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MATTHEW D. BLANCHARD
qherekidsf.com | 864 ELLIS ST STE 4F SAN FRANCISCO CA 94109 USA | matthew@qherekidsf.com http://www.linkedin.com/in/matthewblanchard http://wm.academia.edu/matthewblanchard
further outside the urban ghetto of Rome. Accattone soon abandons his initiative of reform and, responding to Stellas curious fascination with the illicit profession of prostitution, introduces the naive angel of a woman to a new life on the streets. Accattone eventually comes to regret his responsibility in the tarnishing of Stellas pure spirit a nd again seeks to escape his immoral, impoverished existence through moral reform, by finding legitimate employment. While Accattones own spirit seems morally opposed to the pimps profession, he is physically unprepared for real work. Out of exhausted de speration, he quickly chooses to abandon normative employment and turns to yet another illicit profession: thievery. Yet, just as Accattone was unsuccessful as a pimp and as a true working man, he fails as a thief. Ultimately, the protagonist is driven to his death, while fleeing the scene of a robbery gone awry. The films anti -hero, in fact however, finds bliss in death. For, such sanctity and satisfaction in dying was precisely what the protagonist had been seeking from the start of the film. In the end, Accattones quest is complete, and the anti-hero is redeemed by his corporal demise. In order to better recognize the poetry of Pasolinis literary style and to understand how it is brought to the screen, it is important to analyze the thematic religiosity of multiple unifying images which define the film. As Pasolinis first film, Accattone holds close to the Neorealist tradition in one very important way. The director herein analyzes a subject matter that is characteristic of the earlier, Italian cinematic genre of neorealismo : Mans rejection from the greater social network and his inability to find again within it a place that corresponds to his true social-cultural identity and worth. As discussed above, Accattone is not only rejected from his family as a defunct father and husband, but he also finds himself morally incompatible with the inhumane responsibilities of the pimp. The protagonists inability to fully incorporate himself into any particular community is accentuated not only by his constant search for death but also by the hallowing presence of a certain antagonist: a thief, who constantly acknowledges Accattones solitude, criticizing him for not being suited for the pimps vocation: Remember! We are all born for a vocation. You werent born to be a pimp, but a bum. And, here you are! Pasolini, however, diverges from the Neorealist tradition by the manner in which he brings this analysis to the screen. The religious symbolism of Pasolinis cinematic style fully distinguishes the director from more objective directors of early neorealismo , who rejected the overt use of poetry in film. The integral presence of the sub-proletariat community in Accattone is very significant to the cinematic poetry of the film, for it is only within this particular social context that such unmistakably Christian thematization may function. The depiction of Accattone as a Christ-like figure succeeds as significantly pivotal filmic symbolism; because, just as Christ once associated himself with the lowest vagrants of society, Accattone too finds his place among thieves and prostitutes. Moreover, the poetic significance of the protagonists identity is reinforced through his association with secondary characters, each who have names that reveal their allegoric function in the tragic story. The women of Accattones life represent three separate moments of the anti-heros journey toward tragic redemption. We first encounter Accattone as the pimp of Maddalena: a woman justly named as an explicit representation of the classical Christian image of a prostitute. The protagonist is therefore immediately associated with Christ. Once Maddalena has been jailed and Accattone attempts to initiate a moral reform, he humbly returns to beg for support from the wife he abandoned some time ago. Her name being a semantic derivative of a word loaded with religious signification, Ascenza represents here a higher moral and spiritual order to which Accattone can no longer gain access. Accattones social immobility (i.e., his inability to raise himself out of societal destitution) is then doubly represented a s both moral and spiritual immobility, for Accattone will never be permitted his proper ascension. Finally, Accattone encounters a woman whose innocence and celestial spirit is evoked by a name that translates as star. It is Accattones immoral behavior which pulls this star out of the sky and begins to extinguish its shine. Even Accattones name explicitly defines his character as a beggar, incapable of holding any job be it criminal or legitimate. The films eponymous protagonist is therefore left only to beg for forgiveness, for redemption, and even for deat h.
ACCATTONE (Pasolini, 1961) FILM ANALYSIS & REVIEW 2/6
While the religious allegory is explicitly represented in the names of the characters, it is more poetically interpreted by the text of the screen play and in particularly subjective instances of Pasolinis filmic framing of images. The start of th e film is a prime example of how the theme of death and redemption is fully represented through very effective cinematic allegory. We are initially introduced, not to Accattone alone but to a clan of vagrant men who sit together day after day with nothing to do but to share pointless conversations and to laugh down the unsuspecting passerby. Together, the men poke fun at the one young man who is actually going off to work, jeering at him and jokingly inviting him to join the ease, comfort and illusion of their careless leisure: You still alive? They say work kills. Its an honorable death! Hey martyr, listen to me! Quit working and come and joins us at Metro Goldwyn Mayer (roars like lion). Pasolini, in his screen play, not only here initiates use of religious allegory through critically cynical sarcasm (e.g., the working-martyr is later named the Prodigal Son) and fully captures the shameful leisure that characterizes the men of the ghetto, but the director also represents the cinema itself as derogatively linked to the illusory comfort of these mens l ives. The action of the film then shifts to focus on the brother of this Prodigal Son, the beggar. After hearing the legend of the death of Barbarone, Accattone decides himself to try to imitate the story and thereby achieve its own end. Just as Barbarone had done some time before, Accattone gorges himself on a plate full of potatoes and then goes to a bridge to jump to his expected death. The poetic framing here captures the protagonist high above a crowd of bystanders, in a position fully reminiscent of Christ displayed on the cross. Falling into the water below, Accattones body is even extended into the form of a cross: his legs held tightly together and his arms extended straight out on a horizontal, as if crucified. With Accattones failed suicide, Pasolini then introduces new extensions of this religious allegory in which we see the protagonist not only as hopeless character meant to escape a despicable existence through death, but also as someone who hopes to find in death a greater existence through legend. Accattone complains that he still has to make people cry, just as another man laughs away disappointment with another religiously significant joke: Saint Barbarone protected you! The man then goes to imitate the dead Barbarone by lying down on the ground in a position which evokes the traditional Renaissance image of a martyr or saints corpse. With this opening scene, Pasolini represents not only a pertinent social context where leisure is valued more than duty but also a profoundly allegorical reinterpretation of a shameful character who hopes to be canonized in the sanctity of death. Consequently, the final scene of the film represents the fulfillment of the protagonist quest toward redemption and escape, for it is only in death that he is satisfied. It is only in death that he finds the comfort and bliss that his peers so thanklessly exploit around him. Accattones anti-heroic struggle to come to terms with his criminally negligent behaviors, while truly regretting the forced immorality of his personal character, captures the protagonist in a state of perpetual flux between good and evil: a battle between Accattone and himself, Vittorio. Throughout the narrative context of the film, it is often very difficult to distinguish Accattone as a respectable human being. Even though his regret is explicitly represented in his whispered asides and soliloquies Mother Mary make me a saint now that Ive done my penance, he says to himself after comforting a sadden Stella Accattone is almost always portrayed visually as a sort of monster or villain. For instance, when Accattones regret is rejected by his wife and her family, he and Ascenzas brother take their confrontation into the small piazza of their poor neighborhood and begin to fight. Here, Pasolini chooses to frame the two
ACCATTONE (Pasolini, 1961) FILM ANALYSIS & REVIEW 3/6
characters in a way that is explicitly reminiscent of an American Western showdown, complete with the greater significances of a confrontation between good and evil. Accattone is wrestled down to the dusty ground; and, for the first time in the film, his pristine appearance is dirtied. In this instance of dirtied denigration, he is seen more as the vagabond he truly is. In a similar moment of blatant filmic poetry, Accattone again is represented as a monster when, in a drunken stupor after the start of Stellas fall into prostitution, he rushes to the bank of a river, s plashes his face with water, and buries his face in the sand. As Accattone looks up to the friends who have followed him there, we see that the protagonist has now baptized his forsaken immorality in a monsters mask of mud. Accattones regret and his corrosive self-disgust are opposed periodically throughout the film by the protagonists own impulsive tendency to blame others, often women, for his tragic existence. At the start of the film, in a sharp zoom of the camera that emphasizes the misogyny of the speaker, Balilla proclaims, Damn all women, they take you up to heaven and they drop you! In a similar vein, Accattone continues throughout the entire film to hold women in contempt for being the cause of his down fall. In fact, just after revealing the mud-mask of his monstrous identity, Accattone reproaches Stella with particularly contemptuous rage, blaming her for his failures and admitting his own self-disgust: Cant you see? I make myself sick! Before I met you, who was I? I had a car and m oney and everything I wantedAnd now I am waiting for manna from heaven. Accattone, as a villain, herein projects his own self -hatred onto the one woman who has been ready to accept the goodness that hides behind his monsters mask. For, it is only Stella who identifies the protagonist not as Accattone, the beggar, but as Vittorio, the human: full of divine potential and moral value. Pasolini completes his film by fully denouncing the immortality and pathetic escapism of his protagonist, while introducing a surreal element that would have been entirely inappropriate within the context of strict neorealismo . As with most Neorealist protagonists, Pasolini represents sympathetically the social and spiritual isolation of his films eponymous anti-hero as a character clearly rejected by numerous hostile communities, while also insinuating that his protagonists own self-absorption and inability to accept the responsibility of failures are, in fact, the greater causes of his downfall. Just as De Sicas anti-heroic protagonists of Neorealist cinema such as in The Bicycle Thief and in Umberto D., for example perpetuate their own isolation by ignoring the compassion around them, Accattone is incapable of recognizing and accepting his own personal occasion for redemption via the true love and support shown to him by Stella. In the end, Vittorio is left alone with his dreams, to watch as the corpse of his alter ego is escorted to the cemetery. Vittorio is left alone with his dreams, to beg for his body to be buried in the light of day and not in the shadows of night; as if, even in death, Accattone deserves one last glimmer of warmth, hope, and love. Pasolinis use of a surreal dream sequence to close his film, combined finally with the allegoric representation of the nihilistic religiosity of Accattones actions throughout, fully distinguishes the filmmakers style from the more objective genre of neorealismo and brings this film to a poetic level far superior to that of his predecessors. While Pasolini has chosen, with Accattone, to focus on subject matter typical of the Neorealist tradition, the manner in which the filmmaker incorporates the strikingly allegoric religiosity of his poetic style into a socio-cinematic analysis of the urban marginalization and disenfranchisement of his characters allows Pasolini to push beyond the socio-historical boundaries of the Neorealist gaze and to begin to interpret more fully the spiritual nature of Man.
4/6
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL REFERENCES
Pasolini, Pier Paolo. Accattone . Rome: Cine de Duca/Arco Film, 1961. Film. Liehm, M. Passion & Defiance: Film in Italy from 1942 to the Present. Berkeley: University of California, 1984. Print. Marcus, Millicent J. Italian Film in the Light of Neorealism. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986. Print. Bondanella, Peter E. Italian Cinema: From Neorealism to the Present. New York: Continuum, 2001. Print. Legner, Markus. The Art of Italian Cinema: Guidelines. Florence: Scuola Lorenzo de Medici, 2002. Print. Bertellini, Giorgio. The Cinema of Italy. London: Wallflower, 2004. Print.
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FINAL DRAFT : Revision Copy-Edited for Publication, by Author (Thursday, 21 November 2013). Copyright 2002 - 2013 MATTHEW D. BLANCHARD | All Rights Reserved. qherekidsf.com | 864 ELLIS ST STE 4F SAN FRANCISCO CA 94109 USA | matthew@qherekidsf.com
http://www.linkedin.com/in/matthewblanchard http://wm.academia.edu/matthewblanchard
ACCATTONE (Pasolini, 1961) FILM ANALYSIS & REVIEW 6/6