In the Italy of the economic miracle, it was widely assumed that
the "lumpen-proletariat" was about to disappear. However,
the issue of identity and representation of sub-proletarians was
controversially debated among Marxist intellectuals. In my paper,
I will look at Visconti's Rocco and His Brothers and Pasolini's
Accattone as responses to this issue, which entails a re-elaboration
of Gramsci's thought around the Southern Question. I will focus
on two main questions, which are also at the base of Pasolini's
critique of Visconti's film in 1960 : 1) how to "represent"
the sub-proletarians in light of the historical and social transformations,
which Italy had gone through since Gramsci's elaboration of his
theory of "alliances;" 2) what kind of solution can be
found to the "Southern Question," i.e. in what way has
the role of intellectuals changed since Gramsci's theorization in
the Prison Notebooks.
In 1926, Antonio Gramsci wrote the essay 'The Southern Question.'
In 1945, the secretary of the Italian Communist Party, Palmiro Togliatti,
published the essay on Rinascita. Most likely, Visconti was
aware of Gramsci's text when he directed La Terra Trema and
Rocco and his Brothers. In fact, he declared during an interview
in 1960 that Gramsci's writings had been the inspiration for his
two films.[1]
In "The Southern Question," Gramsci underlines the responsibilities
of the working class towards the improvement of the Southern peasants'
conditions. Gramsci agrees with the Turinese Communists and understands
the alliance between the industrial North and the agricultural South
as a collaboration between the peasants and the working class, which
will be in charge of producing machines and secondary products as
well as of providing political leadership. Gramsci does not believe
that emigration from the South would be a solution to the question.
Visconti had, in my opinion, positively responded to Gramsci's theory
in his film La Terra Trema: the protagonist 'Ntoni understands
the necessity for a collective effort in Acitrezza, challenging
his brother Cola's decision to follow the 'American dream' and leave.
Visconti declared in 1960 that Rocco and his brothers was
the sequel of the Valastro story.[2]
However, there is a major and significant variation in the 1960
film: the Parondi left their home in the South. The starting point
of Rocco can be seen as the representation of a shift in
historical contingency, which entails a new articulation of the
"Southern question." Moreover, the film does not follow the historical
development from 1948 to 1960. Rather than narrating the transfer
from the South to the North, Rocco starts in medias res:
the Parondi family has already arrived at Milan Central Station,
and they are waiting, alone, in the huge fascist and monochrome
architectural environment. And no one arrives to pick them up. When
the Parondi enter the apartment of Ginetta's family, everyone is
surprised how they could get there "by themselves." In this sequence,
the film performs the allegory of a historical process: Ginetta's
relatives "discover" the presence of the Italian lumpen-proletariat,
i.e. the southern peasants, only when they had already moved there;
seemingly, in the late '50s Italy faced the "appearance" of the
lumpen-proletariat or, even better, of its "remnants."
Indeed, an important topic in cultural and political debates in
the late '50 was the "disappearance" of the lumpen-proletariat.
Pier Paolo Pasolini argued in "I tuguri" (Vie Nuove,
1958) that sub-proletarians did not "disappear," thanks to the
economic miracle. He claimed that the Italian government did not
want to acknowledge its new formation, i.e. a miserable mass that
had been hidden, until then, in the far South and that started to
emerge at the margins of the big cities.[3]
Pasolini directed his first film Accattone (1961) in a "borgata,"
which he defined in 1960 as a new version of the Fascist "borgate"
made by the new government. The new "borgate" resembled
the old one in their architecture, but even more because they were
used to confine, as a "concentration camp," those people
rejected by Society. Throughout the late 1950s, the Italian government
criticized neorealist directors for they would not give a "truthful
representation of the Italian people." The government's claims echoes
the nationalist ideology of the previous regime. During the shooting
of La Terra Trema, Visconti and other directors signed a
letter that denounced a "fascist" control over production.[4] Visconti's concern
about the new government's resemblance to the Fascist regime seems
to emerge in one of the last scene of La Terra Trema, in
which the vendors look like "black shirts" and one of
Mussolini's statements about the Italian People is only almost
deleted from the wall. Rocco addresses the issue of
the emigrants' ghettization especially vis-ą-vis the Parondi's relationship
to the city of Milan. The family lives "underneath" an
"honorable" building. At their arrival, the doorwoman
dismisses the Parondi as soon as she sees them, hurrying them towards
the basement. She says: "down, down there, you need to go down
there." The family moves in the foreground, like a black undistinguishable
mass, while the doorwoman and another tenant exchange comments about
their "difference."
It seems that both Visconti and Pasolini represent in their films
Rocco and Accattone the "remnants" of the sub-proletarians.[5]
In both films, the lumpen-proletariat has changed since Gramsci's
time as well as since the time of La Terra Trema. In my opinion,
both directors consequently question how the intellectuals can represent
the "new" sub-proletarians and what relevance the
Gramscian idea of the intellectual has when history has proven that
society had developed in a different way from how Gramsci (and those
who lived through the Resistance) had envisioned. The emigration
of peasant masses from the South questions both the representation
of the lumpen-proletariat and the interpretation of social
dynamics related to it, in particular their encounter with the capitalist
society.
Pasolini claimed in the 1958 article I previously mentioned that
Italian directors, such as De Sica, Rossellini, and Visconti, mystified
the "reality of the rejected" and did not dare to represent
these miserable persons in their films. Two years later, Visconti
directed Rocco and his Brothers, which addresses these themes,
especially in Simone's story. Yet, Pasolini criticized Rocco
and challenged Visconti asking from the latter "a major courageous
act of psychological analysis" (Pasolini 1999, 904)[6]. Pasolini wrote: "It happens very often that the
emigrants from the South, especially when they are young, give way
to and get involved with immediate temptations of the environment
in which they must live: the poorest neighborhood, the "borgate"
or the barracks. [...] In the worst case, their ingenuous fatalism
becomes a kind of rebellious anarchism. At least, they do not to
consider as sacred what really is not as such" (Pasolini 1999, 903).
[7] For Pasolini, Rocco
instead simply represents Simone as the "evil" one. In
my opinion, Accattone represents the director's desire for
understanding the likes of Simone. Since the characters' bare lives
are totally "other" to the reality of the director, the film suspends
judgment about their actions and attempts to understand their reasons
to the extent of their living conditions.
An investigation of the concept of "work" can be useful to exemplify
my interpretation. The Italian Constitution reads that the Republic
was founded on "work" ("il lavoro"). Pasolini's article,
which I previously quoted and which included both a description
of the Roman sub-proletarians and a critique of Visconti's Rocco,
was a response to a reader's letter addressing the problem of "work"
vis-ą-vis the Southern emigrants. In this letter, a Roman citizen
declared that the emigrants from the South could not be residents
because they did not have a job and they could not have a job because
they were not residents. This letter claims that "work"
is linked to the process of exclusion and elimination of the "rejected."
In the name of "work," on which the Republic was founded,
the Italian government could shape a new National identity. It would
finally eliminate the split between " the "People" as a whole and
as an integral body politic and, on the other hand, the "people"
as a subset and as a fragmentary multiplicity of needy and excluded
bodies" (Agamben, What is a People?). I think that Pasolini's insistence
on the word "work" in Accattone represents a reaction
against the governmental use of "work." Accattone
and his buddies call "work" a "bestemmia;" they make fun
of those who work because they will all meet at the "Campo
Santo" anyway. In other words, the sub-proletarians challenge
the idea that "work" should always be equated with "good."
In this way, Pasolini contrasts the current capitalist society,
as well as the government, which use the same term as instrumental
to establish hegemony to the detriment of the sub-proletarians.
Furthermore, Pasolini also defied the government's idea about human
beings' natural sense of duty and virtue, arguing that the psychologies
of the sub-proletarians who live in the slums have reached a "pathological
level." Pasolini thought that "work" couldn't solve their
problem. For Accattone, working is unbearable. Accattone's exclamation
during his first day of work "Are we at Buchenwald?" links
with Pasolini's idea of the "borgate" as concentration
camps, but also hints at this man's inadaptability to work.
This point is crucial for Visconti because for him, as a Marxist,
"work" was an instrument to educate the sub-proletarians and maintain
a "good" behavior. It is worth noticing that in her letter
to Rocco, Rosaria praises Simone for the family's respectability
in the neighborhood; however, they most likely had the house from
the city of Milan because Ciro found a job at Alfa Romeo.[8] I would claim that
there is an evident connection between "work" and moral
behaviors in Rocco, which agrees with Gramsci's writing in
the section of the Prisons Notebooks called "Americanism
and Fordism." Ciro's story embodies this idea. From a Gramscian
perspective Ciro is a positive figure because he received an education
both properly intellectual (the film stresses the fact that he went
to school) and practical (he works in the factory). Ciro is the
one who is concerned with what kind of job his brothers are doing
and he doubts that to be a boxer means that one is working. On the
other hand, Simone's "evil" behavior can be associated
with the fact that he does not "work." Yet I would argue that the
film does not represent Simone simply as "evil," but conveys
the complexity of his character. For example, in the scene at the
bar (right before Nadia's murder) and in the one of the murder as
well, Simone's facial expressions betray the same naivety he showed
the very first day he met Nadia or he looked out the streetcars'
window. During the scene at the "Idroscalo" Nadia tells Simone
that he is a "beast" and that "everything he touches
becomes filthy." However, it seems to me that Simone looks
more desperate than "bad" and that Nadia's words are excessive.
This is especially true if we compare the film to the script published
in 1960. In the original script Nadia's lines follows a scene that
was then cut, in which Simone brutally beats Nadia in a moment of
rage. In the script, Simone is definitely more violent and disturbed
than in the film, not only in this last scene but in the one of
the rape as well.[9] I think that the film stresses Simone's defeat
and the castration of his dreams, together with his evil behavior.
The "movements" of Simone's character mirror in my opinion those
of the leit-motif, which follows him (and the other characters)
during the film. Both his character and the leit-motif are "busy,
reharmonized, rephrased, redeveloped" (Landy 1996, 148).
The second part of Pasolini's critique of Rocco involves
another character, Ciro. I believe that Ciro is conceptually a "variation"
on the "theme" of the Gramscian "organic intellectual." In other
words, Visconti takes the theme of the organic intellectual and
re-articulates in the context of the new contingency. For Gramsci,
every man engages in "intellectual" activity whenever s/he thinks
"critically" and elaborates coherent thought. Furthermore,
Gramsci writes that technical education is fundamental in the modern
world in order to produce a new kind of "intellectual"
that is "organic" to the working class. Ciro is an "intellectual"
because he is able to look at reality and autonomously elaborate
a critical understanding of it. Moreover, Ciro also has the "function"
of the intellectual within the collective unity of his family. He
acts within the Parondi as a rationalizing force. For example, Ciro
frequently asks his brother Rocco to think rationally about Simone's
behavior; he is the one who tries to "educate" Luca and
to open his mother's eyes as regards to Simone. However, when he
wrote "The Southern Question," Gramsci thought that the
Southern peasants could not produce intellectuals organic to their
own class, but rather that the traditional intellectual or those
produced from within the working class should take the role of intermediaries
between the political force (the party) and the sub-proletarians.
In Rocco, Visconti suggests that the Southern peasant, who
now lives in a big city, can autonomously elaborate a conception
of the world "superior" to common sense. Ciro is indeed
Visconti's own "creation" on the base of the Gramscian
model.
Why did Pasolini say, "Accattone cannot become Ciro?" Pasolini
motivated the absence of "Ciro" by a lack of technical tools. More
exactly, he intended a lack of a "language" that would be able to
express the development of a character like Accattone into a Ciro-like
figure. Regarding to this lack, Pasolini cited his two novels Una
Vita Violenta (1959) and Ragazzi di Vita (1955). Pasolini
claims: "Accattone was born in a moment of discouragement,
that is to say during the summer of the Tambroni government, so
there is a sense in which Accattone is a regression with
respect to Una Vita Violenta" (Pasolini 1965, 35). In Una
Vita Violenta, the protagonist decides at the end to subscribe
to the Communist Party. In Accattone, the protagonist "develops"
from pimp to thief. This "false" progress represents the fact that
Accattone's "common sense" does not become "good sense," in Gramscian
terms. I will attempt to unveil the "reasons" behind Pasolini's
representation of the sub-proletarians as immobile in their worldviews
by contrast to Rocco's characters.
As Marcia Landy highlights in Film, politics and Gramsci,
"Gramsci's notion of common sense and good sense is the lynchpin
in his analysis of existing and future hegemonic formation" (Landy,
78). Gramsci writes in the Prisons Notebooks that
"common sense" is "the folklore of philosophy." In
Landy's words, "Common sense is polysemic, formed of various strata
from philosophy, religion, institutional practices, and individual
experiences" (78). All the members of the Parondi family possess
at the beginning of the film what Gramsci calls "common sense."
Interestingly enough, the "common sense" of the mother Rosaria does
not evolve during the film. I would argue that Rosaria's intention
to move from Lucania to Milan does not depend on the acquisition
of "critical consciousness." Gramsci writes that "common sense"
is not a negative concept by itself: the problem is that those who
only have "common sense," i.e. a non-coherent worldview,
will most likely conform to the conception of the world imposed
by the hegemonic social group. I think that Rosaria is a very good
example of this dynamic. Her decision to join Vincenzo in Milan
was "uncritical." At the beginning of the film Vincenzo
declares that Rosaria should have waited until he would find a job
for the brothers. Her departure reflects an un-critical belief in
the economic miracle. This belief is juxtaposed with a backward
morality. For example, when the brothers go to work for the first
time she warns her children to come back with lots of money from
their working day; at the end of the film, she sees Simone's murder
as a "delitto d'onore" motivated by his jealousy and unveils her
attachment to an archaic southern morality[10].
Vincenzo points out to her that they should have waited to come,
Rosaria looks at the folkloric sign of the pin with the picture
of her newly dead husband. Vincenzo's behavior does not mirror an
acquisition of "god sense" in Gramscian terms as well.
His interest towards his mother's decision is not motivated by a
critical understanding of the economic situation of the whole family
but by his personal interest, i.e. his marriage with Ginetta. When
Ginetta's family decides to break the engagement, Vincenzo is ready
to step back to "his origins" and force her.
Accattone suggests that the "innocence" of their
common sense is the only way to prevent the sub-proletarians to
conform uncritically to the bourgeois worldview, i.e. to to become
like "Rosaria" or "Vincenzo," is to save. In Pasolini's words, Accattone's
characters "live outside of a historical consciousness and specifically,
of a bourgeois consciousness" (Pasolini 1965, 32). Therefore, they
are "pure." Pasolini claimed that the frontality of the shots, the
simplicity of pans, the general "fixity" that characterized his
way of "looking at the world of the poor" corresponded to his desire
to maintain the "purity" of "the elements at work in the psychology
of a derelict." These elements are pure because they are "devoid
of consciousness" (32). This definition of the sub-proletarians,
as living in an archaic time, outside history and Christianity,
echoes Carlo Levi's description of the Southern peasants in the
book Cristo si č fermato ad Eboli (1947). At the same time,
Accattone acknowledges that the situation has changed since
the immediate post-war years. Therefore, in the film there is a
character like Stella whose purity contrasts with Accattone's "innocence."
When he sees Stella for the first time, Accattone says: "You
must be from somewhere else. I would not think you were from Rome.
You seem so pure and innocent. Boh. You are lucky that you do not
know." In this scene, Accattone expresses Pasolini's own nostalgia
for an ideal lumpen-proletariat embodied by Stella. At the
same time, I think that this purity is never taken seriously but
rather ironically, so that the "nostalgia" is never equivalent to
a negation of historical development, but rather is a "poetic concession."
It should be clear that Accattone's innocence has nothing to do
with our standard paradigm of morality. Rather, it is a representation
of a "common sense" as a polysemic and mobile magma still autonomous
from the ideology of the hegemonic group. As regards to the intellectual,
Pasolini's idea is different. In his poem "Gramsci's Ashes," Pasolini
writes that it is impossible for the intellectual to negate his/her
awareness of history.
I think that the idea expressed by Pasolini in "Gramsci's Ashes"
is also developed in Rocco and his brothers and in particular
in the character of Rocco. In order to discuss this point, I need
to further develop the dynamics of the transformation of common
sense into good sense. As regards to both Rocco and Ciro, this transformation
addresses the question of intellectual engagement. As I already
mentioned, Ciro functions in the film as the organic intellectual
in Gramscian terms. Rocco's story also develops the question of
intellectual engagement vis-ą-vis the acquisition of critical consciousness,
but in the opposite way. Rocco's behavior changes enormously during
the film. During his conversation with Nadia at the cafe, Rocco
claims that he had become aware of his rights as a human being through
the experience of injustice, i.e. his friends' imprisonment. In
other words, he attempts to elaborate a critical worldview. However,
Rocco had a different experience than Ciro. He worked at the "tintoria,"
where he appears to be disconnected from the working space: he is
the only man at the shop, surrounded by women who declare that they
cannot understand him. Unlike Ciro, Rocco did not go to school.
From the beginning till Nadia's rape, Rocco's "engagement"
appears as uncritically optimistic. Rocco's change of attitude towards
life after Nadia's rape demonstrates that his thought was based
on an irrational faith in "progress." I would argue that
the development of Rocco's character represents Visconti's critique
of the notion of "progress," which he will later develop
both in The Leopard and in Vaghe Stelle dell'Orsa.
I do not think that Rocco's character interprets Visconti's nostalgia
for a pure and innocent world, now irremediably lost and deteriorated.
Instead, I think that Visconti's model for the critique of "progress"
can be found, once again, in Gramsci's writings. Gramsci criticized
an idea of "progress" and "becoming" which relies
on the notion of a necessary improvement along the trajectory of
time. This notion cannot be rationally explained and therefore this
kind of "optimism" can only lead towards the opposite
attitude of "pessimism," as soon as the subject experiences
disappointment. Therefore, Gramsci thinks that one should not understand
historical movements as dependent on the trajectory of the subject's
existence. Rather, one must look at men as a "system."
Anyone who has an awareness of history and understands the individual's
relationship to history as a collective experience will be able
to face the worst experience and still keep the "optimism "of
his/her will. Gramsci writes: "Everything is easy, and one
wants all of those things that one does not have in the present.
[...] We need instead to focus with violence on the present situation
the way it is, if we want to transform it. [...] We need to create
sober men, patient, who do not despair in front of the worst horror
and who does not get excited about every little thing" (Gramsci
1975, Q 9, 60)[11].
These statements can be summarized in the epigram "Pessimism
of intelligence, optimism of will." Visconti himself, challenging
alleged criticism around the film's "pessimism," declared: "My pessimism
is only one of thought, never one of will. The more thought uses
pessimism to investigate the ultimate truths of life, the more it
will gain optimistic and revolutionary strength" (Visconti
1977, 63).[12] Rocco says that anything can be done as long
as one wants it and expresses his desire for anything he does not
have in the present. His decision to be together with Nadia mirrors
in the narrative the optimist's "blindness" towards the
social contingency. Rocco admits to Nadia that he "did not
know" about Simone's passion for her. As soon as Rocco becomes
aware of Simone's desperate passion, he gives up. Faced with the
horror of the rape, Rocco covers his eyes with his hands. Rocco
cannot bear the horror of the present and retreats in a backward
ideology, which is perfectly exemplified in his speech about his
country of "olive trees" and "rainbows." His
sense of honor and his attachment to the family are stronger after
the rape than before. Even his acknowledgment of Simone's exclusion
from the family is expressed by means of a proverb, and moreover
it is called a "sacrifice." In this way, Rocco highlights
that it was a "necessity" and not a willful choice of
the family. He does not believe in men's justice; he believes that
Simone's behavior is only a problem of the "individual"
(Simone's passion for Nadia, his weakness, etc.). Ciro's perspective
is the opposite of Rocco's. Ciro looks at Simone as a problem for
the all family and wants to find a solution for the sake of the
entire family. After his first successful boxing match, Rocco tells
Ciro: "You do not know how ugly it is." By contrast, Ciro's
speech to Luca at the end of the film reveals his awareness (pessimismo
dell'intelligenza) together with his strong will (ottimismo della
volontą) which is based on his capacity to distance himself from
the situation in which he is involved and elaborate thought.
Interestingly enough, Gramsci also claimed that the optimist's
attitude towards life was identical to the pessimist, for they both
look at life as "a river without a mouth." Both the optimist
and the pessimist do not see the goal of their actions within contingency.
If there is any goal for the optimist, Gramsci argues, it is transcendent.
Perhaps, it is not by chance that Ciro calls Rocco a saint, whose
aim lies "outside of history." This is not only interesting concerning
the development of Rocco's behavior but also regarding Rocco's relationship
to Nadia. I would argue that after the rape Nadia and Rocco
look towards the future with the same attitude. The parallel editing
of the match and the murder scene does not allude, in my opinion,
to Rocco's responsibility for Nadia murder. On the contrary, it
seems to sustain a "parallel" between Rocco and Nadia. During the
match, Cerri says: "Mad woman! What are you doing? Why don't
you cover yourself?" In the next frame, Simone tells Nadia:
"Cover yourself." Rocco sells his body to Cerri for Simone.
Nadia sells his body to Simone for Rocco. They both lost contact
with contingency. When he fights he does not see the enemy: he
does not fight for a goal but because of a rage within himself.
In other words, Rocco cannot act towards the fulfillment of a contingent
need but only in function of his desire to "rescue" Simone.
Nadia is "already dead" (in history) when she gives herself to Simone.
Rocco is already dead (in history) when he gives himself to Simone
as well, after the rape. It is worth to notice that Rocco's first
rendezvous with Nadia happens on a street-car. This is actually
the only one of her date that we are allowed to see. This
scene seems to exemplify the deleuzian concept of the crystal of
time (a direct image of time) because we do not perceive time through
movement but rather we experience time through the images. The relationship
between the space (the street) and the object (the street-car) gives
an indirect image of time. In the streetcar scene we are "inside"
the car, disjointed from the outside space. We do not perceive movement
but rather we see time (Nadia and Rocco chatting, then Nadia and
Rocco embracing) and "hear" time (the "bourgeois"
music theme is replaced by the leit-motif). Therefore, the film
suggests that Nadia's encounter with Rocco, i.e. their relationship,
happens "outside history." Furthermore, on the streetcar we hear
both the musical theme that is usually paired with a scene representing
a "bourgeois situation" and the film leit-motif. I would
argue that the theme corresponds to a "naturalistic" representation
of events in time throughout the film. The leit-motif instead, as
Landy argues, is used "in ways suggested by Deleuze that undermine
any clear notion of realism and representation." From the streetcar
scene on, we will not hear the "naturalistic" theme anymore.
I do not have the space in this paper to elaborate on the issue
of "realism" extensively enough, but I believe that it should be
taken into account that both Visconti and Pasolini challenge the
idea of "realism" in classical terms. Therefore, both
films do not aim at a "truthful" representation of reality, such
as the Italian government was asking Italian Neorealist directors
to do (as the Fascist regime had asked its his intellectuals to
do). Visconti explains his "respect" towards reality in his essay
"Anthropomorphic cinema." He clearly explained this point in Empirismo
Eretico (1964): "The most odious and intolerable thing, even
in the most innocent of bourgeois, is that of not knowing how to
recognize life experiences other than his own: and of bringing all
other life experiences back to a substantial analogy with his own.
It is a real offense that he gives to other men in different social
and historical conditions" (Pasolini 1988, 87). Pasolini sees
the self-referential use of the camera as a "moral" question. Visconti's
use of the language of melodrama also rejects identification between
the director's subjective representation and "reality." Visconti
believes in the director's work as a "reality of art." I would
argue that both Pasolini and Visconti react to an idea of "realism"
expressing the equivalence of "resemblance" and "affirmation," which
Michel Foucault had identified at the core of a fundamental tension
in classical paintings. Both Visconti and Pasolini estrange the
spectators by frequently pointing at the film as a "representation."
As Sam Rohdie pointed out as regards to Pasolini's films and writing,
"the pimp is not a pimp" but speaks like a pimp. In other
words, the moving images do not attempt to "affirm" the object represented
by means of "resemblance." Yet "reality" breaks through
their "representations." Sam Rohdie explains this point
in his comments concerning melodrama in Visconti's film: "Melodrama,
by theatricalising reality, reveals it while at the same time revealing
the impossibility, the unlivability of the emotions it calls up,
except within melodrama - that is not in life but in art. The overheated
fiction of melodrama becomes simultaneously revelation of the real,
protest against it, and salvation from it, the place where the values
denied by reality, or defeated by reality, can still survive" (Rohdie
1992, 23).
A short digression on the work of Giovanni Testori can further
explain Pasolini's and Visconti's relationship to "reality"
and "realism." In Rocco, the titles state at the
beginning read that the script is based on some short stories of
Testori's collection Il Ponte della Ghisolfa. During the
shooting of the film, Suso Cecchi d'Amico explained to Guido Aristarco
that Testori's text had been used after a first draft of the script
was already prepared, in order to perfection the representation
of the Milanese reality in the outskirts. Testori himself was present
during the making of the film. In the film, a few line literally
reproduce a story of Testori by the title "Il Ras."[13]
Furthermore, there is another literal citation of another story
by Testori ("Dopo il Match") that is not mentioned in
the titles, from a second collection La Gilda del Mac Mahon.[14] From the same collection is also taken the scene
in which Morini waits for Simone after the match. The character
in Testori's story is also called Duilio Morini. I do not know exactly
how to interpret these citations. Indeed, they tell us something
about Visconti's way of using Testori's text. The stories that Testori
narrates are very different from Rocco's. Since the character
development in the film is completely different if not opposite
to Testori's story, I can say that Visconti did not use Testori
as a primary source but rather as one of the elements to be orchestrated
within the operatic structure of the film. Also, it is intriguing
that Cecchi D'Amico highlights the use of Testori's material in
order to have a more direct contact with the characters to represent.
Interestingly enough, Testori challenged Pasolini and confronted
his attitude towards the Roman sub-proletarians. Testori claimed
that Pasolini used to have always a notebook in his pocket and to
write while in a conversation with them. Testori said that he instead
would go and talk to the "rejected," writing about them only once
he was be back home. Testori declared that he "loved" them. Pasolini,
on the other hand, criticized Testori and claimed that the latter
sentimentally portrayed the Milanese subalterns; Testori would not
engage in a sociological research, but rather sympathize for this
people irrationally. These respective critiques are very interesting
vis-ą-vis the representation of the "new" sub-proletarians in Rocco,
Visconti only cites Testori's text and therefore denies the "sentiment"
that is behind the narration of his characters' adventures. Testori's
stories are not articulated the same way the script of Rocco
is. Moreover, I think that Testori's relation to Visconti as
an author mirrors Gramsci's distinction between Catholic and Marxist
intellectuals. I would argue that Testori, as a catholic, lowers
the intellectual to the people. Visconti, as a Marxist, lifts the
people to the level of the intellectuals by the combination of analytical
discourse and the language of melodrama, i.e. by pairing the elaboration
of a scientifically coherent thought and the language of the national-popular.[15]
In conclusion, would argue that for Pasolini, Visconti analyzes
the social reality of the late 50's still within the same paradigm
of 1948 and represents too schematically the Parondi's brothers.
Therefore, I consider his critique to be the expression of Pasolini's
need for a new paradigm in order to analyze a social reality that
has dramatically changed. In my opinion, Visconti and Pasolini both
understand historically the question of the "disappearance"
of the proletariat, but their responses and interpretation around
the issue differs to a great extent because of their own different
experience as intellectuals as well as their different poetics.
Visconti, who belongs to the generation that lived through the Resistance,
seems to understand the role of the intellectual in a Gramscian
sense, i.e. organizing thought in order to solve the problem and
understands characters not as individuals but as a system of relationships.
These principles are reflected in Rocco's narrative structure.
The Parondi brothers are like the "five fingers in one hand:"
inseparable and born from the same womb (Rosaria). Visconti explicitly
requested this sentence in the film. I think that one should not
look at the brothers as separate beings but as a "system of
social relationships," using Gramsci's words. In this "system"
one can see, for example, that "progress" (Ciro) and "decadence"
(Simone) are inseparable. As regards to Rocco's poetics,
the operatic, the use of leit-motif and parallel editing express
a conception of the film as orchestrating and articulating a web
of different themes. Pasolini, who instead is part of a second generation
of intellectuals, too young to experience the Resistance, still
conceives reality in a "Gramscian way" but also challenges the applicability
of the Gramscian idea of "organic" intellectual and the
idea that school and work could automatically produce someone like
"Ciro." Pasolini's concern is with finding a "language"
that could express the reality of the "rejected." Therefore,
Accattone's poetics revolves around "linguistic"
questions: camera movements and framing especially, which Pasolini
calls the "epic-religious" "way of seeing the world."
Bibliography
- Agamben, Giorgio. 2000. 'What
is a people?' In Means without end.Trans. Cesare Casarino
and Vincenzo Binetti. Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press.
- Aristarco, Guido. 1978. Rocco
e i suoi fratelli. Eds. Guido Aristarco. Bologna : Cappelli.
- Dall'Ombra, Davide and Fabio
Petrangeli. 2000. Giovanni Testori. Biografia per Immagini.
Cavallermaggiore: Gribaudo.
- Foucault, Michel.1983. This
is not a pipe. Trans. James Harkness. Berkeley : University
of California Press.
- Gramsci, Antonio. 1991. La
Questione Meridionale. Roma: Editori Riuniti.
- Gramsci, Antonio. 1975. Quaderni
del Carcere. Ed. Valentino Gerratana. Torino: Einaudi.
- Landy, Marcia. 1994. Film,
Politics, and Gramsci. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1994.
- Landy, Marcia. 1996. 'Critical
History and the Operatic: The Case of the Leopard.' In Cinematic
Uses of the Past. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
- Pasolini, Pier Paolo. 1965.
Pierpaolo Pasolini: An Epical-Religious View of the World.
Film Quarterly, Vol. 18, No. 4, 31-35.
- Pasolini, Pier Paolo. 1995.
Storie della cittą di Dio: racconti e cronache romane: 1950-1966.
Torino : Einaudi.
- Pasolini, Pier Paolo. 1999.
Saggi sulla politica e sulla societą . Ed. by Walter Siti
and Silvia De Laude .Milano: A. Mondadori.
- Pier Paolo Pasolini. 1993.
Accattone. Mamma Roma. Ostia. Milano: Garzanti.
- Rohdie, Sam. 1992. Rocco
and his brothers : (Rocco e i suoi fratelli). London : BFI Publishing.
- Rohdie, Sam . 1995. The
Passion of Pier Paolo Pasolini. London : BFI Publishing.
Testori, Giovanni. 1959. Il ponte della Ghisolfa. Milano
: Feltrinelli.
Testori, Giovanni. 1959. La Gilda del Mac Mahon. Milano
: Feltrinelli.
- Visconti, Luchino. 1977.
"Da Verga a Gramsci (1960)." Visconti: il Cinema.Modena:
Ufficio cinema del Comune di Modena.