Rome Journal XII: Pasolini, Ancora!

she-wolf nursing Romulus and Remus

Pasolini’s great masterpiece Mamma Roma was an inadvertent form of mythmaking, that ended up rivaling the she-wolf nursing Romulus and Remus. The movie begins with Anna Magnani leading three pigs into the wedding feast of her pimp Carmine (Franco Citti). The pigs are laughingly called the "Fratelli d’italia,” the brothers of Italy. But the reception is modeled on da Vinci’s Last Supper and the pigs are a proto-Holy Trinity, comprised of Marxism, Christianity and Antiquity, three elements that the film points to as the driving forces of Roman life. Today Pasolini’s vision holds more true than ever. Up until recently the country was run by a billionaire tycoon whose fortune came from media. He stayed in power longer than any post-war prime minister. The Brigate Rosse are no longer an everyday threat, as they were back in the 70’s when they kidnapped and murdered, Aldo Moro, the Christian Democratic prime minister. But the class divisions in the country are still readily apparent and the disparity between poor and rich underlined in Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century are as evident in Italy’s capital as any place in the world. As for Christianity it’s still a huge force with Pope Francis proving to be a charismatic figure who has extended the political influence of the papacy in a way that may be greater than any time since the Risorgimento. As far as antiquity is concerned, the past is to Italy, what oil is to the Saudis. It constitutes the wealth of the country, both economically, in terms of tourism, but also spiritually to the extent that history is written on literally every street corner and to quote Santayana, “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

The Passionate Thief

If you want to see Anna Magnani’s earthly talents turned to comic advantage then check out Mario Monicelli’s The Passionate Thief (Risate di goia, l960), the restored print of which is currently completing a run at Film Forum. Magnani, whose suffering persona in films like Rome, Open City (1945) and Mamma Roma (1962) was accentuated by those famous eyes which sparkled with life in spite of the dark rings, plays the part of, Tortorella, a down on her heels extra at Cinecitta, out for a good time on New Year’s eve in Rome. The Passionate Thief is worth seeing if only for the blond wig Magnani sports as part of her party outfit. Magnani is passionate even in her comic roles, though the passionate thief in question may refer to the character of Lello (Ben Gazarra) who calculatedly seduces Magnani only to use her as a front. “Steal but why play with my feelings?” Magnani cries at the end to which Gazarra replies, “Because I’m a thief and not ashamed of it.” The famous comic actor Toto plays Umberto, a bungling scammer and sometime performer, who is the straight man in the face of Magnani’s frenzied energy. He’s a Buster Keaton double, as they open up their only possession, an umbrella, to protect themselves from the sun rather than the rain. By the end of her New Year's, Tortorella’s fortunes have fallen even further with her taking the rap for the theft of a necklace from the Madonna in a church. Here Monicelli conjures the memory of another famous Italian screen actress, Giulietta Masina, who played an equally down on her heels character, the prostitute in Fellini’s The Nights of Cabiria (l957). Fred Clark has an uproarious cameo as a drunken American tourist who seems like an easy mark, but inadvertently ends up relieving the thieves of their jackets before attempting to jump into a fountain. Poverty is really the subject (“Why are some people born rich and others so poor?” Gazzara’s character asks at another point) and as in Big Deal on Madonna Street (1958), Monicelli uses the comic caper to underline a theme that neo-realists like Rosellini, Visconti and De Sica presented in a more sinister light.

The Origin of "The Origin of the World"

Whistler’s “Symphony in White, Number  1: The White Girl

The 2/9/13 Arts, Briefly column of the Times cited Paris Match as reporting on a unique finding regarding Courbet’s famous and infamous “The Origin of the World” (“The Other Half of ‘The Origin of the World,’" NYT 2/8/13) According to the Times’s recap of the Paris Match story “a collector says he has discovered the top half of Courbet’s portrait.” In passing the Times piece mentions that the painting was “once owned by the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan.” Along with the notoriety of the painting’s wanton pose, Lacan was also notorious for the precocious way in which he terminated his patient’s sessions. Cutting short sessions would, one thinks, mean that Lacan was able to see more patients in one day than the average Freudian and this delicious tidbit might provide some insight into where all the additional money went. But the discovery of the model’s identity is also good news for lovers of an ideal of feminine beauty that is currently held in low esteem. While a truncated nude might be tantamount to the esthetic advantage of low definition (b&w in film, minimalism in art), the closing of the circle here strengthens a worthy cause. The sitter or spreader who, the Times remarked, was  “thought to have been Joanna Hiffernan, a model and muse not only to Courbet, but also Whistler,” can now can be a spokesman for the pubic hair and a posthumous protestor against Brazilian waxing, anorexic photography and other forms of pedophilia that have infected our culture. Were Anna Magnani, who sported hair in her armpits, still alive, she'd undoubtedly be pleased that the identity of  Courbet's model was uncovered.

Swimming Not to Cambodia

Kate Upton, this year’s Sport Illustrated Swim Suit issue cover girl is no Anna Magnani. To begin with she is blond rather than dark and she lacks the hair in her armpits that was one of the things that made Open City’s neorealism complete. But she's a giant step away away from the anorexic and pedophilic Brazilian waxed babes that fashion mags stuff down our throats as if we were goose livers being turned into fois gras (although the actual question of whether she is Brazilian waxed or not has not as yet been reported in the press). Yes like Arab spring a popular uprising has occurred due to social networking and this grass roots rebellion has produced Kate Upton. Listen to the Times’ Guy Trebay "waxing" about the phenomenon (“Model Struts Path to Stardom Not on Runway, but on You Tube,” NYT, 2/13/12), “it is increasingly difficult for the industry to ignore the world outside the Fashion Week tents, particularly the one that is virtual.”  Whatever fashionistas may think, deconstructionists should delight in Trebay’s locution which delivers the unmistakable connotation that the ideal will be replaced with the unreal. In his piece he describes how Ivan Bart of IMG Models, “the company behind the multimillion-dollar careers of woman like Gisele Bundchen” came to respond to a woman who came “from obscurity to No. 2 on a list of the world’s 99 ‘top’ women compiled by AskMen.com, an online magazine with 15 million readers.” “ ‘Kate is bigger than fashion,” Trebay quotes Bart as saying. "‘She’s the Jayne Mansfield of the Internet.’” Kate may have something in common with Barbie but she’s got her “Christian Louboutin stilettos” planted firmly in the air.