Rome Journal VIII: Aqueduct Park

photograph by Hallie Cohen

If you want to spend an afternoon in Rome watching trains speeding by ancient aqueducts, pick up the B at Circo Massimo change at Termini for the A and get off at Guilio Agricola. Viale Guilio Agricola is a long street that leads to a church at the edge of a place called Aqueduct Park. The park is not far from Cinecitta (the film studio complex in Rome) and perhaps it’s greatest  notoriety derives from the the fact that it was the location for the famed opening scene of La Dolce Vita (1960) where Christ hangs from a helicopter. In Pasolini’s Mamma Roma (1962), it’s the place where Anna Magnani son Ettore (Ettore Garofolo) is savagely beaten before his inamorata Bruna (Silvana Corsini) goes off to have group sex with the victors. The varying ways in which Fellini and Pasolini used the park speaks to the world of difference that characterizes the two directors’ views of post-war Rome. Fellini pictured the city as a circus redolent of hope and a gritty glamour. Pasolini looked at its urbanity through the lens of Marxism and class struggle. Today the Viale Guilio Agricola is lined with housing developments that are reminiscent of Co-op or LeFrak city in New York, the kind of middle class housing in which convenience is traded for affordability. Both the neighborhood and the park itself reveal another side of Rome for the tourist, to the extent that the dwellings and the antiquity partake of a certain quotidian reality. The Circo Massimo may long have outlived its use as a racetrack for chariots, but aqueducts are still a source of water and the streets are inhabited by the kind of people you’re not likely to find starring in La Grand Bellezza  (2013). The Marina Abramovic-like performance artist in La Grand Bellezza  bangs her head against one of the aqueducts in the park.

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.

The Great Beauty

The imagery of Paolo Sorrentino’s The Great Beauty is almost as old as his lead character who has just turned 65. Jeb Gambardella (Toni Servillo) is a disaffected novelist and journalist, whose reputation is based on a work called The Human Apparatus published forty years before. He’s the observer, the repository of the film’s sensibility and a stand-in for the playboy journalist that Mastroianni played in Fellini’s La Dolce Vita. The notion of the superior soul through whose eyes we see the world is indeed an anachronistically romantic strategy whose provenance goes right back to the character of Aschenbach in Death in Venice--although there is more than a hint of parody in the extravagance of Sorrentino's creation. And what does our brooding artistic figure see? A selection of the demimonde who are equally disaffected as he is. In fact, it’s as if Sorrentino had made The Great Beauty for American audiences nostalgic for the Rome of movies like 8 ½ and La Dolce Vita  since it’s hard to believe that any Roman or Italian for that matter would recognize the dandyish boulevardier that Servillo plays. Are there any denizens of Rome’s intelligentsia who still dress like the Alan Delon character in Eclipse? The persona Servillo embodies is both over the top and over the hill and one wonders about the very newspaper which subsidizes his current beat—a cross section of esthetic inanity and decadent aristocracy. Is this vision of Rome a product of the Berlusconi media empire? That his editor and confident Dadina (Giovanna Vignola) is a dwarf only solidifies the sense of the movie’s tabloid thrust. Sorrentino has appropriated Fellini’s circus, but there are too many acts and they’re all curiously short-lived. Fellini had a real sense of narrative, but The Great Beauty is a series of jump cuts, cheap thrills that have little narrative arc. Both Fellini and Antonioni dealt with a similar palette, but while a movie like L’avventura challenged the whole way we conceive of narrative, it still told a story. In his perambulations Jeb comes across Talia Concept (Anita Kravos), a Marina Abramovic like performance artist whose has a hammer and sickle carved into her red pudenda and whose cri de coeur is a head butt. Later Jeb witnesses a pre-adolescent abstract expressionist who makes millions by letting out piercing cries as she throws cans of paint on a scrim. Stephen King should appropriate this last character for a future horror novel, but she’s just one of the many disingenuous figures in this period piece masking as an exploration of present day Rome.

Circus and the City

Come one, come all to the Circus and the City at the Bard Graduate Center! See how P.T. Barnum’s circus evolved in to Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey! See the advent of the circus parade with its menagerie of animals (including elephants), carved figures and floats (prefiguring the Thanksgiving Day Parade). Learn how the circus influenced the birth of a whole new form of graphics and poster art including wood engravings and chromolithograpy producing the famous circus ads that look so much like watercolors and owe a debt to the work of Toulouse-Lautrec. Barnum’s Roman Hippodrome the Largest Place of Amusement in the World, Occupying the Entire Block between Madison and Fourth Avenue…was how one read.  See an advertisement for the circus in Yiddish and understand how the circus as a non-linguistic form of entertainment transcended the language barriers of an immigrant population. Learn how the Hippodrome preceded Madison Square garden and see the photographs of the lusus naturae, “human wonders” which included both born and made freaks like a bearded lady and a creature covered with tattoos. See General Tom Thumb’s outfit, his tiny pants and miniature fiddle. See the film of Tiny Kline swinging l000 feet in the air on her Iron Jaw! Remember how the circus influenced Fellini’s imagination in films like La Strada and 8 1/2. Appreciate the European influence, the clowning from commedia dell’arte and acrobatics from gypsy culture! Come one come all!

To Rome With Love

To Rome With Love has about as much to do with Rome as From Russia with Love had to do with Russia or Woody Allen’s previous film Midnight in Paris had to do with Paris. Nevertheless unlike Midnight in Paris whose chief claim to fame lay in portraying stock characters from both the past and present in a sit com setting, To Rome With Love is truly hilarious and inventive, particulary in two of its comic premises. The first concerns a retired impresario with a fear of death (Allen himself) who comes up with the out of the box idea of casting a singing mortician (Fabio Armilliato) in I Pagliacci. The only problem is that the mortician, whose life’s work involves “in the box” solutions, can only sing in a box, i.e. the shower. The ensuing opera house scene literally places the mortician in a shower on stage, with a scrub brush and soap running down his face, as he belts out his arias. But the coup de grace of To Rome is in casting Roberto Benigni as clerk who becomes suddenly and inexplicably the prey of Roman paparazzi. Benigni is dropped almost as quickly as he is discovered when the paparazzi alight upon an anonymous bus driver. There are other strands of plot in the movie which include a Michelangelo who falls in love with an American girl on her way to the Trevi fountain and a Leonardo who falls for an aspiring American actress who likes to quote Yeats and Camus. The movie is characterized by a number of these non-sequiturs that all ignite their own individual brand of farce. Penelope Cruz plays a prostitute, who is mistaken for the wife of proper young man from the provinces (and who in a wonderful piece of Berlusconiana seems to know every Italian businessman in sight) while the proper young man’s wife is swept off her feat by a famous Italian actor. There’s a little bit of Fellini (Nights of Cabiria, Amarcord  and 81/2) in To Rome and a big dose of Midsummer Night’s Dream  as the chaos dissolves and Allen’s cast of characters all land on their feet. 

Mamma Roma

Pasolini’s Mamma Roma, currently in revival at Film Forum, begins with Da Vinci’s Last Supper, ends with a reference to El Greco, in a desolate shot of burned-out ruins, and nods to Mantegna’s famous painting Lamentation over the Dead Christ. Actually, from the beginning, Pasolini’s second film establishes two of the director’s central obsessions—the low life of Rome’s pimps and prostitutes and Christianity, if not the passion of Christ himself, which puts the director in good company when you think of Augustine and Dante’s Divine Comedy, also mesmerizingly evoked in a tragic prison sequence. But the really great art historical reference is Anna Magnani (she, like the Madonna, will likely go down as one of the great subjects for all the artists—in this case filmmakers—who tried to embody her), who plays a majestic whore and lush who wants the best for her son Ettore (Ettore Garofolo). In the first scene she leads pigs into her pimp’s wedding while celebrating her freedom by swinging her then little boy in the air. It’s the bags under Magnani’s eyes—with their world weariness, their lust, their rapture and compassion—that leave such an indelible imprint. Guilietta Massina played a prostitute in Fellini’s Nights of Cabiria with an almost Chaplinesque mixture of humor and pathos, and years later there was Sigmone Signoret’s Madame Rosa. But Magnani is the ultimate whore, strolling through Rome’s underworld in a series of literally death-defying soliloquies—only why did she have to shave her armpits?

Diasporic Dining: Episode II

The one-time peep show gardens, with their topiaries of prostitutes and porn palaces, like Les Gals and the famed Triple Treat Theater, with its mesmerizing XXX sign, are all gone now. In the halcyon days, there was the GG's Barnum Room, where pre-op transsexual prostitutes swung from trapezes. There was Legz Diamond, which still exists in neutered form, where totally naked lap dances led straight to the VIP room.

Peep show booths with their smell of disinfectant; the change belt of the shills; tokens going in the slot; girls there for the asking twenty-four hours a day; women with lactating breasts. The antecedents reach further back, to Depression-era America with its travelling carnival—bearded women in cages, phrenological singularities, prodigious dwarfs whose feat was to hoist their own monstrous heads.

Evenings ended at the Terminal Bar opposite the Port Authority, with its Fellini cast of zoot suits and collagen lips.

The deterioration of Times Square is complete. The hookers and hustlers are gone. There are no gay movie theaters populated by characters from Midnight Cowboy, no world out of which Martin Scorsese could steal the immortal lines of Travis Bickle.

42nd Street has been overrun with chain stores, the New Jersey mall at the intersection of Routes 4 and 17 transplanted into the middle of Manhattan, clothed, depersonalized, stripped of its stripping. This is one transplant that the body politic has not rejected.

The girls no longer stream into the Port Authority, Joyce Carol Oates characters from upstate ending the journey at Phoenix House. Now the streets are so crowded with glazed-eyed gawkers it’s impossible to move. Junk is what they called heroin back in the ‘50s and ‘60s, but now there aren’t enough rehabs to accommodate all the junk food addicts wandering the streets on their trans fat highs.