Stupendous, miserable city: Pasolini, Rome, cinema

This dissertation argues that Pier Paolo Pasolini's first two films cannot be understood properly outside the urban context in which these films were set and shot. Accattone (1961) and Mamma Roma (1962) are located concretely in the Roman periphery whose borders were expanding apace during the years of post-WWII economic recovery. The former was shot primarily in the borgate, miserable neigborhoods built by Mussolini's Fascist regime, while the latter was shot in a public housing project built at the furthest edge of the Roman periphery in the early 1950s. The dissertation argues that understanding the specific resonance of these locations is central to understanding the films' meaning, the nature of their political critique of postwar development, and Pasolini's aesthetics. The dissertation begins with a brief introduction to key elements of 20th century Roman urban history. It then essays an analysis of the literary texts that Pasolini produced after his arrival in Rome in 1950. These are writings that occupy themselves with the nature of Roman urban space and the tenor of life in the borgate where Pasolini lived during the early 1950s. The dissertation then moves to analyze Accattone, paying special attention to the way in which the spatial dislocations produced by Pasolini's shooting and editing styles must be understood as responses to the spatial dislocations of the borgate. The dissertation then turns to analyze Mamma Roma and to consider its precise setting in a housing project that was an exemplar of what has been called "architectural neorealism." Through the use of this location and of Anna Magnani---the well known star of neorealist cinema---in the film's title role, Pasolini mounts a critique of the failure of postwar Italian culture (whose aspirations neorealism expressed) to reinvent itself radically in the aftermath of Fascism and war. The dissertation concludes with a brief consideration of Pasolini's turn, in his subsequent films, to a mode of allegorical filmmaking, linking this development to his critique of Roman urban development.