Authors: Clive James
Having so resonantly played back-seat driver, Pasolini was bound to grab the wheel.
Accattone
, his début movie as a director, in 1961, was the world of
Una Vita Violenta
made noisomely accessible to all, with no punches pulled, even in the casting: the bad teeth on display were the genuine article. The only star associated with the movie was Pasolini himself. The
result was a triumph. Condemned out of hand by all the right people, it was a scandalous artistic success that was widely seen to spring from an even more scandalous reality. By a paradox whose
consequences he would never cease trying to talk his way out of, Pasolini gained immediate and universal acceptance as the first fully authenticated multimedia genius ever to wear dark glasses
indoors and a silk shirt undone to the third button. His subject matter was life beyond the margin; he himself was no more marginal than the Pope. How to reconcile this anomaly?
He couldn’t, but he made a great try. If Mr Schwartz had gone lighter on inessential detail he might have found room for a few paragraphs pointing out what a continuous thrill it was to be
in or near Italy when the film directors were all living in each other’s pockets, poaching each other’s personnel, and turning out movies that struck you even at the time as memories to
be kept, partly because the people who made them so obviously had memories of their own. The glaring difference between the Italian cinema and the French New Wave was that the Italians hadn’t
sent boys to do a man’s work. Quite apart from the international big guns like Fellini and Visconti and Antonioni, there was a whole row of domestic household names who could get the tragic
recent history of their country even into their comedies. Anyone who wanted to know what really happened to young Italian deserters who ran away from German machine guns could have found out from
Comencini’s
Tutti a Casa
, a comic vehicle for Alberto Sordi which nevertheless brought out the full tragedy of the collapsing Fascist farce. Most of these directors were social
democrats – moderates, if you like, or bourgeois liberals, if you insist – but they could produce a socially responsible cinema, and there was at least one Marxist, Gillo Pontecorvo,
who left Pasolini’s Marxism looking like the caprice it was. Pontecorvo’s
The Battle of Algiers
was a political film in the way Pasolini’s films never were.
But everyone at the time knew that Pasolini’s role was to remain unpredictable by refusing to mature. He carried a licence to shoot his mouth off out of season, forever making statements
because he could never make sense. Italian cinema had room for just one Godard-style head case, and Pasolini was it. The special exemption he held in the literary world also applied, on a larger
scale, in the more spectacular world of the movies. Almost every film he made was indicted, sequestered, banned from the festival, reinstated, fought over, laughed at – above all, talked
about. If he hadn’t scandalized them, people would have been disappointed.
He was a spoiled child given a camera for his birthday, who made home movies about what had spoiled him.
Oedipus Rex
was an obvious love poem to his mother, played by Silvana Mangano at
her most iconically beautiful, with Pasolini’s alter ego Franco Citti in the title role. Starring in
Medea
, Maria Callas was his mother all over again: statuesque, mad about Jason,
ready to kill anyone for him, including her own sons. In
Teorema
, Terence Stamp played Pasolini himself, the sexually omnipotent stranger who penetrated the bourgeois household and
everyone in it, as if the plot of Jerome K. Jerome’s play
The Passing of the Third-Floor Back
had been given a monkey-gland injection. Stamp, looking more beautiful than Mangano and
Callas put together, was almost credible as the avatar before whom the whole household lined up seriatim to be ravished and transfigured. An earlier choice for the role, Lee van Cleef, might have
made disbelief harder to suspend. The early choices for the role of Jesus Christ in
The Gospel According to St Matthew
were similarly unpromising. Jack Kerouac was one, Allen Ginsberg was
another, and there was even a dizzy moment when Yevtushenko was considered. But Pasolini saw sense, cast a strikingly good-looking unknown, and made his best film, the one that shocked even the
Marxists. It took the Gospel straight. Under the influence of Pope John XXIII, the Curia had decided that the occasional venture into the mass media need not be ruled out. The Franciscans put up
the money for the movie on the sole condition that Pasolini’s script stuck to the book. Pasolini might have done so anyway. Matthew’s Christ comes with a sword. It was the way Pasolini
saw himself: the man from nowhere, speaking authentic speech, potent beyond containment, loving the poor, transfiguring them by his touch. Authenticity was aided by the contractual and temporal
impossibility of Christ’s castigating the bourgeoisie, consumerism, American-style false tolerance, etc. All He was allowed to do was cleanse the temple, which will always need cleansing. As
a Biblical film,
The Gospel According to St Matthew
has no peers and only one plausible emulator I can think of – Bruce Beresford’s 1985
King David
. That film, much
derided even by Beresford himself, has something of the same startling, self-contained feeling of being there where it all began, away from here where it all ends. Recast and given the budget to
finish the big scenes that were cut short when bad weather chewed up its shooting time,
King David
might have come even closer to the Pasolini film Beresford so admired when it came out,
in 1964. But Hollywood was a bad place for Beresford to start from. To that extent Pasolini was right about American consumerism. He was just wrong about the Italian bourgeoisie, from which came
the independent producers who backed his movies not just because they hoped to make money – always a gamble with a director out to get banned if he could – but because they respected
his gift. The Franciscans respected it, too. Modern Italian society was more complex and fruitful than Pasolini ever allowed. He wasn’t sufficiently impressed by how it had given rise to him.
He was too busy being impressed with himself.
It did him in, in the end. History caught up with him in the late nineteen sixties, when the student rebellion outflanked him. His reaction to the student revolutionaries was the same as de
Gaulle’s.
Vi odio cari studenti
: I hate you, darling students. Pasolini cheered the police for hitting them. At least the police were poor, whereas the students were
figli di
papà
, sons of daddy – in a word, bourgeois.
But by then it was becoming evident even to Pasolini that the class war was over and the bourgeoisie had won it. Belief in the socialist state was draining away in the West because it was
already dead in the East. The only course left was to clean up democracy. Pasolini didn’t take defeat gracefully. Using the regular front-page platform given him by the country’s
leading newspaper, the
Corriere della Sera
, he railed against every aspect of the new reforming spirit. He condemned abortion, divorce, even gay rights. He could have been preaching from
the Reverend Criswell’s pulpit in Dallas, except that he still considered himself the true Left. All this new stuff was just ‘the American type of modernist tolerance’. The
bourgeoisie was just boxing clever.
This was foolish, but there was worse to come. He condemned the poor, too. They had failed him, the way the Germans failed Hitler. Like many social commentators who love people by the class,
Pasolini had never been much good at loving them one by one: apart from his sainted mother, he froze out everybody in the end – he was the authentic Brechtian iceman. But in the last phase he
did the same thing even to his collective paragon, the poor people of the
borgata
. His undoubted passion for their way of life had always been riven by a contradiction. He thought they
were authentic, speaking a tongue unspoiled by suave hypocrisy, honest in their animal lust. If all this had been true it would have been a good case for keeping them poor. But he also said that
the slums they lived in were capitalism self-condemned, ‘truly and really concentration camps’. (Pasolini also habitually trivialized the word ‘genocide’, thereby pioneering
the unfortunate current practice of squandering the language appropriate to an absolute evil on a relative one.)
The tension between these two attitudes was fruitful for him as long as they could be held in balance. When it became evident, however, that the only wish of the poor was to join the consumers
he despised, Pasolini could find no recourse except to enrol them among his enemies. In his three, increasingly dreadful last movies, his ideal pre-bourgeois world of freely available sex is
successively discovered in Boccaccio, Chaucer and de Sade. The trilogy makes painful viewing. Escapism is too dignified a word. Pasolini was fleeing into a past that never existed from a present he
couldn’t face. In a notorious front-page piece for the
Corriere
he dismissed his once-beloved Roman sub-proletariat as having succumbed to ‘a degeneration of bodies and sex
organs’. Pasolini even had the gall to suggest that education was ruining them. For the admirer of Gramsci it was a sad betrayal. Gramsci had always been delighted by any evidence of his
proletarians’ improving themselves. Pasolini wanted them to stay the way they were. When they showed signs of independent life, he lost interest in them.
Perhaps too kindly, Mr Schwartz doesn’t make much of the possibility that they were losing interest in Pasolini. One of the most famous men in the country, recognizable at a glance, he
still drove by night into the territory of the Violent Life. But time was ticking by. Once, the car and the clothes would have been enough. Now he needed his fame. What next? Charlus with his
rouged cheeks? Aschenbach with his rinse? Rage, rage against the dyeing of the hair. Luckily, Pasolini never had to face the sad, slow twilight of the predator gone weak in the hams. He died the
way he had lived, dramatically.
He had always thought that life was like that: drama. It was the belief that made him the kind of Communist who sounds like a Fascist. His politics were an insult to his intelligence. But there
was a saving grace. The Italians are cursed with a language so seductive it can gloss over anything; Pasolini could always make it reveal more than it concealed, even when he talked tripe. He cut
through the mellifluous uproar to speak the unspeakable. Pasolini’s matchless ability to be irritating in every way meant that he was also irritating in the ways that count. Beneath
Pasolini’s politics lay his perceptions, and some of those remain permanently true. Free societies feel free to waste human lives, pushing them to the edge and calling them part of the
landscape. The better we are at telling ourselves that this is inevitable, the more we still need telling that it won’t do.
New Yorker
, 28 December, 1992 and 4 January, 1993
Asanisimasa
is a seeming nonsense word that crops up early in Fellini’s
8½.
Later on you find out that it isn’t nonsense at all, but a real
word expressed in a children’s code, like one of the language games Mozart played with his sister. Simpler even than pig Latin, the code works by inserting an ‘s’ after each vowel
and then repeating the vowel before moving on to the next consonant. Take out the padding and
asanisimasa
contracts to
anima,
the Italian for ‘soul’. At the heart of
Fellini’s greatest film, one of the greatest works of art of the century, is a single word.
To get to it, though, you have to do more than crack a childishly simple code. You have to follow the director down a long corridor in an old-fashioned luxury hotel. It is late at night. Along
the corridor comes Marcello Mastroianni in the role of Guido Anselmi, a renowned Italian director buckling under the strain of starting work on his latest, make-or-break film before the script is
really finished. Guido is wearing a black hat with its sides curled up, he has hangdog bags under his eyes, and his overcoat is draped over his forearm. Surely this is the studied sartorial
insouciance of Fellini himself – a clear confession that the director is his own hero. We know who this is. We know what must be going on in his head: anguish, remorse, panic. But without
breaking step in his forlorn march he suddenly twists and flicks one foot sidewise while it is in midair, as if he were momentarily attacked by the memory of a dance. Why does he do that?
I first asked myself this question in Florence, in 1963, when
8½
came out. Even in the delighted shock of that first viewing, it was clear that
8½
had dozens of
such apparently self-contained moments, enigmatic yet instantly memorable: the squeaky crackle of Guido lying back with languorous angst on a bed heaped with the eight-by-ten glossies of actresses
from whom he has to choose the supporting cast; the sheeting that shrouds the scaffolding of the uncompleted rocket ship flapping in the sea wind at night; Guido’s father going down into his
hole in the ground; the ancient cardinal’s face inhaling the steam in the sauna at the spa; Sandra Milo, Guido’s airhead mistress, trying to walk in two different directions at once
when she spots Anouk Aimée, the terrifyingly poised wife; Guido slumped in the preview theatre in front of the intellectualizing screenwriter who has nagged him beyond endurance and who, in
the beleaguered director’s imagination, has just allowed himself to be hanged. If you could have stopped the film from moment to moment, it might have looked like any film in which a visually
gifted director lights fireworks that will illuminate the darkness of an unilluminating script. But the film established its coherence in the first few minutes and unfolded inevitably. It was a
film about an unfinished film – about a film that never even started – and yet it looked and sounded more finished than any film you had ever seen. About a director who didn’t
know what to do next, it always knew exactly what to do next. It was a cosmic joke.