“Uomo di cartone” Pier Paolo Pasolini, Accattone, 1961

Philippe-Alain Michaud

Perché (siatene certi) non è né un gigante, né un re, né un uomo forte. È un miserabile crocifisso, nudo, coperto di ignominia e di ferite, senza splendore, senza grandezza, senza alcuna bellezza; è uno storpio, offeso, spogliato, battuto; è un povero, dileggiato, tormentato, ripugnante alla vista; è un disgraziato, legato, appeso nudo a un albero; i fianchi straziati, la testa martoriata, coperto di sputi; i piedi trafitti e le mani legate. Evidentemente, non è un dio.

Giacomo di Sarug, Omelia sulla caduta degli idoli

La contaminazione

Nei suoi film, Pasolini non ha mai smesso di rimettere in scena il racconto del Vangelo, in forma allegorica (Teorema), letterale (Il Vangelo secondo Matteo), parodistica (La ricotta) o sincretistica, come in Accattone, in ossequio a quel principio di scrittura magmatica che egli riprende da Erich Auerbach1, trasferendo così il racconto evangelico nella periferia di una Roma contemporanea, alla quale, grazie a un ulteriore spostamento, Pasolini conferisce l’aspetto dei paesaggi urbani della pittura del primo Rinascimento.

Nel 1968, in un’intervista con Jon Halliday, Pasolini dichiarava: “Stilisticamente sono un pasticheur. Adopero il materiale stilistico più disparato: poesia dialettale, poesia decadente, certi tentativi di poesia socialista; c’è sempre nei miei scritti una contaminazione stilistica, non ho uno stile personale, mio, completamente inventato da me, benché possegga uno stile riconoscibile. Se lei legge una mia pagina, non stenta a riconoscerla come mia. Non sono riconoscibile perché inventore di una formula stilistica, ma per il grado di intensità al quale porto la contaminazione e la commistione dei differenti stili”2. Auerbach, di cui Pasolini fu attento lettore, ha mostrato come la separazione gerarchica degli stili e dei contenuti operata dalla tradizione greco-latina (dello stile elevato e dello stile umile) non si sarebbe potuta himself to the point that he died the death of a slave. “That the King of Kings was treated as a low criminal, that he was mocked, spat upon, whipped, and nailed to the cross—that story no sooner comes to dominate the consciousness of the people than it completely destroys the aesthetics of the separation of styles; it engenders a new elevated style, which does not scorn everyday life and which is ready to absorb the sensorially realistic, even the ugly, the undignified, the physically base.”3 Pasolini’s Accattone moves through the working class suburbs of Rome just as Christ “moved in the everyday milieu of the humble folk of Palestine; he talked with the publicans and fallen women, the poor and the sick and children.”4 And when Halliday asked the director in what manner he had been influenced by Dreyer, Mizoguchi, and Chaplin—his favorite filmmakers—the answer returned once again to the formal plane, to Auerbach’s concept of magmatic writing: “Well, I don’t know if you can really talk about direct influences. I don’t know if I was thinking about these authors when I was shooting the film, they are source references I made somewhat from the outside after I’d finished the film. When I was making it the only author I thought of directly was Masaccio.”5

Though Masaccio is most commonly associated with his departure from Giotto’s still gothic sense of space and the establishment of a linear perspective that can be traced back to Brunelleschi, Pasolini sought a different type of realism in his painting, the “proto-Humanistic,” materialistic, sculptural realism that may be observed in the frescos of the Brancacci Chapel, in which Roberto Longhi endeavors to distinguish Masaccio’s work from the work of Masolino.6

Pasolini draws on Masaccio’s spatial conception for the outline of his buildings, in the absence of a uniform distribution of space, in the simplicity of the action taking place, and in the contrast of the backgrounds with the close-up shots. Roberto Longhi, to whom the director ascribed his “figurative fulguration,”7 thus described Masaccio’s painting, “the background, where the common tenements establish a novel vision of the cityscape, which one might call neo-Romanesque were it not for the new certainty of the space: in the two cramped alleys, one caught in shadow, the other struck by the sun; in the house in the center, jutting out over the others; in the way the fixtures for hanging cloths in front of the windows turn slowly and precisely, coming to a halt at the vanishing point, set the exact center of the width of the entire fresco.”8 These words are reflected in the reconnaissance shots mostly taken not with Tazio Secchiaroli but with his assistant, 9 in which Pasolini followed a rule of “absolute expressive simplicity,” as he himself stated in the notes taken on the day before he began shooting the film.10 In them, we observe his desire to establish a connection between the movie and the figurative, compositional universe of early fifteenth-century painting:

The Day Before. October 4

Faces, bodies, streets, squares, shacks piled one upon the other, the blackened walls of broken skyscrapers, mud, hedges, the suburban lawns scattered with bricks and trash [. . .]11

The Day Before. October 21.

The sun clings to those rows of terraces, I say, and to the yellowish embankments of houses—when they are not blue, or gray, or red, or smooth like the surface of an oil painting (with, I repeat, an underlying layer of the grainy plaster of the old, yellowish houses of a thoroughly spent suburb). The air’s muddy hue is barely cracked by the radiant, albeit compressed, 3 p.m. light. A summer shudder runs through the crowd, dressed in miserable, greasy rags, dusty and wet. It is hot again.12

Jacopo Carucci, detto Pontormo, Studio di figura per l’affresco di Poggio a Caiano (recto), 1519-1520, Gabinetto Disegni e Stampe, Galleria degli Uffizi, Firenze

Jacopo Carucci, known as Pontormo, Study for a Figure for the Fresco at Poggio a Caiano (recto), 1519-1520, Gabinetto Disegni e Stampe, Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence

Pier Paolo Pasolini, Che cosa sono le nuvole?, 1968, Archivio Fotografico Cineteca Nazionale - Centro

Pier Paolo Pasolini, What Are the Clouds?, 1968, Archivio Fotografico Cineteca Nazionale - Centro