Search results
Mamma Roma is a 1962 Italian drama film written and directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini, starring Anna Magnani, Ettore Garofolo and Franco Citti. [1][2] Synopsis. After her pimp Carmine marries, prostitute Mamma Roma starts a new life as a marketer in Rome to enable her 16-year-old son Ettore a better life.
Mamma Roma: Directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini. With Anna Magnani, Ettore Garofolo, Franco Citti, Silvana Corsini. An ex-prostitute reunites with her son, but an extortion scheme threatens her aspirations for a decent life.
- (11K)
- Drama
- Pier Paolo Pasolini
- 1965-01-18
- Authorial Intertext
- Humanism
- Catholicism
- Marxism
- Psychoanalysis
- Homosexuality
- Gramscian, National-Popular Phase of Pasolini’s Filmmaking
- A Cinema of Poetry
This article intends to provide both background information on Mamma Roma (1962), Pasolini’s second film, and contextualise the lack of unity, the “expressive clash”, in Pasolini’s work which renders him, as Naomi Greene suggests, “a more protean figure than anyone else in the world of film” (3). Outlined below are the major discourses, as they cir...
Pasolini’s intellectual development was shaped by the humanism at the core of the Italian school program. Unlike his later struggles with Catholicism, Pasolini never really questioned his humanistic education. He gave “humanism” a positive connotation, relating it to the idea of history as the continual process of perfecting an abstract humanity. H...
Catholicism was ingrained in him from childhood and continued to exert an influence over Pasolini’s thought. Deeply religious as an adolescent, he experienced intense mystical longings expressed in his diary. Messianic fervour prepared the terrain for his embrace of Marxism and Pasolini dedicated much time and energy to the reconciliation of the tw...
Marxismchallenged his religious faithand gave Pasolini the tools to think through the problems of oppression. His Gramscian version of Marxism (see below) provided an umbrella under which even some of the humanistic and Catholic principles dear to him could gather. He often stressed the contiguity between Marxism and Christianity.
By the mid-’60s Pasolini had enthusiastically subscribed to the Freudianism that had been widely, if superficially, circulating in Italian culture since the 1950s. Freudianism, like Marxism, constituted an attack on bourgeois ideology. Freud also offered Pasolini a clear and coherent “scientific” theory of the cause and nature of homosexuality.
If psychoanalysis provided Pasolini with the tools to talk about the body rationally, homosexuality gave him the certainty that the body is a purveyor of knowledge and had repercussions on the way he saw the oppressor/oppressed dialectic. Its discourse exposed Marxism’s inadequacy in addressing sexual oppression and led him to highlight the private...
When Pasolini started directing films in 1961, he had already worked on the scripts of some 15 other movies for directors like Federico Fellini and Mauro Bolognini. It was on the strength of his well-received and controversial Roman novels, Ragazzi di viti (1955) and Una vita violenta (1959), that he was first asked to work on scripts and many of t...
Pasolini’s first major essay on film, Il Cinema di poesia(1965), provided a theoretical map of his view of cinema and the poetic intuitions that marked his work. From his first venture into filmmaking Pasolini spoke of simplifying, to the maximum, the objective simplicity of cinema: slow pans (“nothing more technically sacred”); frontality (“I alwa...
About equally as bleak as his first outing, Pier Paolo Pasolini's Mamma Roma is a sobering portrait of the working class' marginalised. In his sophomore directorial feature, Pasolini continues his centring of poor, cafoni characters in the borgate suburbs of Rome.
- (15.7K)
- Arco Film
- Pier Paolo Pasolini
Sep 10, 2012 · For this Marxist sympathiser, radical poet and novelist, the peasantry was the fount of pre-religious grace, inevitably to be broken on the wheel of bourgeois conformity. Whatever Pasolini's ...
People also ask
Who starred in Mamma Roma?
Who directed Mamma Roma?
What is 'Mamma Roma' based on?
Who is Mamma Roma?
Filmed in the great tradition of Italian neorealism, Mamma Roma offers an unflinching look at the struggle for survival in postwar Italy, and highlights director Pier Paolo Pasolini’s lifelong fascination with the marginalized and dispossessed.