Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Mamma Roma
1962 · Pier Paolo Pasolini · Mamma Roma on Sightlines
Pigs at the Last Supper. The film opens on a wedding feast for Carmine the pimp, the guests ranged along a table lit and composed in open homage to Leonardo, and then somebody leads live pigs in among them. People laugh. The composition is sacred, the joke is coarse, and Pasolini refuses to rank them. That is the whole film in one sequence: these people will be given the framing of early-Renaissance altarpieces, and nothing in their lives will be redeemed by it.
Mamma Roma (Anna Magnani) has bought her way out of prostitution. A market stall, an apartment in the new INA-Casa blocks at the edge of Rome, and the sixteen-year-old son she gave up as a baby sent for and installed, so he can be respectable. Then the pimp comes back, and the boy drifts into petty theft.
Between those points come the two most famous shots in early Pasolini: Mamma Roma walking a night street, talking without pause, the camera tracking beside her while men drift into the frame and out of it again, clients and hangers-on with nowhere to be. She never stops talking. The men are weather. Deleuze calls this kind of image the free-indirect subjective, and he took the phrase from Pasolini's own criticism: a concept a director coined for his own practice, promoted into a category by a philosopher. It means the camera goes along with a character and keeps looking at her anyway. Not her point of view. Not neutral coverage either. Two obsessions share the image, hers and the director's, and you feel both. The finer name is the dicisign: the camera perceiving someone who is perceiving, so you sense a second set of eyes in the room. That is why the night walks play as arias rather than scenes. The camera is not gathering information. It is beholding her while she works.
Which explains the odd sensation of the whole film: it looks like neorealism and it does not move like neorealism. Deleuze, following Bergson, says cinema is built on the any-instant-whatever. The camera samples motion at even intervals and takes whatever lands in them; no instant outranks its neighbours, and that ordinariness is the medium's gift. Older image-arts worked the opposite way, on privileged instants: the pose, the peak of a gesture, the form that sums up an action. A painter picks the moment. Pasolini, in a medium designed to abolish the pose, brings the pose back. He frames people head-on, centred, nearly symmetrical, in compositions lifted from Masaccio and the panel painters of the Trecento, and Baragli's cutting holds those faces in frontal shot/reverse so a scene advances as a succession of tableaux instead of a flow. Every so often the film stops sampling and starts posing. Ettore's last scene is the extreme case: the dying boy's body given the composition of sacred painting, the iconographic climax the style has been building toward.
It is a deliberate violation of Bazin's ethic. Don't impose a form on the real, let it keep its ambiguity; Ladri di biciclette was the model, with real streets, non-actors cast for their faces, and a plot engine made of money. Pasolini keeps every protocol and breaks the ethic, handling cinema, as he put it, the way you would handle a sacred object. Visconti had shown him in La terra trema that untranslated dialect and painterly rigour could live in one film, and the borgata speech he wrote for Fellini's Cabiria gave him both the dialect and the figure of the holy prostitute. What he adds is the halo, and the halo is the argument.
Delli Colli's high-contrast black and white gives the non-professionals the weight of carved figures. For Deleuze the close-up is the affection-image, feeling registered and not yet discharged into action, and its purest form is the qualisign: an immobile reflecting face expressing one quality and nothing else. Garofolo's Ettore is exactly that, sullen and sensuous and barely moving, a surface. The grammar goes back to Dreyer's Passion de Jeanne d'Arc, which first treated a suffering face frontally, as an object of devotion. Then Pasolini puts Magnani in the middle of it. Hers is the other kind of face, the intensive one, features in constant micro-movement, an emotion climbing toward a threshold. Critics have said from the start that she is magnificent and somehow at odds with the film around her. She is. Two incompatible face-types are grinding against each other, the star who acts and the boy who is photographed, and she brings with her the icon Rossellini minted in Roma città aperta, which Pasolini needs intact for the friction.
The geography carries the rest. The new housing blocks stand on open ground beside the ruins of a Roman aqueduct and an old church. Deleuze has a category for worlds built this way: the impulse-image, his name for cinematic naturalism, in which a concrete social setting, the derived milieu, turns out to be a skin over an originary world of appetite and drives, and everything inside it runs down a line of slope toward exhaustion. The fruit stall, the apartment with a view, the respectable son: derived milieu, brand new, paid for. The wasteland beside it is the older truth, and the film knew it in the first sequence, when the pigs walked into the sacrament. In Stroheim and Buñuel the slope is appetite. Here it is class. The tone does the descending, buoyant and comic through the first half while Magnani schemes and laughs, then accelerating into catastrophe with no consolation at the bottom.
One more device, easy to mistake for decoration. Vivaldi, laid over pimps and thieves and a market stall, exactly as Bach's St Matthew Passion had been laid over Accattone the year before. Deleuze distinguishes two ways a frame opens outward: onto adjacent space you could walk into, and onto something that cannot be located in the film's space at all. Music is a door to the second kind. This music comes from nowhere in Rome. Not a radio, not a church. It insists from outside that what you are watching is a Passion, while the feast and the street supply the pop songs that are these people's real soundtrack. Both channels stay open. Neither wins. And since the camera is never simply hers, that insistence reads as an author's: a Marxist poet's vision fused with a woman who has no language for her own defeat, speaking for her without pretending to be her.
With Accattone, this film made it possible to shoot the poor without documentary humility, and film history has been spending the permission ever since. Pasolini's own line runs from here through the La ricotta episode and out of the borgate into myth; Delli Colli carried the sculptural monochrome forward, to Leone among others. The narrative move is colder. Take the oldest melodrama plot there is, the fallen woman who sacrifices everything for her child, and delete the part where the sacrifice buys something. Tragedy with the redemption cut out. Her cry at the end is framed against the aqueduct and the city, monumental, purchasing nothing.
Watch the night walks again and try to catch the moment the camera stops following her and starts framing her. That switch, between going with someone and beholding them, is the film's whole moral problem inside one technical choice. And the question Pasolini leaves open is the one his admirers and his enemies have always split on. When he gives a borgata boy the pose of a dying saint, is that love, or a charge sheet against the world that made the pose fit? The film will not say. It holds the frame.
Concepts in play
- Perception-image (free-indirect subjective) — The two long nocturnal lateral tracking shots: the camera walks beside Mamma Roma through her unbroken monologue while clients and hangers-on drift into and out of the moving frame, perceiving with her and beyond her at once.
- Dicisign — Those same tracks keep her frontal while moving with her, and Baragli's frontal shot/reverse holds faces rather than smoothing them into continuity, so the camera's own act of looking stays felt alongside hers.
- Privileged instants — Head-on, centred, near-symmetrical compositions quoting Masaccio and the Trecento/Quattrocento panel painters; the wedding banquet composed as Leonardo's Last Supper; Ettore's final scene staged as the film's iconographic climax in the grammar of sacred painting.
- Any-instant-whatever — The neorealist substrate Pasolini keeps from Ladri di biciclette and La terra trema — real borgata locations, non-professionals cast for their faces, untranslated dialect, a plot engine of economic desperation — which the posed tableau repeatedly interrupts.
- Qualisign (icon of quality) — Delli Colli's high-contrast black-and-white giving non-professional faces the weight of carved figures, and Garofolo's Ettore played as sullen, sensuous passivity: an immobile reflecting surface, directed from outside as an expressive object.
- Reflexive vs intensive face — Magnani's practised, theatrically shaded emotional realism set inside a film whose other faces are directed as anti-naturalistic surfaces; the documented friction between her method and Pasolini's is legible on screen as two different kinds of face.
- Impulse-image (naturalism) — The sub-proletarian world staged not as reportage but as a fallen landscape of drives — Ettore's drift into petty crime, the pimp's return, the pigs led into the sacred banquet — erupting beneath the surface of respectability.
- Derived milieu — The gleaming but soulless INA-Casa apartment blocks, the newly bought fruit stall, and the petit-bourgeois life Mamma Roma is purchasing for her son.
- Originary world — The wasteland of Roman aqueduct ruins and the old church standing immediately beside the new housing blocks, so the modern project is perpetually shadowed by an ancient, sacred, savage ground.
- Line of slope (entropy/degradation) — The narration's movement from comic, buoyant scheming in the first half to accelerating catastrophe, the montage of Ettore's death, and an ending that offers grief without transcendence.
- Out-of-field (absolute) — Vivaldi's instrumental writing laid over pimps, thieves and a market stall — as Bach's St Matthew Passion had been over Accattone — a music located nowhere in the film's space, set against the diegetic dance and sentimental songs of the feast and the street.
- Political free indirect discourse — The Marxist parable of the impossibility of escaping one's class is carried by a camera fused with Mamma Roma's vision without being reduced to it: the author's obsession speaking through a character who has no language for her own defeat.