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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. She finds him a job as a waiter by blackmailing a trattoria owner and tries to draw him away from his thieving friends and occasional streetwalker Bruna. When Mamma Roma is forced back into ...
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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...
Anna Magnani is Mamma Roma, a middle-aged prostitute who attempts to extricate herself from her sordid past for the sake of her son.
- Mamma Roma
With a fervent yearning for respectability and enough money to buy herself a brand-new life in Rome, the uninhibited, fearless, determined former streetwalker Mamma Roma renounces her ignominious past to reunite with her loafing 16-year-old son Ettore.
Jul 27, 2014 · Set during the time period in Italy known as the Italian economic miracle, Mamma Roma offers a searing critique for this type of environment, especially with how the boxy, public housing that the characters exist in is juxtaposed with the ancient structures in the surrounding countryside.
Dec 12, 2008 · At the wedding of her former pimp to a country girl, Mamma Roma celebrates her own liberation from a life of reluctant prostitution. She sells vegetables in the outdoor market and dreams of a respectable future for her teenage son, Ettore.
