Rome Journal IX: Piazza Tommaso di Cristoforis

photograph by Hallie Cohen

In one of the most moving scenes from Pasolini’s Mamma Roma, Anna Magnani and Ettore Garofolo, who plays her son, stand perched on the edge of opportunity, of a new life which manifests itself in the form of better housing. The scene takes place in front of a dramatic archway leading to a housing unit on the Piazza Tommaso di Cristoforis. We’re on the outskirts of Rome, near the Porta Maggiore—which is one of the ancient entrances to the city. Pasolini’s shots are like tableau vivants which exude a profound sense of place. Antonioni's setups have a similar sense of place, but his movies end up looking like Di Chirico paintings. By contrast, Pasolini’s style, his esthetics, which were as immersed in art history (he studied with art historian Roberto Longhi), also drew their power from the director's left-wing politics. When Pasolini filmed Mamma Roma the area was poor and not far from a church on a long street, Via Casal Bertone. Here he shot the iconic opening scene in which Mamma Roma leads three pigs she calls the “Fratelli d’Italia" into the wedding reception of her pimp, Carmine (Franco Citti). The scene is modeled on da Vinci’s Last Supper, which itself is painted on the wall of Milan’s Santa Maria delle Grazie and records a niche similar to the one which Pasolini created for his movie. Though Piazza Tommaso di Cristoforis is still an outer borough, there’s now a majesty to the location. The apartment house is gated, presided over by a guard and is reminiscent of grand old Upper West Side buildings in Manhattan like the Apthorp, with its courtyard and auspicious entranceway. How times have changed! If you walk from Piazza Tommaso di Cristoforis to Via Casal Bertone you will come to Favole di Pizza at Via Cesare Ricotti, 8. They have sublime slices.

Longines DolceVita

Gloria Perkins the sexy American actress (played by Dorothy De Poliolo) is back. If you recall she lured Sandro (Gabriel Ferzetti) away from Claudia (Monica Vitti) in Antonioni’s L’Avventura. Wherever Gloria goes she causes rioting by horny Italian men and if you follow Longines DolceVita campaign (in which Kate Winslet appears, along with Bollywood’s Aiswarya Rai) her persona is attracting a gaggle of paparazzi too. Yes it’s actually Fellini’s La Dolce Vita that the sequence is alluding to, but the memory of the scenes Gloria created is also at work. Advertising can be extremely irritating, especially the kind that you see mixed in with previews at your local quadruplex. But it’s comforting to know that scenes from great Italian classics, like L’Avventura and La Dolce Vita still reside in the collective memory of the culture, if only to sell a watch or bottle of perfume. Another recent commercial for Louis Vuitton, for instance, featured a masked ball that recalled  Eyes Wide Shut. Commercials and music videos require a very high level of film artistry—since they have to communicate a good deal of information in a very short period of time. The juxtaposition between a memory and a product is often an example of simple filmic montage, executed with the high production values that commercials require. However, what's next? Will a scene from Bergman’s Cries and Whispers appear as a plug for Obamacare?  Will Fellini’s circus characters from 8 ½ be used to advertise Six Flags? Commerce and art can often sometimes be strange, but effective bedfellows.

A Touch of Sin or the Turin Horse

You may reconsider your views on gun control after seeing Jia Zhangke’s parable of modern China A Touch of Sin. It’s as if you gave Stockman, the crusading doctor of Ibsen’s Enemy of the People, Dirty Harry’s .44 magnum. At least that’s how the film starts. Dahai  (Wu Jiang), a local crusader against corruption (who bears some resemblance to Ai Weiwei), walks around with a blood splattered face after he rids his world of corruption. Nietzsche purportedly came upon the site of a horse being beaten on the streets of Turin and was so traumatized that he never wrote again. Zhangke is plainly drawn to thugs and violence as a metaphor for the violence of the broken social contract that is contemporary China, but also because of its esthetic possibilities. Blood runs throughout the movie like the drip in a Pollock. The director recapitulates this famous scene from Nietzsche, albeit to a different end. After Dahai kills the horse beater, the horse is seen wandering confusedly, pulling its empty cart, not knowing what to do without its sadistic driver. It’s not clear exactly what Zhangke’s trying to say in this scene, but the idea of the beating occurs again and again throughout the movie. Dahai is beaten by the thugs hired by a corrupt local businessman and is mockingly referred to as Mr. Golf (after the golf club with which this is accomplished) by the locals). A young woman who works as a receptionist in a sauna is beaten by two customers and a young worker in one of the huge industrial campuses that populate the movie (the kind that manufactures parts for Apple in Chengdu) throws himself off a balcony to avoid having to carry out a beating. In works like Threepenny Opera, Brecht used thugs and criminals to make his political points and not all Zhangke’s avengers are driven by morality. The movie opens up with the murder of a group of axe wielding thugs, by Zhou San (Wang Baoqiang), a thief who is no Robin Hood. If anything the amorality of much of the violence becomes the harder pill to swallow. And yet curiously despite the knives and clubs and guns, ATouch of Sin is no action movie. In fact there are scenes, right out of early Antonioni, where the camera lingers on the irresolvable psycho-social predicaments of his characters and nothing much happens at all.

L’avventura at Film Forum

A newly restored print of L’avventura is playing at Film Forum and there are problems with it. To begin with, you can barely read the subtitles. But "let’s go to the video tape" as Warner Wolf used to say and revisit some of the themes of this seminal work. In a key sequence at the beginning of the film Anna (Lea Massari), the girl who iconically disappears, tells Sandro, her lover, “When someone is there facing you, that’s all you get.” She’s in despair when they are apart for a month at a time, but she prefers separation’s imaginative possibilities. It’s the territory of Kierkegaard’s Diary of the Seducer and Sartre’s La Nausee with a touch of Bovaryism thrown in. But then Antonioni turns off the current. There’s nothing like an unexplained disappearance to pull the rug out from under mankind. In fact, the Ur disappearing act is the absence of God. Here we have the Southern hemispheric version of Bergman’s The Silence. As Sandro (Gabrielle Ferzetti), Claudia (Monica Vitti) and the others on their boat search the island, Antonioni begins his exploration of distance and scale. The theme of painting runs through the movie. There’s an early cut between Anna and Sandro and a group of American tourists discussing painting, then in a later scene where Claudia is being stalked by men in a piazza she runs into a paint store and asks for a can of blue and there’s the wonderful scene where Sandro intentionally lets his pendant knock over the ink well of a young artist attempting to capture the ornate arch of a church. Antonioni famously said to Rothko, “your paintings are like my films. They are about nothing...with precision,’ The early scene with the figures crawling across the rock strewn island and then the classic urban scenes culminating in the de Chirico like image of Claudia running frantically down the hotel hallway in search of Sandro, who has fallen into the arms of an American prostitute named Gloria Perkins (Dorothy De Poliolo), are all the visualization of the notion of closing the gap, the exists between men and more specifically between man and the enormity of things. It’s not love or even really lust, but some primal fear that brings the figures in Antonioni’s landscape together. When Sandro is caught in flagrante by Claudia, Gloria asks for “un piccolo ricordo,” a small souvenir or memory. Sandro throws some money between her legs as he chases Claudia to the film’s famous climactic or anti-climactic scene. But the lovely words linger with you. Yes, Gloria is a whore, but even she wants to be remembered.

Repulsion

People don’t understand mental illness is probably the simplest way to describe Roman Polanski’s Repulsion. The film which is currently being revived at Film Forum is an essay in at least two forms of subjectivity: that of the omniscient viewer of Carol, the disturbed woman played with such enigmatic brilliance by the youthful Catherine Deneuve, and of Carol herself. Carol is not some urban neurotic out of a Woody Allen film. She exhibits the kind of symptoms (she hallucinates and hears voices) that cause sufferers to jump out of windows. In her case, the violence is unleashed on those around her, an infatuated young man Colin (John Fraser), a greedy and lustful landlord (Patrick Wymark) and her sister’s husband Michael (Ian Hendry), the only one who escapes unscathed. Deneuve’s beauty is a perfect foil for the subjective states of those around her since she is such a cynosure (particularly when she walks around wraithlike in her diaphanous nightgown). This is epitomized in the scene when the landlord, her second victim, comes into the apartment, looks around at the disarray, which unbeknownst to him already includes a corpse in a tub, and says it looks like a “nuthouse,” a piece of humor worthy of Hitchcock. Before coming to his own end as he attempts to rape Carol, he tells her “a cup of hot tea and an aspirin and you’ll be as right as rain.” The world of insanity is where Polanski is expert and the film was oddly prescient since the director himself would come home to face the carnage wreaked by the Manson gang on his own home only a few years later. The iconography of madness begins with an eyeball, segue ways to a beauty salon customer receiving a mud facial and ends with the camera closing in on the eyes of the already distant Carol in family snapshot from childhood. A rotting piece of rabbit is the centerpiece of the decay, but roots of sprouting potatoes soon replace the ticking of the clock as indicators of time passing. Polanski has at least as good a grip on the subject of subjectivity as Bishop Berkeley and maybe better, but the Bishop’s universe had built-in insurance against implosion in the form of God. Repulsion, shot in wonderfully stark black and white, was made one year before Blow Up and much of the shooting take place in what looks like Chelsea’s Sloane Square, the epicenter of the swinging London that Antonioni would capture in Technicolor a year later. La Dolce Vita (l960) is also referenced in the form of a mocking Leaning Tower of Pisa postcard Carol receives from her sister’s boyfriend. But Carol’s episodes, the famous crack in the wall, the fantasy of being molested, the “repulsion,” she experiences, all center on sexuality and in that sense, for all Polanski’s reputation, the film functions as a kind of psychiatric jeremiad against the liberties of the era in which it’s situated. Repulsion also antedated Bergman’s Persona, another film which dealt with the break from reality, by one year though perhaps the character closest to Carol is Shakespeare’s Ophelia who was created almost four centuries before.