by Mark Cousins
Few people have watched Sleep the whole way through, but it was important in a number of ways. The film introduced the idea of cinema as an event rather than the linear experience of a story. It was, by implication at least, a tender expression of homosexual desire when this was still taboo in cinema. Jean Cocteau’s work and that of underground Californian filmmaker and author Kenneth Anger also addressed this theme, but Warhol went further and led the way for what was called “New Queer Cinema” of the 1990s.
EXPLOSIONS AND ADVANCES IN FILM STYLE ACROSS THE REST OF EUROPE
Crossing the Atlantic again we find someone who was gay, like Warhol, and who instinctively tended towards pure and simple films like Warhol; but if Warhol’s films worked like trance-inducing background material, the opposite was the case for Italy’s most passionate filmmaker. Pier Paolo Pasolini was as violently against his times as the New Yorker was in tune with them. A novelist, poet, journalist and polemicist, he was the most notorious of the six Italian filmmakers who changed the art of filmmaking in the 1960s.
Pasolini was born in Bologna and brought up in north-eastern Italy where he experienced Mussolini’s fascism at first hand. His resultant Marxism was the lens through which he saw his working-class, often slum-dwelling, characters first in novels in the 1950s, then in films. Starting his film career as a screenwriter, he contributed to Fellini’s Nights of Cabiria (Italy, 1957) (see page 73), then caused a stir with the first of his many films about Italian sexual and class taboos, Accattone (Italy, 1961). The story of a pimp living on the impoverished outskirts of Rome, the film could not be more opposed to the “tradition of quality” films that Truffaut hated. Pasolini said of his approach, “Accattone lacks many of the technical devices that are normally used in films. There are never any angles, close-up or otherwise, in which you see the character from the back or over the shoulder. There are no sequences in which a character enters and then exits from the same scene. The dolly, with its sinuous, impressionistic movement, is never used.”7
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The use of bright sunlight and simple framing of real-looking people gave Pier Paolo Pasonlini’s Accattone a distinctive look. Italy, 1961.
Bresson could have written these words: frontality, simplicity and rejection of technique. He and Pasolini, Maysles, Dreyer, Cassavetes, Warhol and, to a certain extent, Hitchcock, felt the need to scrub the cinematic schema of its accumulated layers. Added to the “splintering” of Godard, (the idea that a shot is a moment of time) and to the momentary-ness and rejection of sociology in Truffaut, we now have the asceticism of these directors. Why? Part of the answer is technological, of course. The equipment became simpler to use and lighter to hold. This argument has more weight when one learns that in the 1990s, when equipment underwent a second miniaturization, a group of Danish filmmakers launched an explicit manifesto, Dogme, to minimalize film technique (see pages 461–62). It seems that when filmmakers notice how simple their kit is, they reject what they see in an almost moral way, as the vulgarity of elaborate technique.
A second reason is that the return ro the raw, simple style of the late 1910s and early 1920s was the contribution made by filmmakers to the 1960s rejection of consumerism, of veneer, of the accumulated layers of affluent society. The problem with this political argument is that Warhol, for example, was very much in the flow of that society and certainly was not theoretically against it. A third reason needs to be considered: only in the 1960s did filmmakers properly absorb the modernist idea, popular in other art forms, that visual art must first and foremost be about its own material. Painters should not disguise their basic equipment – a canvas surface, paint and brush strokes. So with cinema. Bresson, Godard, Truffaut, Dreyer, Warhol, and now Pasolini, wanted, for very different reasons, to rake through the schemas available to them to find the simple essence of cinema – shots and cuts. Just as their forbearers had done in the 1910s, they were using small cameras again, filming frontally in black and white, rejecting the widescreen format and cross-cutting techniques.
Pasolini, in fact, looked to go even further back than the 1910s. He explains, “My cinematic taste does not derive from a cinematographic origin … What I have in my head, like a vision, like a visual field, are the frescoes by Masaccio and Giotto (207) … fourteenth-century painting which has man at the centre … I always conceive the background as the background in a painting and that is why I always attack it from the front.”8 This can be seen in Accattone. The frontality of it was astonishing and Pasolini often emphasized this by filming with the scorching sunlight behind his leading actor, Franco Citti. This technique, in the director’s own words, “hollows out the eye sockets and the shadows under the nose and around the mouth … as a result … the film was imbued with that ‘deep aesthetic sense of death’ which the critic Pietro Citati talked about.”9 In other words, as the still overleaf shows, Citti’s face looked like a skull.
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Pasolini used pre-Renaissance painter Giotto’s powerful portrayals of biblical figures as a model for some of his filming.
Accattone’s dialogue is arresting. Take, for example, the scene where Accattone finally decides to stop being a pimp. When he announces this to his friends, one predicts, “Today you’ll sell your watch, tomorrow you’ll sell your gold chain and a week you’ll not have eyes to cry with.” The almost biblical intensity of such dialogue would not sit easily in many films, but a decade later, the American director Martin Scorsese – Catholic and of Italian origin – explicitly used Pasolini’s model in his breakthrough film, Mean Streets (USA, 1973). Combining biblical turn of phrase with his understanding of moments in the novels of Irish novelist James Joyce, he filmed scenes where young Italian men, like Accattone’s friends, meet in a bar and say to each other, “Are thou the King of the Jews? Doest thou sayest this to thyself or have others told in me?”10
On its release, Accattone was picketed by neo-Fascists who hated its bleak portrait of Italy. Two years later, Pasolini made an even more frontal film, again drawing on fourteenth-century Italian painting, whose subject was no less than the life of Jesus Christ (208). Here a third element in the geometry of the director’s complex personality comes to the fore: to his homosexuality and Marxism, add his Catholicism. For much of the twentieth century there was a relationship of sorts between Catholicism and Marxism but what concerns us here is how they folded into Pasolini’s cinematic vision. The answer is that together they made him wary of the naturalism of neo-realism. He wanted to film the structure of the lives of his characters, not just their surface, and he wanted to render them sacred. Borrowing from religious painting helped in this regard; choosing timeless themes and locations did too. However, there is also another explanation for this. The filmmaker who has appeared as frequently as any other in this story of film – Carl Theodor Dreyer – was Pasolini’s only real filmic model. It was to Dreyer’s work that Pasolini turned in order to help him make the religious film, Il vangelo secondo Matteo/The Gospel According to St. Matthew (Italy, 1964). In fact, he took his cinematographer, Tonino Delli Colli, to see Dreyer’s films before filming Accattone, “to have a model since he couldn’t manage to explain to me what he wanted”,11 as Delli Colli explained.
Pasolini’s work is so revealing about the broader trends in 1960s cinema because he, like Bresson, wrote about it. Take this, for example, which could almost have been penned by Bresson: “I have an almost ideological, aesthetic preference for non-professional actors … in so far that they are fragments of reality in the same way that a landscape, a sky, a sun, an ass walking along the street are fragments of reality.”12 Again we have the idea that cinema had too much baggage and had strayed too far from reality. Compare this quotation with a piece that Truffaut said around the same time: he wouldn’t work with actresses from “tradition of quality” films because “they affect too much the mise-en-scène”. This last phrase, “mise-en-scène”, refers to the way people and things are positioned within and moved around the frame. For Pasolini, Truffaut, Bres
son and the others the fictitious nature of mainstream cinema affected even purely abstract questions such as composition. Looking back at the images from 1960s cinema in this chapter we notice something important – these very diverse filmmakers tended to film the human head either square on or, in Godard’s case, from behind. Side angles, shot-counter-shot and the language of closed romantic realism were too tainted for them.
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The simple, austere cinematography of The Gospel According to St Matthew was inspired by the films of Dreyer. Italy, 1964.
Pasolini’s rich mix of early painting, Bresson, Dreyer and homosexuality would be taken up by a British director of the 1980s and 1990s, Derek Jarman, but its immediate effect was on a prodigious young Italian who was Pasolini’s assistant, who watched the day that his master filmed the scene where Accattone rejects his former life and who was also enthralled by Godard. Bernardo Bertolucci was the son of a northern Italian poet and, like Pasolini, started in screen writing. His second film as director, Prima della rivoluzione/Before the Revolution (Italy, 1964), released when he was just twenty-four years old, was an intoxicating account of a young man in the director’s home town of Parma who dithers about becoming a revolutionary but opts in the end for the security of his middle-class background. Using Lelouch-style long lenses, Godard’s jump cuts and Pasolini’s brutal frontality, Bertolucci captured the young man’s dilemma with zeal (209). In 1970 he would make two films that would influence a raft of 1970s American directors, but at the moment he leads us to a hugely successful filmmaker for whom he conceived an important screenplay.
Sergio Leone started by playing a small part in De Sica’s neo-realist landmark Bicycle Thieves (1948) and then became an assistant director, working on Ben-Hur (USA, 1959). After making a series of Italian epics, he cast an American TV actor in a Western influenced by the themes of loneliness in Kurosawa’s films, and Henry Fonda’s and John Wayne’s inscrutability in the movies of ohn Ford. The actor was Clint Eastwood, the film was Per un pugno di dollari/A Fistful of Dollars (Italy–Germany–Spain, 1964). Traditional Westerns were dying out in America in the 1960s. They accounted for a third of US production in 1950 but just nine per cent in 1960, a drop from 150 films to just fifteen. Their themes were considered too traditional, patriotic, even racist and sexist, and only modern reworkings of them seemed to appeal, yet Leone revived them in Europe. He subtly altered their imagery, for example, and his typical building was an Hispanic mission church bell tower rather than a ranch house. Out of the huge box-office success of A Fistful of Dollars, the so-called “spaghetti Western” cycle was born. Once again technological advancement played a part in Leone’s success. Image 210 shows a frame enlargement from A Fistful of Dollars. At first glance it seems nothing more than a good example of the widescreen imagery that was familiar in Japan, America and elsewhere from the mid-1950s. However, notice the staging of the image. The foreground and background are far apart, yet both are in focus. This was rare in widescreen photography and the reason Leone could do this was because the Italians had invented Techniscope in 1960. Techniscope allowed two “unsquashed” widescreen images to be stored one above the other on a 35mm frame rather than one squashed frame. Although this made the result slightly grainier, it allowed shorter focal length lenses to be used. As Greg Toland’s cinematography showed, short focal lengths lead to deeper space within the image. Leone was the first director to exploit this new technology to the full.
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Francesco Barilli (left) as Fabrizio, a youth unsure whether to become a revolutionary or a conformist in Before the Revolution, Bernardo Bertolluci’s precocious adaptation of Stendhal’s The Charterhouse of Parma. Italy, 1964
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Sergio Leone and his cinematographers Massimo Dallamo and Frederico Larraya chal-lenged the conventional “washing line” compositions of widescreen films in A Fistful of Dollars, whose massive success launched the spaghetti Western cycle. Italy– Germany–Spain, 1964.
To this marriage of width and depth he added – thanks in part to Bertolucci – an almost mythic sense of the American film genres. His C’era una volta il West/Once Upon a Time in the West (Italy–America, 1968) featured grand crane shots, epic music, intense stand-offs, Edenic pastoral scenes, a brutal sense of retribution and an elemental feeling for the differences between men and women. It was about films themselves, the pleasure of watching them for their own sake and the beauty of their familiar scenes, exactly as A Bout de souffle had been. Like John Ford’s The Searchers (USA, 1956), it was about how vengeance can become a man’s reason to live. More daringly, Leone extended scenes, such as the opening one and another in a bar, so that the whole film became about waiting. Howard Hawks’ Rio Bravo (USA, 1958) was about this too, in a way, but Leone’s film was abstractly so: for retribution to come, for modernity to come, for the world to change. He had worked with the neo-realists at the beginning of his career and imported their sense of the timeless, de-dramatized moment into his operatic Westerns. In 1984, he made a sister film, Once Upon a Time in America (USA, 1984) (211), which mythologized and brutalized the gangster film as Once upon a Time in the West had the Western. In it Leone did not so much extend time as fragment it, telling his story out of sequence, with flashbacks within flashbacks, as confusingly at first as L’Année dernière à Marienbad. The effect of these two films is unforgettable. A master Italian filmmaker had stolen America’s two indigenous film genres, enlarged them stylistically, made explicit the masculine brutality of each, and filtered them through his pessimistic view of life. Leone’s influence was great. The best western director of the 1970s, Sam Peckinpah, said that he would have been nothing without Leone’s example, and another, Stanley Kubrick, claimed that the Italian influenced his celebrated A Clockwork Orange (UK, 1971).
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Leone continued to emphasize the epic and brutal elements in American movie genres, for example in Once Upon a Time in America. USA, 1984.
Leone was Italian cinema’s most commercially successful 1960s director, but even more operatic than his films were those of Count Don Luchino Visconti di Modrone. Like Pasolini he was Marxist, Catholic and gay, yet his cinematic instincts were the opposite. Where Pasolini captured the brutal lives of impoverished people with the pared-down techniques of the late 1910s, Visconti was closer to Vincente Minnelli in decorating his frames and elaborating his camera moves to capture the decadence of the wealthy milieu in which he had been raised.
Or, at least, he was eventually, because in the 1930s he left Italy (fifteen years after Mussolini had come to power), designed costumes for Jean Renoir in France, and become a communist, before directing, in 1942, a forerunner of neo-realism, Ossessione (Italy) (see page 191). In the 1950s he directed opera in Milan and it was only now that he evolved, in cinema, a style as sensuous as Mizoguchi or Minnelli, both of whom he admired. Of the filming of Senso (Italy, 1954), his sumptuous account of nineteenth-century Italian history, he said, “Sometimes I was dreaming of opera”13. His Rocco e i suoi fratelli/Rocco and his Brothers (Italy, 1960) returned to that quintessential 1920s theme, a family migrating from the peasant countryside to a growing city. This film and his subsequent international box office successes Il gattopardo/The Leopard (Italy, 1963) and Morte a Venezia/Death in Venice (Italy, 1971) extended the tensions of 1950s cinema – glossy surfaces masking what Visconti called “the burden of being human” – into elaborate portraits of decay.
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Elaborate production design and beautiful colour distinguished another operatic Italian film, Visconti’s The Leopard. Italy, 1963.
Swap aristocrats for prostitutes, fashionistas, filmmakers and orgiasts and you get a familiar figure in our story, who also started in neo-realism. Federico Fellini was an international directing star by 1959. La strada (Italy, 1954) and Nights of Cabiria (1957) had shown how effortlessly he could conjure up poignant cinematic dream states. La Dolce Vita (Italy, 1960) was a whole film as vicious as the religious scene in Nights of Cabiria, an in
fluential but exhausting denunciation of fashionable people in Rome. Otto e Mezzo/8½, (Italy, 1963) was rather more. In it a filmmaker, played by Fellini’s alter-ego Marcello Mastroianni, struggles with his ideas for a new production and escapes into fantasies involving his wife, mistress and leading actress (213). Though often thought of as purely autobiographical, 8½ is better understood as a work of cinema, like the famous ballet in Minnelli’s American in Paris, in which the theme is not courtship, but the creative process itself. This is a film about the agony or inadequacy of the conventions of schema plus variation. But not only so. Fellini used the language of fantasy cinema to describe a mid-life crisis – in this case an artistic one. This combination was entirely new.
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A master director at the height of his powers during a great decade for Italian cinema: Federico Fellini’s acclaimed account of creative indecision and mid-life crisis, 8½. Italy, 1963.
8½’s storyline dipped in and out of Mastroianni’s character’s inner life but our final Italian director of the period rejected storytelling more radically than Fellini or any of his fellow countrymen. Michelangelo Antonioni started working in cinema by making documentaries, directed somewhat conventional features in the 1950s, became interested in the American abstract painting of the end of that decade and, in 1960, began a trilogy of films which are often thought of as the most modern of their time. L’Avventura (Italy, 1960), La notte/The Night (Italy, 1961) and L’éclisse/Eclipse (Italy, 1962) each try to express the anxiety of the modern age, as Fellini had latterly done, but use emptiness rather than fantasy as their central idea. This image from La notte helps explain (214). Jeanne Moreau plays the rich wife of a writer – Mastroianni again. They go to a party together, meet other people and, at dawn, she says to him, “I feel like dying because I no longer love you.”