Showing posts with label Pasolini. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Pasolini. Show all posts

Thursday, 7 May 2009

Porcile / Pigsty

As part of Pasolini’s mythical cycle alongside Theorem, Medea and Oedipus Rex, this is not one of his easier films; for that the earlier neo-realist styled works and the later Decamerotic-inspiring Trilogy of Life are recommended.

What Pigsty is, however, is provocative, thought provoking viewing.

Its most jarring aspect, besides Pasolini’s characteristic modern-primitive style approach to filmmaking and exploration of normally taboo material – including why such material is considered taboo – is that there are two distinct narratives.

In one, set in the civilised 1960s present, Julian (Jean Pierre Leaud), the son of an German industrialist and Nazi war criminal discusses politics with a young woman, Ida (Anne Wiazemsky) and rebels against his family and upbringing by the unusual strategy of falling into an apparently self-induced catalepsy.

In the other, set in a vague, pre or early modern past, an unnamed cannibal (Pierre Clementi) and his associates (including Franco Citti) roam a volcanic wasteland where they are hunted down and eventually captured and executed.

While this structure is somewhat reminiscent of Oedipus Rex, where the story begins with Oedipus’s birth in a Fascist Italy like Thebes before then shifting to a more obviously ‘mythical’ / ‘primitive’ landscape after he is taken from the Kingdom, there is no equivalent continuity between the two places and times. One seems historical, grounded, the other mythical, abstracted.

Eventually – possible spoiler warning, though one suspects you don’t really watch a film like this in expectation of a conventional resolution – the two narratives and their respective chronotopes intersect through the shared presence of Ninetto Davoli.

The iconic actor appears as one of the executioners and as a contemporary peasant labourer who confronts Julian’s father and his associates (including Ugo Tognazzi and Marco Ferreri).

The implication, when combined with Clementi’s cannibal’s one line of dialogue, the repeated “I killed my father, I ate human flesh, and I quiver with joy,” is perhaps that the cannibal narrative represents Julian’s unconscious – or half-conscious – desires in their non-sublimated forms.

While demanding the viewer’s active involvement, the film also features some more straightforward grotesquery like the ex-Nazis – Julian’s father being a bloated Hitler clone – and some reasonably amusing wordplay around their names, with one being called Herdhitze.

And then, of course, there is also the fact that it is an arthouse cannibal movie by Pasolini with a cast of arthouse favourites and, as such, like Fascist-sploitation Salo, especially useful to have in one’s store of “nobrow” reference points when someone challenges you for watching a Cannibal Holocaust or SS Experiment Camp.

Wednesday, 22 August 2007

La Commare secca / The Grim Reaper

This was Bertolucci’s debut feature, made when he was barely into his 20s from a scenario by Pier Paolo Pasolini, with whom he had worked as assistant on Accatone. It’s perhaps best summarised as a version of Rashomon set in the universe of Accatone, a deconstructive take on the crime film or detective story; hence its inclusion here in relation to the giallo.




Strong geometric arrangements


The discovery of the body

The film opens with the discovery of a prostitute’s body by the banks of the Tiber and proceeds, through the at times interlocking flashback accounts of five potential suspects / witnesses to the crime, to reveal what happened and whodunnit. In truth, however, this aspect is never really that important compared to the exploration of character, environment and their interaction, along with formal experimentation.


All roads lead to Rome, specifically a river-side park – the sleeping soldier in the foreground, the two youths and the prostitute in the background.

In particular we never actually see the detectives whose voices we intermittently hear within the interrogations, the film-makers instead letting the interviewees speak for themselves, in their own language, with minimal interruptions. The crucial point, of course, is the disjunctions and discrepancies that emerge between the spoken and visual accounts of the same scene, as the character’s monologue or dialogue suggests one thing and the mise-en-scene another, or those between different depictions of / perspective on the same scene.




The interrogation scenes are characterised by an expressionistic rather than neo-realistic mise-en-scene


Sometimes the two aesthetics are combined, however, as in this fragmented, mirrored composition

One consequence of this, however, is also that it’s more difficult to really empathise or identify with the characters to the same extent as in a more conventional narrative. While this doesn’t prevent one from enjoying or appreciating a film – after all, something similar could be said of Bava’s Blood and Black Lace or Bay of Blood and Questi’s Death Laid an Egg, for instance, the important thing is the different social positions of their respective protagonists. In Bava and Questi’s films, we are invited to look on with a detached, critical eye as supposedly civilised bourgeois men and women reveal their material baseness and spiritual bankruptcy. Here, however, we are presumably supposed to feel sympathy for the poor and disadvantaged types, but may find ourselves conflicted as when, for example, an evidently gay character attempts to pick up two youths, who in turn plan to rob him. Then again, part of Pasolini’s brilliance (like that of Hubert Selby Jr.) always lay in making us think about our own reactions to characters and worlds we would likely not want to visit in our real lives.




Shadows on the wall; the platonic myth of the cave is a theme that recurs in The Conformist, although perhaps via Moravia rather than Bertolucci himself.

At times the camera attains its own presence and consciousness, as when a tracking shot starts with the point of view of a character only to end with their inclusion within the same shot (this character being the one ultimately revealed as the murderer, thus possibly connoting their fragmented “self”), or the observation of two girls dancing back and forth left to right, moving in and out of the frame; “poetic” elements not surprising if we again consider the influence of Pasolini, but forging perhaps unexpected connections with more obviously generic gialli.




The dancing girls and the exploration of screen space – presently invisible does not mean absent

Fans of the filone cinema may also want to note that Jimmy the Phenomenal has a blink and you’ll miss him appearance in a café near the end, while Nico Fidenco is credited as the vocalist on one of the diegetic musical numbers.


Jimmy

La Commare secca is available on NTSC DVD as part of The Criterion Collection.

Thursday, 26 July 2007

Oedipus Rex

[Not a giallo, nor a particularly coherent review, but a film that could make for some interesting comparisons with Argento and that “it all depends on what you mean by reality” line]

Fearful that his newborn son Oedipus will usurp him, King Laius of Thebes leaves him in the wilderness to die. A shepherd find the baby and gives him to the childless King Polybus and Queen Merope, who adopt him as their own.

As a young man Oedipus leaves Corinth and goes out into the world. An oracle tells him that he will kill his father and marry his mother. Understandably horrified, he avoids Corinth, and eventually decides upon Thebes as a destination.

Along the way Oedipus encounters Laius, whom he kills to complete the first part of the prophesy. Arriving in Thebes, he then discovers the place beset by a monster, the sphinx, which he slays. His reward is the kingdom of Thebes and the now-widowed Queen Jocasta's hand in marriage...

When reviewing just about any other film such details would count as spoilers of the Verbal-Kint-is-Keyser-Soze variety. In the case of a classical text like Oedipus Rex, however, we're dealing with a text that the audience is surely already familiar with, even if this familiarity may extend little further than that of he's the guy who kills his father and fucks his mother type name recognition. We're also dealing with a work which, through its very status as tragedy, inherently offers no surprises, the end answering the beginning in that inevitable, predestined, fated-to-be kind of way.

As such, the key area of interest in lies in what the film-maker actually chooses to do with their source text, the degrees of reverence and violence they treat it with. And here, unsurprisingly, it is where Pasolini's genius emerges.

While the first (literal) sign we see in the film is one pointing the way to Thebes and, from the looks of it, of classical provenance, the subsequent (semiotic) signs attending the birth of Oedipus are anachronistic – a bicycle, a uniform, a farm building – and seem to establish the time and place of the action as pre-war fascist Italy.

It's a brilliant device by which Pasolini simultaneously universalises Oedipus's narrative by divorcing it from ancient Greece, yet also introduces specificities at the societal and personal levels.

In terms of the first, it establishes the possibility of a psychoanalytical reading of fascism, in line with the popularisation of Freudian ideas within Italy around this time and the emergence of countless films in which younger directors looked back at the fascist regime and the complicity – or otherwise – of their fathers within it.

In terms of the second, it inserts Pasolini himself into the story (the French histoire, with its multiple meaning, seems more apposite here, however) through obvious affinities between his own biography (he was born in 1922, his father an army officer) and that of his character and the way Oedipus's subsequent travails also become an account of his own Oedipal trajectory. Or, rather, don't:

“I have never dreamt of making love with my mother. Rather I have dreamt, if at all, of making love with my father (against the dresser in the miserable bedroom my brother and I shared as children)..." (Pasolini)

Things become even more complex as the action shifts from Thebes to Corinth. For while the North African landscapes and the figures that inhabit them may be closer to what we expect – although here we can also note the way Pasolini chooses to represent the sphinx as something more akin to an African witch-doctor than a mythological creature – this same self-consciously timeless quality again renders any attempt at an unequivocal this-is-what-it-means reading highly problematic.

This, in all its complexities and ambiguities, is in turn is where the film becomes arguably Pasolini's finest realisation of the (deceptively) naïve theories he was developing around the same time, as a “heretical empiricist” committed to “a certain kind” of “realism” whose function, in line with his preference for the “cinema of poetry” over the “cinema of prose,” was to raise questions as to how reality comes to be defined and, just as importantly, with what consequences for us all.

If Oedipus Rex is a challenging film for those used to more conventional aesthetic approaches this is thus with good reason and, in many respects, the entire point: Pasolini wants us to open our eyes to the world, even if the risk is, like Oedipus, that we may not like what we come to realise thereby..

Wednesday, 18 July 2007

Il Rosso segno della follia / A Hatchet for the Honeymoon

John Harrington is quite, quite mad. Unusually, however, he is perfectly aware of and comfortable with this situation: “Paranoiac – an enchanting word and so full of possibilities!”

His compulsion to murder young brides is also therapeutic, each fresh victim bringing him closer to understanding a childhood trauma by revealing another crucial detail of this Freudian primal scene.

Tiring of his wife, own Mildred, John seeks a divorce. But having worked hard to make the bridal wear business John inherited from his beloved mother into a success, Mildred is unwilling to accede to his demands, expressing a firm belief that their marriage is of the “till death do us part” variety.

Thus John decides to do away with Mildred.

In an unexpected twist on the till death do us part theme, she then returns as a ghost to haunt him, this making his craziness more outwardly manifest insofar as no-one else can see her or thus who John is talking to...

If this wasn't bad enough, the police are becoming increasingly suspicious that he is the bride killer. All the victims can, after all, be traced back to the House of Harrington in one way or another.

While John points out that there are 200 weddings a day in Paris this only makes things worse, making the coincidence seem all the more striking, design rather than accident...






Bava's involvement in the project extended beyond the direction to cinematography and the title design, in which the Red Sign of madness over Harrington is a recurring motif

Mario Bava's 1969 return to the giallo may have also witnessed a return to the fashion setting of Blood and Black Lace and the theme of the discrepancy between the public face of the bourgeois and the monster lying beneath, but it does so with a very different tone to its predecessor.




The real train and the simulacrum

From the outset, as the director cuts from stock-type footage of a real train – a train on which the as-yet-unidentified Harrington as just killed once more – to a very obvious model (whilst the audio continues as before) before then revealing that Harrington is now at home playing with his toys, it is clear that Il Rosso segno della follia / Hatchet for the Honeymoon is more light-hearted and tongue-in-cheek than deadly serious.


The oh-so Freudian motif of the stairs in John's haunted memories

Rather than presenting the killer as an un-knowable, masked Other as in Blood and Black Lace, Bava instead draws us in to identifying with him through extensive use of voice-over and subjective camera and a more abstract, less explicit manner.

Like Chaplin's Monsieur Verdoux – identified by Tim Lucas in his liner notes on the Image Entertainment DVD as a key intertext for the film – you come to understand why he kills, becoming unable to condemn even if you do not condone.






The superficially charming John Harrington wouldn't hurt a fly – until, having saved it from drowing, he feeds it to his parrot...

But there are also differences between the two characters and films: whereas Chaplin sought to comment on the ironies and inequities of a world that accepts at the societal scale what it denies at the individual – kill one man and you are a murderer, kill a million and you are a conqueror – Bava is less concerned with making such a grand(iose) statement. However, insofar as this was also the kind of subtext that many critics felt out of place in Leone's The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, the Good's remark that “I've never seen so many men wasted so badly” an admission that in the scheme of things he and the other rogues are, like Verdoux, “merely amateurs,” perhaps this is no bad thing as a wise acknowledgement by Bava of the kind of limitations he was working under.




John's ideal women mannequins preserved in a state of perfection, unable to answer him back

Yet, other subtexts are undoubtedly there if one wants to search for them. Harrington's quest for self-knowledge that will ultimately prove self-destructive has clear echoes of the Oedipus myth – arguably the first detective narrative and protagonist – itself given a consciously idiosyncratic interpretation by Pasolini the previous year.

With an elegant score by Sante Romitelli, considerable camp / kitsch charm and three attractive female presences in the forms of Dagmar Lassander, Femi Benussi as models / victims who fall into the House of Harrington's ambit and Laura Betti – reinforcing the Pasolini connection, having approached Bava to express her interest in working with him on the back of her award-winning performance in Medea - as Mildred, perhaps Hatchet for the Honeymoon's only real weakness is that from a generic perspective the resolution of its central enigma is all too predictable.

But given the aforementioned opening sequences, perhaps this was entirely the point: if Pasolini's Oedipus Rex represents the most subversive take on a classical text in the Italian cinema of the 1960s (“I have never dreamt of making love with my mother, rather I have dreamt, if at all, of making love with my father...”) might not Hatchet for the Honeymoon be the equivalent ne plus ultra for the giallo, circa 1969?

Tuesday, 10 April 2007

Comizi d'amore / Love Meetings

Although this blog is nominally about the giallo film and Dario Argento, I think it is important to maintain a sense of perspective and try to watch a variety of cinema. You can never tell when something is going to prove relevant, or provide some new insight or idea.

This 1965 documentary from Pier Paolo Pasolini is a case in point. In it the director goes round Italy, microphone in hand, conducting vox populi interviews in which he asks ordinary Italians for their views on such topics as divorce, homosexuality and the whether the closure of brothels via the 1958 Merlin Law was a good or bad thing.

As such, it provides a fascinating insight into the kind of discourses around modernity that Mikel Koven argues - I think correctly - that we see in gialli five or ten years later. Putting it another way, I think anyone who enjoys – say – the debates between Marc Daly and Gianna Brezzi in Deep Red as much as the set-pieces would get a lot of out this.