THE SCREEN
Westerbeck, Colin L. Jr.
The starting dates for the careers of Italy's internationally known directors are pretty evenly staggered from the early forties, when Visconti made his first film, to the early sixties, when...
...A reaction against modern Italy and the conditions of modern life in general, the film is also, in its sensibility, too much a part of both...
...But I think most of us feel that since the war there have in essence been two generations of Italian directors which are quite distinct...
...Based ostensibly on de Sade's 120 Days of Sodom, the film shows us what happens when three Fascist functionaries in the last days Mussolini's government have a house full of kidnapped teenagers at their mercy, or rather, their absolute lack of mercy...
...The ribaldry and explicitness of earlier films are still there, but they have turned sour...
...That they aren't is horribly demonstrated by his own last film...
...The contents of Salo are really so horrible, they're unspeakable...
...But Ashbery, responding to advance word on the film, declined to go at all, and Dickstein, though he Commonweal: 17 accompanied us to the preview, departed again after film critics...
...Pasolini's film abandons itself to a taste for brutality which Bertolucci's film, at worst, only indulges now and then...
...In writing, and especially in poems, the cerebral quality of the medium mitigates the effects of gross images...
...In these two films alone, the whole of Italian cinema today seems diminished...
...Though less cohesive in its initial outlook, this second generation seemed as full of promise as the first and certainly maintained Italy's reputation as a country of world-class filmmakers...
...The starting dates for the careers of Italy's internationally known directors are pretty evenly staggered from the early forties, when Visconti made his first film, to the early sixties, when Bertolucci made his...
...No sooner did he reach the surreal extreme of Porcile than he seemed to move back in the opposite direction again with Medea (1970), The Decameron (1971) and The Canterbury Tales (1972...
...generation of and Pasolini have been, despite eighteen-years' difference in their ages, co-members...
...In theoretical essays on film whose influence Bertolucci has acknowledged, Pasolini argued that "the meaningfulness of [cinematic] images is equivalent to the meaningfulness of words," and at times he behaved as if the two were virtually interchangeable...
...Matthew (1964), or The Decameron—where he was able to take a benign and tolerant view of the human comedy, a view that was, if not warm-hearted, at least warmblooded...
...Ruefully it occurred to me At the destruction, only the film critics have to be on that the feeling Baumbach and I had that we should hand, stay until the bitter end only served us right for being colin l. westerbeck, jr...
...Bertolucci's first work in films was as assistant director on Pasolini's first feature, Accatone (1961), and the following year Bertolucci based his own first feature, The Grim Reaper, on a story by Pasolini...
...But where writing is sometimes not sensual enough as a medium, movies are often too sensual...
...But the mixture of realism and surrealism, passion and abstraction, has always been an unstable, volatile one in Pasolini's films...
...Fellini's filmmaking was able to get outside of la dolce vita and contain it...
...The first generation is the group that contained the Neo-Realist school, from Rosselini's Open City in the mid-forties to Fellini's La Strada almost a decade later...
...It seems likely that this rare versatility which Bertolucci and Pasolini shared was one of the things that attracted them to each other...
...Pasolini's film, especially, seems unable to transcend the state of being it would criticize...
...Indeed, images that are strong and even disturbing are necessary on occasion in order to provoke immediate responses and overcome the remoteness of the reading experience...
...Just before the time when each directed his first feature, Fellini brought the work of the previous generation up to date with La Dolce Vita...
...One thing the four of us talked about was whether it's still really possible to take the measure of a whole culture, as Dickstein has tried to do in The Gates of Eden: American Culture in the Sixties, by looking mainly at books instead of movies or even television...
...In part my harsh opinion of Bertolucci's new film may just be a result of suspicions that, if Italy's politics can be so erratic, her society so unstable and her currency so unsound, Italian culture may be in for a bad time as well...
...A poet like Ashbery, or the young Pasolini about twenty minutes of the film, leaving Baumbach or Bertolucci, is someone who is present at the creation, and me to carry on alone...
...HOMAS POWERS f >f Italy's intervenly staggered made his first ncci made his...
...On the afternoon that I saw Salo, I happened first to have lunch with a colleague, Jonathan Baumbach, who writes on film for The Partisan Review, and with Morris Dickstein and the poet John Ashbery...
...What is perhaps equally important, both men were working poets when they took up filmmaking and continued to write poetry thereafter...
...Each generation of audiences would like to believe that its own artists are greater than, or at least as good as, their predecessors, and the new generation of Italian filmmakers definitely encouraged such hopes in those of us who are contemporaries of Bertolucci himself...
...Let it suffice to say that two of the three sections of the film, "The Circle of Shit" and "The Circle of Blood," are appropriately entitled...
...In these films Pasolini's vision was at its strongest only ribald in the way that Bertolucci's sometimes is in 1900, or that Fellini, on whose Night of Cabiria Pasolini collaborated, can be...
...Their careers go together in fact, and have done since the early days...
...But in a more serious way, my opinion of 1900 results from my feelings that it is literally contaminated by certain similarities it bears to Pasolini's last film, Salo, which has also just been released in this country...
...A miscalculation of this kind is perhaps what goes wrong in Salo and 1900 alike...
...An image which provokes both thought and feeling in words may have the reverse effect on film, leaving us too stunned to think or feel at all...
...As I was saying in my previous column, however, I think we have all begun to have our doubts about Italy, and perhaps, with the making of 1900, about Bertolucci too...
...As much as we would like to think the more recent Italian filmmakers as great as their immediate predecessors and mentors, this just may not be so...
...What distinguishes the best of Pasolini's films is that all are attempts to naturalize some ancient myth...
...I wouldn't attempt to discuss them in any detail...
...The best of his films have been those—The Gospel According to St...
...But the fact that Bertolucci's work is moving within range of Pasolini's final visions at all seems to bode ill for Bertolucci's future...
...Lumping Bertolucci together with Pasolini this way isn't as idle a comparison as it might seem...
...I Disturbing as the film and Pasolini's subsequent murder are, though, they shouldn't cause us to forget, altogether what truly great films he once made.' A graph of his early career would be, despite their affinity, an, inversion of one made for Bertolucci's career so far...
...The imaginations of Pasolini and Bertolucci now seem to be contained, and delimited, by it...
...Where Bertolucci began with a very surrealistic treatment of his material in Before the Revolution (1964), and has since moved away from that approach, Pasolini began as a latter-day Neo-Realist in Accatone and moved the other way, toward surrealism, in Teorema (1968) and Porcile (1969...
...After lunch, Dickstein and John Ashbery were invited to the screening too...
...The second generation began making films about five years after that and includes, most notably, Pasolini and Bertolucci...
...The same year that he made The Grim Reaper Bertolucci won for his poetry one of Italy's most prestigious literary prizes, the Premio Viareggio, which Pasolini (if I am not mistaken) had won some years before...
...The disappointment of Salo and 1900 is that they are not so much about la dolce vita as the product of it...
...It even seems to reflect on that whole generation of Italian filmmakers of which Bertolucci and Pasolini to a permanent e offers a good of a chance—it ut that it offers )f numbers, but whites, who are out...
...In the films where Pasolini's vision of man becomes abstract and virulent, he was usually trying to do the opposite—to mythologize modern reality...
...Their dual careers are interesting, too, because one way to interpret the raw imagery in both Salo and 1900 would be as the fault of too literary a mind...
...This, certainly, is what is going on in Salo...
...the war there Italian directors on is the group rom Rosselini's li's La Strada neration began : and includes, Though less >nd generation and certainly of world-class > would like to lan, or at least lew generation ed such hopes of Bertolucci an, however, I >ts about Italy, >out Bertolucci icci's new film Italy's politics : and her cur; in for a bad y, my opinion s literally coni to Pasolini's :n released in »elf to a taste t worst, only it Bertolucci's s final visions future...
...They've become a weapon to use against the audience, a kind of self-disgust which insists upon disgusting as many other people as possible too...
Vol. 105 • January 1978 • No. 1
