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.

Frederick Wiseman’s "National Gallery"

In a sense Frederick Wiseman was the wrong person to make National Gallery, which is currently completing a run at Film Forum. His signature reticence, characterized by a total lack of narration, becomes the work of art itself. In other films about schools,  hospitals, the welfare system, an insane asylum (Titicut Follies), La Comedie-Francaise, and even the Crazy Horse in Paris, Wiseman’s almost diaphanous docu-novel style with its omniscient seemingly absent author, lets the content breathe. The feeling of seeing a Wiseman film is that of being parachuted into a war zone; the absence of plot, of a beginning, middle or end is mitigated by leitmotifs that create a music. But here the subject is looking itself and at times you end up gazing admiringly at the film, more than the collocation of art works comprising its subject, London’s National Gallery. Frank Lloyd Wright’s architecture in the Guggenheim has often been criticized as competing with and also being unfriendly to art. National Gallery is hardly an unfriendly witness, but in a museum which exhibits many da Vincis, the film is a “Mona Lisa,” continually calling attention to its own enigmatic gaze. All that being said National Gallery is amongst many things a Thomas Struth party. Struth as you may recall is the a photographer who records people looking at art and National Gallery's portraits of people watching Rembrandt portraits and other masterpieces are a singularly affecting part of the movie (in one an attendee with earphones is caught gazing at a docent giving a lecture he can’t hear). The recent The New Rijksmuseum film portrayed another art institution with a similarly broad canvas, but it had an axe to grind, in terms of the museum’s relationship to its surrounding environment. The New Rijksmuseum is to the National Gallery what Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People is to say O’Neill Long Day’s Journey Into Night. National Gallery, which includes a moving scene where a class of blind and visually impaired people are lectured on a Pissarro, ultimately deals with museums and museum going in such as way as to demonstrate what one of Wiseman’s subjects calls “a wonderful opportunity to study the human condition.”

Paris Journal VI: La Sainte Anne de Leonardo

“La Sainte Anne, l’ultime chef d’oeuvre de Leonardo da Vinci,” currently running at the Louvre is a monumental exploration of artistic process using one of da Vinci’s greatest works, "The Virgin and Child With St. Anne"as its petrie dish. Da Vinci worked on his masterpiece over several decades, right up until his death in 1519.  To begin with the show explores the influences on da Vinci in the inception of the work. Bartolomaus Zeitblom and Lorenzo Fasolo ware just two contemporaries whose works impacted da Vinci and a line of artists running from Raphael to Pontormo, Degas ("Etude d’apres la Sainte Anne di Leonardo,” 1855) and Odilon Redon (“Homage a Leonard di Vinci,” 1919) would eventually be influenced by the masterpiece since it was first exhibited in the Salon Carre of the Louvre in 1797. The curators also point to the influence of the painting on Freud’s Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood, in the way that the “virgin’s mantle” recalls the vulture that landed on “Leonardo’s cradle” and which for Freud played such a key role in development of Leonardo’s scientific sensibility. But the key element of the exhibit are the early drawings for the cartoons on which da Vinci based his conception. “The fierce debate about the nature of Mary’s conception, according to which Mary was conceived exempt of Original Sin had encouraged a veneration of her mother,” the curators remark at the beginning of the exhibit. During the long gestation period in which da Vinci created his masterpiece, John the Baptist was replaced by a sheep and Sainte Anne was moved to the top of the field, a change which increased the importance of the Jesus’ grandmother while also giving the painting itself a vertical and diagonal dynamic. The modifications which were not subtle, would change the history of both art and thought.