From dialogue writer to screenwriter: Pier Paolo Pasolini at work for Federico Fellini

2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 323-337 ◽  
Author(s):  
Claudia Romanelli
Keyword(s):  
Italian Cinema ◽  
Pier Paolo Pasolini ◽  
Critical Attention ◽  
Federico Fellini ◽  
Lasting Impression ◽  
Bernardo Bertolucci

Pier Paolo Pasolini was a poet, novelist, essayist and filmmaker who also worked as a screenwriter for some of the most important Italian directors including Mario Soldati, Mauro Bolognini and Bernardo Bertolucci, to name a few. While Pasolini’s poems, novels and films are widely studied, his work as a screenwriter has not attracted much critical attention. This is partly because Pasolini tended to collaborate with directors whose artistic tastes were very different from his own, making it difficult to understand what he could possibly bring to the films on which he worked. The fact that he took his first steps in the screenwriting teams for which Italian cinema was famous has also contributed to downplay his screenwriting activity. One such example is his contribution to Federico Fellini’s screenplays. Fellini first approached Pasolini because he wished to revise the dialogue in Le notti di Cabiria, which he thought lacked the authentic feel of the language spoken in the Roman slums where the film took place. Although critics have always assumed that Fellini discarded Pasolini’s revisions to his scripts, archival sources tell a different story, revealing Pasolini’s key contribution to Fellini’s work and his eagerness to leave a lasting impression on it.

Coming of age in Milano: Ermanno Olmi from sponsored cinema to feature filmmaking

2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 411-428
Author(s):  
Jim Carter
Keyword(s):  
Coming Of Age ◽  
Italian Cinema ◽  
Modern Life ◽  
Cinema Studies ◽  
The Past ◽  
Michelangelo Antonioni ◽  
Feature Films ◽  
Bernardo Bertolucci ◽  
Critical Process

This article argues that a full understanding of Ermanno Olmi’s feature films will require a deep engagement with the sponsored cinema he made as director of the Sezione Cinema Edisonvolta. It begins by spelling out some of the stakes and challenges of a ‘sponsored turn’ in Italian cinema studies, which during the past decade has inaugurated the long archival and critical process of revaluing the corporate roots of auteurs like Michelangelo Antonioni, Bernardo Bertolucci and, to a certain extent, Ermanno Olmi. It then elaborates on the relation between Olmi’s sponsored cinema (1953–61) and feature filmmaking (1961–2014) by analysing two films that mark the director’s transition from the small to big screen: Michelino 1 a B (1956) and Il posto (1961). The central contention is that these films tell two different versions of the same coming-of-age story: a young boy from the provinces finds work in a downtown office building, where he must come to terms with the fact that he will remain there all his life. The distance between the two films is a measure of Olmi’s own coming-of-age as an intellectual: from a resolved promoter of the guiding role of business in modern life to a sceptical interrogator of white-collar mundanity. After a comparative reading that reveals general similarities of structure and specific scenes of quotation, the article concludes with some remarks about education, a concept through which Olmi’s feature films show themselves to be aware of – even commenting on – sponsored cinema.

Dreams and desire. The cinema of Pier Paolo Pasolini and Federico Fellini: A conversation with Roberto Chiesi

2022 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 97-107 ◽  
Author(s):  
Angela Porcarelli
Keyword(s):  
Professional Relationship ◽  
Civic Involvement ◽  
Pier Paolo Pasolini ◽  
Commercial Television ◽  
Federico Fellini ◽  
Long Term Consequences

In this interview, Roberto Chiesi talks about the personal and professional relationship between Pier Paolo Pasolini and Federico Fellini. He describes their experience with neorealism and how each of them moved past it to develop an original and unique cinematographic style. He focuses on specific elements of their cinema, such as the importance of the oneiric dimension and their conception of the sacred. Chiesi explains the central role civic involvement had in the work of Pasolini; his last movie Salò o le 120 giornate di Sodoma (Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom) (Pasolini 1975) is centred on the dramatic process of degradation caused by the new consumeristic ideology. Fellini, instead, was primarily concerned with the corruptive vulgarity of the new commercial television. Highlighting the importance of Pasolini and Fellini’s legacy, Chiesi concludes the interview by saying that the two artists had the foresight to imagine the dreadful long-term consequences the events of their time would produce, consequences we are experiencing in today’s society.

scholarly journals From Pasolini to Moro: Notes on two unburied corpses and Italian cinema

2019 ◽  
Vol 7 (13) ◽  
pp. 9-23
Author(s):  
Annalisa Mirizio
Keyword(s):  
Political Life ◽  
Italian Cinema ◽  
Pier Paolo Pasolini ◽  
Public Identity ◽  
The Public ◽  
Collective Imagination ◽  
Public Character ◽  
The Way ◽  
Aldo Moro

This text sets out to present the cinematic representation of Pier Paolo Pasolini and Aldo Moro from the idea of the “unburied corpse”. I propose here that, due to the circumstances of their deaths, the lifeless bodies of the filmmaker and the politician do not endorse their public identity but rather overflow and unfold it. Their corpses configured an identity of ordinary man that replaced the image of the public man in the Italian collective imagination and contended to the public character the space of representation. The text recovers some proposals of The Moro Affair (L’affaire Moro, Leonardo Sciascia, 1978) to reconstruct the links between these two protagonists of the intellectual and political life of the Years of Lead. I also analyze the way in which Italian cinema has attempted to interpret the split figures of Moro and Pasolini and their unburied corpses.

Comparing Comparisons: Political Implications of Different Notions of Difference

2016 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 7-26
Author(s):  
Glenn Odom
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Studies ◽  
World Literature ◽  
The West ◽  
Political Debates ◽  
Political Implications ◽  
The World ◽  
Critical Attention ◽  
David Damrosch ◽  
Location Point

With the rise of the American world literature movement, questions surrounding the politics of comparative practice have become an object of critical attention. Taking China, Japan and the West as examples, the substantially different ideas of what comparison ought to do – as exhibited in comparative literary and cultural studies in each location – point to three distinct notions of the possible interactions between a given nation and the rest of the world. These contrasting ideas can be used to reread political debates over concrete juridical matters, thereby highlighting possible resolutions. This work follows the calls of Ming Xie and David Damrosch for a contextualization of different comparative practices around the globe.

‘The well-known, old, but still unbeaten track’: Women Poets and Irish Periodical Culture in the Mid-Twentieth Century

2012 ◽  
Vol 42 (1) ◽  
pp. 32-52 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anne Mulhall
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Literary Culture ◽  
Woman Writer ◽  
Double Bind ◽  
Women Poets ◽  
Substantial Body ◽  
Growing Body ◽  
Critical Attention ◽  
Irish Women ◽  
Under Construction

While neglected Irish male poets of the mid century have seen some recuperation in recent decades, the work of Irish women poets still languishes in obscurity. A growing body of scholarship has identified the need to bring critical attention to bear on this substantial body of work. In this essay I explore the positioning of Irish women poets in mid-century periodical culture, to flesh out the ways in which the terms of this ‘forgetting’ are already established within the overwhelmingly masculinist homosocial suppositions and idioms that characterized contemporary debates about the proper lineage and aesthetic norms for the national literary culture that was then under construction. Within the terms set by those debates, the woman writer was caught in the double bind that afflicted any woman wishing to engage in a public, politicized forum in post-revolutionary Ireland. While women poets engage in sporadic or oblique terms with such literary and cultural debates, more often their voices are absent from these dominant discourses – the logic of this absence has continued in the occlusion of these women poets from the national poetic canon.

The Meaning of Children's Poetry: A Cognitive Approach

2013 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 127-142 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karen Coats
Keyword(s):  
Crucial Role ◽  
The Body ◽  
Critical Discourse ◽  
Holding Environment ◽  
Cognitive Poetics ◽  
Cognitive Approach ◽  
Communal Life ◽  
Clear Sense ◽  
Critical Attention ◽  
Children's Poetry

Critical attention to children's poetry has been hampered by the lack of a clear sense of what a children's poem is and how children's poetry should be valued. Often, it is seen as a lesser genre in comparison to poetry written for adults. This essay explores the premises and contradictions that inform existing critical discourse on children's poetry and asserts that a more effective way of viewing children's poetry can be achieved through cognitive poetics rather than through comparisons with adult poetry. Arguing that children's poetry preserves the rhythms and pleasures of the body in language and facilitates emotional and physical attunement with others, the essay examines the crucial role children's poetry plays in creating a holding environment in language to help children manage their sensory environments, map and regulate their neurological functions, contain their existential anxieties, and participate in communal life.

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