Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Accattone
1961 · Pier Paolo Pasolini · Accattone on Sightlines
A man is being beaten in the dirt at the edge of Rome. An unpaved lot, an unfinished apartment block behind it. A ring of men stands around watching, having nothing else to do. And over the scuffle, Bach: the St Matthew Passion, music written for the death of Christ.
Everyone notices this. The question is what it does. The easy reading is irony — sacred music over squalor, the distance between them the joke. But nothing in the framing smirks. The fight is held frontally, slightly from below, the way Masaccio composes a body taken down from a cross, so that ragged men acquire the weight of figures on a chapel wall. Pasolini is not setting Bach against the borgata. He is claiming, with a straight face, that the brawl and the Passion are the same event.
Deleuze has a name for what the soundtrack is doing. He calls it heautonomy: sound and image each a complete, self-standing work, touching only across an interval that never closes. A normal score serves the picture. It tells you what to feel, and it dies when the scene ends. Bach's Passion is a finished thing that does not know this film exists, and the borgata is a world that cannot hear it. Neither yields. The meeting happens in you, and it has to be made rather than received. That is also why the image stops being obvious. Deleuze's word for an image that has lost its self-evidence and asks to be deciphered is a lectosign, a readable image. You cannot simply watch the beating. You have to decide what it is.
There is a reason Deleuze is a good companion for this director in particular: he took a concept from him. In an essay four years after this film, Pasolini described the free indirect subjective, the shot in which the author's vision and the character's vision are laid over one another so that neither is purely present. Deleuze built it into the Cinema books. Accattone is where Pasolini found the thing before he had a name for it. The camera never looks through Vittorio's eyes. It stands in front of him, on the standard lens he later admitted he barely varied, and looks at his world with the eyes of a poet who is not him and knows it. The scandal of the film is not a bourgeois writer looking at the poor. It is that his vision and their world are fused in one frame with nothing put between them.
Then there is the shape of Accattone's life, which is not a plot. Deleuze describes a cinema he calls naturalism, where beneath any real location lies what he calls an originary world: a place of raw drives where appetite, idleness and exhaustion are the only laws and everything slides one way. The Pigneto is a real district with real inhabitants, filmed as it stood. It is also, here, that other world. Accattone does not decide not to work. He tries, and he cannot, the way a body cannot. Deleuze calls the time of such a world a line of slope, an irreversible gradient toward ruin. Here it runs from Maddalena's arrest to a motorcycle on a road, and the construction never lets it bend. Stroheim and Buñuel, Deleuze's own examples, let the originary world degrade their people. Pasolini's degrades them and crowns them at once. That contradiction is the film.
By 1961 neorealism was considered finished. Deleuze's account of why is worth having. After the war, cinema filled with characters who could no longer act adequately on what they saw, and the tight causal plot slackened into what he calls the balade, the walk that transforms nothing. Accattone's days are exactly that. Card games, loitering, a swim in the Aniene, a theft that leads nowhere, assembled by Nino Baragli as discrete weighted units rather than as suspense. Rome, Open City had put a camera in real streets with partly untrained faces. Bicycle Thieves had cast a factory worker and built a film from a poor man's wandering. Pasolini inherits both and strips out the melodrama and the pity, which were the parts that made neorealism bearable. Bazin had defended that cinema as a window: don't compose, record, let the fact disclose itself. Pasolini keeps the location and the nonprofessional and throws out the humility. He distrusted the tracking shot and the zoom as too naturalistic. He fixes the frame and presents. And from Bresson's Pickpocket, two years earlier, he takes the decisive trick, a petty thief rendered through nonprofessional models and ennobled by borrowed liturgical music. Bach over the thefts is Bresson's move, pushed until it hurts.
Watch the bodies and you see what the fixed frame is for. Deleuze, borrowing from Brecht, calls a posture that makes a social relation visible a gest. These men are not behaving. They are held in attitudes long enough to be read: the slouch of someone with no work, a group around a card game arranged like a fresco. Franco Citti's face, isolated against sky or blank wall, is what Deleuze calls a qualisign, an immobile face reflecting a single quality instead of performing an inner life. The ancestor is Dreyer. The Passion of Joan of Arc is Deleuze's own model of the face as icon, and Pasolini moves the martyr's frontality onto a pimp from the Roman periphery without altering the grammar at all.
Late in the film Accattone dreams his own funeral and watches it. Deleuze would call that an onirosign, a dream-image attached to no memory, circuiting out of the present and back into it. It is also the film admitting the end has already happened. When he dies after the crash he says he is alright now. Defeat and absolution in one breath, and the film will not choose between them.
What did it do? Fellini financed test footage and withdrew, unconvinced by a poet who could not shoot. Bini picked it up. Bertolucci worked as assistant director, his first real job in the industry. The Venice premiere drew neo-fascist disturbances. The incompetence Fellini saw was the invention: refuse camera movement, apply that refusal to people the postwar economic miracle had discarded, and you get something that is neither document nor drama but a debased passion play, staged in the exact lots the state had not paved. Pasolini continued it in Mamma Roma and La ricotta, and anyone who has since filmed the criminal underclass with reverence instead of sociology is working downstream. Deleuze says modern political cinema begins where a people is missing, where a filmmaker cannot speak for a constituted nation and has to invent one out of the faces in front of the lens. The miracle had no place for these men. Pasolini gave them Bach and the compositional grammar of saints, which is a claim, not a description.
Whether that redeems them or only consoles us is a question he asked for the rest of his life, and this film does not settle it. Watch it again for what the camera refuses. It does not follow, it does not creep, it does not cut away to a reaction to tell you how to take a blow. It stands still in front of a man and waits. The waiting is the argument.
Concepts in play
- heautonomy — Passages from Bach's St Matthew Passion laid whole over brawls, thefts and death in the borgate instead of an original dramatic score — a complete musical work and a complete image-world that never merge, the film's 'central tension made audible'.
- impulse-image — Accattone's indolence, appetite and casual cruelty read as drives rather than choices; his one gesture toward reform (love, honest labor) fails the way a body fails, and the film's mode is 'tragic in a specifically fatalistic key'.
- originary-world — The real inhabited Pigneto and the muddy Roman periphery — unpaved lots, unfinished apartment blocks — filmed not as backdrop but as subject, a world of card games, brawls and loitering abandoned by the postwar 'economic miracle'.
- entropy / degradation — The irreversible descent from Maddalena's jailing through failed work and failed theft to the motorcycle crash, moving 'with the inevitability of a passion narrative toward his death'.
- the-gest — Card games, brawls, idle loitering and a swim in the Aniene 'blocked with a formality that lifts them out of naturalism', bodies arranged for painterly grouping so that a posture exposes a social position.
- icon of quality — Franco Citti's untrained face framed frontally and slightly from below against sky or blank wall, directed toward presence rather than psychological acting — 'a face and body more than a performed interiority'.
- free-indirect-discourse-political — Pasolini treats nonprofessionals from the depicted neighbourhoods 'less as characters to be inhabited than as human material to be composed and photographed', fusing the poet's reverential painterly vision with the subproletarian world it films.
- crisis-of-the-action-image — A loose, episodic, picaresque narrative 'tracking Accattone's aimless days rather than building a tightly causal plot', with Baragli's cutting serving accretion rather than engineered suspense, at the exhausted tail end of the neorealist cycle.
- voyage-balade-form — Accattone's drifting through the borgate — loitering, a swim, a botched theft — a wandering inherited from Bicycle Thieves' picaresque of the underclass that changes nothing about his situation.
- onirosign — The set-piece dream/premonition sequence in which Accattone attends a vision of his own funeral, shaped in the cutting into the film's clearest intrusion of the sacred on the profane.
- the readable image — The deliberately incongruous pairing of sacred music with squalor forces the brawl in the dirt to be interpreted rather than simply followed; the fixed frontal frame presents an image to be read like a fresco.
- people-are-missing — The subproletariat of the borgate, excluded from the postwar miracle, filmed typologically and 'sacralised' — a people given iconic form by the film because they have none in the nation's image of itself.