Pier Paolo Pasolini depicted Italian urban life in all its beauty and brutality. Does a new English language version of The Street Kids, by Elena Ferrante’s acclaimed translator, do his work justice?
Pier Paolo Pasolini’s love affair with the city of Rome began in 1950, when he was in his late 20s. He had come there from Casarsa, in the Friuli-Venezia Giulia region, after a scandal involving three boys in the small town of Ramuscello. His adored, and adoring, mother Susanna was, as always, with him. He lived for a year or so with a family named Castaldi at Piazza Costaguti while Susanna worked as a live-in maid for another family called Pediconi a few doors away.
During those first paradisiacal months he befriended Alberto Moravia, Giorgio Bassani (who published one of his poems, an impassioned farewell to Friuli, in Friulian dialect, in the literary journal Botteghe Oscure, which...
Pier Paolo Pasolini’s love affair with the city of Rome began in 1950, when he was in his late 20s. He had come there from Casarsa, in the Friuli-Venezia Giulia region, after a scandal involving three boys in the small town of Ramuscello. His adored, and adoring, mother Susanna was, as always, with him. He lived for a year or so with a family named Castaldi at Piazza Costaguti while Susanna worked as a live-in maid for another family called Pediconi a few doors away.
During those first paradisiacal months he befriended Alberto Moravia, Giorgio Bassani (who published one of his poems, an impassioned farewell to Friuli, in Friulian dialect, in the literary journal Botteghe Oscure, which...
- 11/12/2016
- by Paul Bailey
- The Guardian - Film News
Champion of the disinherited of postwar Italy, Pier Paolo Pasolini's masterworks reveal an obsession with martyrdom that foreshadowed his own wretched death
At the end of Mamma Roma (1962), Pier Paolo Pasolini's great film, the hero lies dying on a prison bed like the dead Christ of Mantegna or a barefoot saint by Caravaggio. Much has been made of the Renaissance and baroque iconography in Pasolini's cinema. The implied blasphemy of Caravaggio's grubby, low-life Christs excited the iconoclast in the Italian film-maker, whose wretched death was somehow foreshadowed in his own work. On the morning of 2 November 1975, in a shanty town outside Rome, Pasolini was found beaten beyond recognition and run over by his Alfa Romeo. A woman had noticed something in front of her house. "See how those bastards come and dump their rubbish here," she complained.
The scene of the murder, Idroscalo, recalls a setting for a...
At the end of Mamma Roma (1962), Pier Paolo Pasolini's great film, the hero lies dying on a prison bed like the dead Christ of Mantegna or a barefoot saint by Caravaggio. Much has been made of the Renaissance and baroque iconography in Pasolini's cinema. The implied blasphemy of Caravaggio's grubby, low-life Christs excited the iconoclast in the Italian film-maker, whose wretched death was somehow foreshadowed in his own work. On the morning of 2 November 1975, in a shanty town outside Rome, Pasolini was found beaten beyond recognition and run over by his Alfa Romeo. A woman had noticed something in front of her house. "See how those bastards come and dump their rubbish here," she complained.
The scene of the murder, Idroscalo, recalls a setting for a...
- 2/23/2013
- by Ian Thomson
- The Guardian - Film News
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