendency to treat images as if they were ideas -- significant ideas. There are two narratives at work in the film: One features Pierre Clémenti as some kind of feral human wandering a volcanic landscape in which he finds a butterfly and a snake and eats both, then dons the helmet and musket he finds beside a skeleton. It's some unspecified pre-modern era -- the helmet and the garb of the soldiers and priests he meets later make think 17th century. He kills and eats another man he meets, then begins to gather a group of fellow cannibals. The other story takes place in Germany in 1967 and centers on Julian Klotz (Jean-Pierre Léaud), the son of a wealthy ex-Nazi (Alberto Lionello) who styles his hair and mustache like his late Führer and is pursuing a merger with a Herr Herdhitze (Ugo Tognazzi), who is a rejuvenated Heinrich Himmler, having undergone extensive plastic surgery. Julian, meanwhile, is an aimless youth who resists the urgings of his fiancée, Ida (Anne Wiazemsky) to join in leftist protest movements and to have sex with her. He'd rather spend time with the pigs in a nearby sty. The efforts at satire in the modern section are as heavy-handed as they sound in this summary, especially since Pasolini has chosen to have much of the exposition delivered by the actors in the flat-footed style of a 19th-century melodrama. There are some acting standouts, however, in both sections, especially Léaud, who seems to be having more fun than his role allows; Clémenti and Pasolini regular Franco Citti throw themselves into their feral roles, and Tognazzi is suavely menacing in his. If the whole thing is meant as a satire on dog-eat-dog (or man-eat-man or pig-eat-man) capitalism, it is sometimes too oblique and sometimes too blatant. Pasolini is a challenging, original filmmaker as always, but this one doesn't transcend the often inchoate artistic fervor of the '60s avant garde.  

Oedipus Rex (Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1967)

Seeing Julian Beck as Tiresias in Pier Paolo Pasolini's Oedipus Rex reminded me of an excruciatingly boring evening I spent in Brooklyn in 1968. Some friends had invited me to go with them to see Beck's Living Theatre perform their play Paradise Now, which as I recall featured the semi-naked company, including some pale and pimply dudes in jockstraps, wandering through the audience, yelling at us about our bourgeois complacency. Those who know me will realize that this is not my sort of thing at all. I realize now that Beck and Judith Malina had a tonic effect on theater with their avant-garde productions, and I salute them for that, but I was not receptive to their efforts on that evening. Fortunately, Pasolini's Oedipus, though infused with some of the radicalism of the Living Theatre, is not at all boring. It's sometimes raw and rough-edged, especially by standards of mainstream cinema. The Technicolor camerawork -- the cinematographer is Giuseppe Ruzzolini -- is often very beautiful, with its astonishing images of the Moroccan desert and ancient buildings, but there are some bobbles in the hand-held camera sequences that move beyond shakycam into wobbly-out-of-focuscam. Franco Citti, who made his debut in the title role of  Pasolini's Accattone (1961) and appeared in many of his other films, is a bit out of his depth as Oedipus, but Silvana Mangano is an impressive-looking Jocasta, and Beck is a suitably foreboding Tiresias. Pasolini's screenplay does justice to its Sophoclean origins as well as to the perdurable myth, although the frame story that begins in Italy during the Mussolini era, with the Fascist anthem "Giovinezza" on the soundtrack, and ends in Pasolini's present seems extraneous. But the truly astonishing contribution to the film was made by costume designer Danilo Donati, whose eerie designs, seemingly cobbled together from scrap metal, clay, and leaves and branches, don't belong to any particular era but have the right aura of primitive myth. Some examples:

The Oracle of Apollo in Oedipus Rex

Silvana Mangano as Jocasta

Headdress for a priest 

Accattone (Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1961)

Franco Citti in Accattone

Vittorio "Accattone" Cataldi: Franco Citti
Stella: Franca Pasut
Maddalena: Silvana Corsini
Ascenza: Paola Guidi
Amore: Adriana Asti

Director: Pier Paolo Pasolini
Screenplay: Pier Paolo Pasolini, Sergio Citti
Cinematography: Tonino Delli Colli
Film editing: Nino Baragli

There are times in Pasolini's first feature when he seems to be trying out things that he will accomplish with greater finesse in his later films. For example, there are several walk-and-talk tracking shots in which Accattone and another person walk down a street toward a receding camera. This technique was used with greater force and wit in Pasolini's next film, Mamma Roma (1962), in which Anna Magnani strides down a nighttime street, talking about her life, as various people emerge from the darkness to deliver comments on what she is telling us. We've seen this sort of thing done many times since the development of the Steadicam -- it has become a kind of cliché in films and TV shows written by Aaron Sorkin -- but even though the shadow of the retreating camera rig occasionally creeps into the frame in Accattone, Pasolini and cinematographer Tonino Delli Colli execute it with considerable skill. Skill is not always in evidence in Accattone, which has its rough, raw edges. It's not always easy to follow Pasolini's screenplay, drawn in part from his early novels, when it comes to the relationships between the various characters: I'm not clear, for example, who the young woman with several small children is who shares a room with Maddalena and later Stella. Pasolini had worked with Federico Fellini on Nights of Cabiria (1957) and it's instructive to compare the two films: Fellini's has greater technical finish, but it's also less harsh and more sentimental, which may be why Fellini, who originally planned to produce Pasolini's film, withdrew his support. But the rawness of Accattone is entirely appropriate for a film that evokes the spontaneity and actuality of early Italian Neo-Realism with its non-professional actors and ungroomed settings. And it has at its center a charismatic performance by Citti, an untrained actor who went on to a long career on-screen that included an appearance as Calo, one of Michael Corleone's Sicilian bodyguards in The Godfather (Frances Ford Coppola, 1972).  "Accattone" is a nickname that means "beggar" or "ne'er-do-well" or "layabout" -- the character's given name is Vittorio Cataldi -- and is entirely appropriate for a character who begins as a pimp and, after hitting the skids and even trying work (at which he shudders), winds up as a thief -- a dead thief. Citti's voice was dubbed in the film, but most of the work is done by his extraordinarily expressive face and by a physical commitment to the role. There is, for example, a terrific fight scene between Accattone and the men of his ex-wife's family, which ends with Accattone and his opponent locked together in a struggle in the dirt, neither willing to relinquish hold. Pasolini also emphasizes the dissonance between a world that produces an Accattone and the religious background from which it springs by using excerpts from Bach's St. Matthew Passion on the soundtrack.

Mamma Roma (Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1962)

Putting a force of nature like Anna Magnani in among the unknowns and non-professionals of the rest of the cast almost upends Pasolini's film, and it reportedly caused some friction between actress and director during the filming. If Pasolini really wanted the naturalistic Magnani of Rome, Open City (Roberto Rossellini, 1948) it was much too late: By then, she had won an Oscar for The Rose Tattoo (Daniel Mann, 1955) and had become the flamboyant, histrionic Magnani who shows up on-screen in Mamma Roma. That said, Pasolini certainly gave her every opportunity to present herself that way, starting with the opening scene in which she herds pigs into the wedding dinner of her former pimp, Carmine (Franco Citti), and culminating in one of the greatest scenes (or rather, pair of scenes) of her career. I mean, of course, the long-take tracking shot in which she walks down a Roman street at night, delivering a monologue on her life, as people appear out of the darkness and recede back into it, serving as interlocutors. It's stunning the first time Pasolini (aided by his cinematographer, Tonino Delli Colli) does it, and even more remarkable when he reprises it after a crisis in her life. I think Mamma Roma is some kind of great film, notwithstanding Pasolini's tendency to be somewhat heavy-handed in his symbolism: witness the staging of the wedding dinner as a parallel to Leonardo's The Last Supper and of Ettore (Ettore Garofalo) strapped to a restraining bed to echo Mantegna's painting of the dead Christ.

Top: Ettore Garofalo in Mamma Roma. Below: Andrea Mantegna, Lamentation Over the Dead Christ, c. 1475-78