The soft cheese
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| German title | The soft cheese |
| Original title | La ricotta |
| Country of production | Italy , France |
| original language | Italian |
| Publishing year | 1963 |
| length | 35 minutes |
| Rod | |
| Director | Pier Paolo Pasolini |
| script | Pier Paolo Pasolini |
| production | Alfredo Bini |
| music |
Alessandro Scarlatti Giuseppe Verdi Tommaso da Celano ( Dies irae ) Giovanni Fusco |
| camera | Tonino Delli Colli |
| cut | Nino Baragli |
| occupation | |
| |
The soft cheese (Original title: La ricotta ) is a film by the Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini from 1963 . It forms the third episode of the socially critical episode film RoGoPaG . The other episodes are by Roberto Rossellini , Jean-Luc Godard and Ugo Gregoretti .
action
The film is preceded by two text panels, the first showing two quotes from the Bible without sound:
-
Because there is nothing hidden that should not be revealed, nor is there anything secret that should not come to light. If someone has ears to hear, listen!
- the gospel according to Mark (4:22-23 ESV )
-
... and he poured out the coins of the changers and knocked over the tables; and to the pigeon sellers he said, Take this away from here, do not turn my father's house into a department store.
- the Gospel according to John (2.15-16 ELB )
The second text panel presents an explanation also spoken by Pasolini himself:
“It's not difficult to predict that my story will elicit interested, conflicting, and shocked judgments. In any case, I would like to explain here that regardless of how La ricotta is understood, the story of the Passion , about which La ricotta is indirectly, is for me the greatest event that has ever occurred and that the books that tell of it are the most sublime that has ever been written. "
The film takes place at the gates of Rome on the set of a Bible film in which a resigned director tries to direct his most secular , ignorant film crew. Here also Stracci works ( il straccione means in Italian of Lump , a simple) Extra and performer of the good thief . He is plagued by severe hunger, but he dutifully brings his own food ration to his family without getting any of it himself. Disguised as a woman, he manages to sneak a second ration, but before he can satisfy his hunger, the diva's dog, a little spitz, takes care of the food.
Meanwhile, a journalist appears on the set and asks for an interview with the director. He grants him four questions, which he then only answers with sarcastic sentences . When the journalist, apparently satisfied with these answers, wants to leave, he calls him back and recites a poem (Pasolinis): "I am a force of the past ..." The journalist doesn't understand a word, so the director dictates a series of drastic insults into the pen in which he expresses his deep contempt for himself and the Italian bourgeoisie. He dismisses it with the remark that the publisher of the journalist and the producer is of this film.
The journalist leaves and meets Stracci, who sells him the diva's dog. Now he finally has the money to get something to eat: in chaplinesque time lapse he races to the outskirts, buys a huge loaf of ricotta , and returns to the set. But again he does not come to eat, he is called to his mission and tied to a cross. While waiting the others are concerned about the bound man and his hunger funny, a Komparsin sets before him a strip down.
The scene is postponed, but Stracci remains tied to the cross. Only after a break in filming can he finally get back to his ricotta, which is hidden in a cave. He greedily devours the cheese, the amused team has followed him, watching him and bringing him more and more to eat, under their sneering laughter Stracci stuffs everything into themselves.
Then the producer of the film approaches the set with a large entourage. For this occasion, a large buffet is set up in front of the crucifixion scene, which is to be shot in his presence. The director and the stars greet the guests eagerly, the preparations for the scene are almost over. After the huge meal, Stracci visibly suffers from his cross while an assistant goes through his text with him one more time. But when the camera finally starts, he remains silent: he overeat and died on the cross. "Poor Stracci," the director comments laconically, "to die like that ... he had no other way of reminding us that he was alive."
background
prehistory
The book for La ricotta was made while filming Mamma Roma . The financing of the next big project, the film adaptation of the Gospel according to Matthew , turned out to be difficult and dragged on, so Pasolini wanted to insert a smaller film. This was originally intended for an episode film La vita è bella by producer Roberto Amoroso , who, however, could not do anything with the script and refused to implement it. Alfredo Bini , who produced most of Pasolini's films until 1967, therefore offered Pasolini to shoot the film as part of an episode film he had planned; the film title RoGoPaG is made up of the first letters of the directors Rossellini , Godard , Pasolini and Gregoretti .
The basic idea of RoGoPaG came from Roberto Rossellini: the film should deal with the effects of the Italian economic miracle and consumer society on the individual. The individual episodes of the film were completely independent of each other, and there was no exchange of content or cooperation between the directors. Pasolini was not satisfied with the result of the overall project: Gregoretti reported that he even urged Bini to only publish his and Gregoretti's episode.
production
RoGoPaG was created as an Italian / French coproduction between Arco Film (Rome) by producer Alfredo Bini and Cineriz (Rome), which also took over the distribution in Italy, and Société Cinématographique Lyre (Paris). For the third episode, Pasolini was responsible for the script and direction, camera and editing were carried out by Tonino Delli Colli and Nino Baragli , who both worked on most of Pasolini's films for many years. Danilo Donati (costumes) and Flavio Mogherini (buildings) provided the equipment, Carlo Rustichelli was the musical director.
Locations
The film was in October and November 1962 on a Acquasanta called wasteland turned on (then) the southern outskirts of Rome, close to the Cinecittà studios in which originated the scenes of the fictional film Bible. The site is located in the Valle della Caffarella, rich in ancient monuments, and is now part of the Parco Regionale dell ' Appia Antica . Here, with the Calixtus catacomb, is also the burial place of the first early Christian community.
occupation
Pasolini preferred to work with actors who should come from the same milieu as their characters, so he preferred to work with amateur actors . With La ricotta, however, it was a matter of portraying a film team. Logically, he cast the role of director with a director. Initially, Peter Ustinov was in conversation, but he was later able to win Orson Welles for the role, he was originally dubbed by Giorgio Bassani . He also used professional extras from the Cinecittà who played themselves for the extras, whom he usually looked for directly on location. Mario Cipriani (Stracci) and Vittorio La Paglia (the journalist) had roles in Accattone and Mamma Roma . Pasolini had a lifelong close friendship with the actress Laura Betti (the diva).
publication
RoGoPaG opened in cinemas in Rome on February 19, 1963, and neither the entire film nor La ricotta were distributed in Germany. Pasolini's episode was first seen on June 9, 1967 on ZDF's late-night program . In 1976 it was shown in the International Forum of Young Films at the Berlinale .
Scandal and trial
After the premiere of RoGoPaG , Pasolini's episode caused a scandal. It had been approved for rental by the responsible ministry in early February 1963, albeit with an age restriction of 18 years and over. However, shortly after the cinema release, the police confiscated a copy of an ongoing screening on March 1 on charges of denigrating the state religion. The other copies were also confiscated, the film was no longer allowed to be shown. As early as March 7th, the court sentenced Pasolini to 4 months imprisonment on probation after a quick trial.
In May 1964, Pasolini was acquitted on appeal . The court expressly stated that the film as a whole did not meet the criminal offense of denigration, the isolated consideration of individual scenes to evaluate the film was not permitted and represented a wrong interpretation of the underlying law. The public prosecutor's office went into the revision , which in February 1967 was rejected by the Court of Cassation , but no formal judgment was issued because the offense no longer existed since 1966 due to an amnesty. In its reasoning, however, the court once again expressly confirmed the substantive position of the court of appeal.
Pasolini's last film Mamma Roma (1962) was also heavily attacked by the public, but above all his Début Accattone (1961) had caused an unprecedented scandal, so the public attention for the process was great. The previous disputes with criminal charges, physical attacks, sharp polemics up to a parliamentary debate and the storming of demonstrations by militant forces of right-wing groups had led to a solidarity between "the educated classes, the cultural intelligentsia" (in the words of the responsible public prosecutor Giuseppe Di Gennaro ) led with Pasolini, while in the media and on the street on the part of the conservatives and the right expressed an "indefinable racist hatred" (Pasolini): that of all people, an openly homosexual communist allowed himself to "read the riot act, that was not acceptable ”(Bini). Bini and Pasolini therefore suspected that the film was used by the conservative side as an opportunity to make an example of Pasolini as an "example of particular liveliness and extraordinary importance in the swamp of Italian culture" (Di Gennaro).
This thesis is also given weight by the fact that Pasolini had given the character of the journalist insulted by the director in the script with Pedote the name of a public prosecutor who had shown himself to be particularly unfair during interviews in earlier trials. Bini asked him to change the name, but Pasolini only slightly varied it to Pedoti. The prosecution then expressly pointed out this provocation during the trial.
The fact that there was hardly any criticism from the Catholic side also fits into the picture, although the charge was that the state religion was denigrated. On the contrary, the film was positively reviewed in some Catholic newspapers, the lecturers of the papal university could not see any disparagement, and the Vatican censorship authority ( Centro Cattolico Cimenatografo ) did not classify the film as excluded for the faithful, although this judgment, along with the Rating Not recommended , hit over half of Italian productions in the 1960s.
The law on which the indictment is based, the Codex Rocco , dates back to the era of fascism and had never before been applied to films. As a result, the process had significance beyond the individual case. On March 4, a solidarity debate for Pasolini took place at the headquarters of the Italian press association, who took a stand against state (film) censorship of religious questions.
Overall, the public prosecutor recognized the film's socially critical position, and its argumentation referred explicitly to the denigration of religious symbols in individual scenes, especially during the shooting of the fictional Bible film, “by [Pasolini] ... showing some scenes from the Passion of Christ and has mocked them through the musical commentary, the dialogue and other sonic utterances ... "However, prosecutor Di Gennaro also recognized in the scene in which the actress of Maria Magdalena strips in front of Stracci, who is tied to the cross, a" inner masturbation [...] to the point where it relaxes at the moment of ejaculation. ”“ The left outdoes itself in analyzes that want to prove that the film is not intended as a blasphemous provocation, ”reported Alfred Andersch , who commented on this Stayed longer in Rome, not without realizing that in his opinion this was the wrong Re manufacturing strategy, he himself argued with the freedom of art .
RoGoPaG could be shown again after a few months with low censorship requirements, for example the text was defused in some sequences: when the director postponed the crucifixion scene in the film, the polyphonic exclamation of the film team “Away with the crosses!” Now becomes a neutral “Die Another scene! ”Even Stracci's death, which in the film director's comment, according to the script, was still his possibility of revolution, is now only one way of pointing out his existence. In addition, the film title had to be changed in order to emphasize the satirical dimension of the episode film: it was now marketed under the title Brainwashing (in the original: Laviamoci il cervello ).
The process was very stressful for Pasolini due to the years of attacks by the conservative media and also had another unpleasant side effect: the production company got into financial difficulties due to the costs and the confiscation of the film, and the process made it difficult to find investors for others Films, so that Pasolini could not realize his next project Il padre selvaggio (The Wild Father) : the film was supposed to be set and also shot in Africa, and was planned almost exclusively with local, colored actors. The screenplay was published in 1975 with a dedication by Pasolini to the public prosecutor and the competent judge of the first instance.
Film analysis
“We have to wrest the monopoly of tradition from the traditionalists, because: Only the Marxists love the past, the bourgeoisie loves nothing and nobody. Her rhetorical declarations of love for the past are simply cynical and outrageous. This love of hers is at best only an artificial one, certainly not a real one that would be able to create a new story ... "
Pasolini staged La ricotta "with an unusually grim grin for this grandiose pathetic of the film" as a grotesque in which the shooting of a film about the Passion of Christ is carried out in parallel with the real passion of the actor Stracci, until both strands at the end through Straccis Converge death on the cross. The juxtaposition of these two passions determines the design of the film on all levels.
On the one hand there is Stracci, the proletarian who is constantly on the move and laughed at by everyone, driven by eternal hunger, on the other hand the bourgeois, intellectual and nameless director who is completely at ease. He can almost always be seen sitting and does not seem to have any needs, the script says: "All ghost and anxiety: He does not eat". He too is isolated in his resignation. Both take no notice of each other, only after Stracci's death does he become conscious of the director.
The central point of the film are the two scenes of the fictional Bible film. These consist of two re-enacted altarpieces ( tableaux vivants ) from the 16th century, Jacopo da Pontormo's Entombment of Christ (1526–1528) and Rosso Fiorentino's Descent from the Cross (1521), but their implementation in the fictional film grotesquely fails. For Pasolini, who also painted and had studied art history with Roberto Longhi in the 1940s, painting was an important point of reference in the conception of his films. It was not about the adoption of motifs or image quotations, even if this occurs in other Pasolini films, but about the underlying concepts, such as the image structure or the aesthetic strategies of conveying content through the media. For example, Pasolini used the 250 mm zoom lens with its greatly reduced depth of field at long focal lengths for the first time in order to isolate the film director by clearly delimiting the blurred and unconnected foreground and background and, together with the frontal view, to create an image structure reminiscent of Masaccio achieve.
For the altar paintings in La ricotta , Pasolini had deliberately chosen two mannerists , Rosso Fiorentino and Pontormo . Mannerism is characterized by an aesthetic strategy which, with an exaggeration of expression that is far removed from the mere depiction of an event, seeks to refer all the more clearly to the content behind the depicted things. This exaggeration is emphasized in La ricotta by adopting these paintings in another medium, film.
Pasolini happily staged the failure of this concept in the fictional Bible film, the paintings are no longer legible for the actors in the film, and their religious content is completely lost. And so her world breaks into the tableaux vivants as an insurmountable disruptive factor : instead of sacred music it is accidentally repeatedly her dance music, the eclisse twist from the opening credits of the film Liebe 1962 ( L'eclisse ) by Michelangelo Antonioni , which much to the displeasure of the Director to the scenes, sometimes the extras can't hold their positions and lose their balance amid the laughter of colleagues, sometimes they pick their noses lost in thought during the recording. It was precisely these scenes that the prosecution's criticism of the trial referred to.
Pasolini filmed in color for the first time at La ricotta , but it is reserved for the two scenes in the fictional Bible film. On the one hand, it is intended to allude to the contemporary, monumental film adaptations of the Bible, whose superficiality the film director tries in vain to evade by resorting to Christian iconography . On the other hand, the color was hardly used to model the figures in the paintings - Giorgio Vasari noticed the lack of shadows at Pontormo's entombment in the 16th century - but was used in a “metaphorical sense, insofar as its radiance transcends the splendor of God . ”The“ natural ”color removes the highly artificial tableaux vivants from the“ abstract ”black and white of the normal film plot and refers to the original religious meaning that emerges from the past, which gives the realism of the plot its deeper meaning.
Io sono una forza del passato.
Solo nella tradizione è il mio amore.
Vengo dai ruderi, dalle chiese,
dalle pale d'altare, dai borghi
abbandonati sugli Appennini o le Prealpi,
dove sono vissuti i fratelli.
- Pasolini
I am a force from a bygone era.
My love lies only in tradition.
I come from the ruins, the churches,
the altar panels, from the abandoned villages of
the Apennines and the Prealps,
where the brothers once lived.
The failing director, who quotes Pasolini's poem Io una forza del passato in the film , is without a doubt an ironic alter ego of Pasolini. At the time of the shooting of La ricotta , Pasolini was preparing a Bible film himself, The First Gospel - Matthew , a film that could hardly have been more different than the fictional Bible film. Pasolini had also dealt with film theoretically at an early stage and developed his concept of the cinema of the posie . Comparable to the strategy of the Mannerists, the aim is to give the images in the film their own meaning, which goes beyond what is depicted / said, through transgressions and breaks in style and technology, as is the case with the use of words in poetry. Instead of adopting this concept one-to-one from the Mannerists, as the director does in the film, he translates it into a contemporary and medium-appropriate form in La ricotta and stages the film as a grotesque, which in the comic exaggeration of the tragic core of the Films referring to Stracci's Passion. Not only in the tableaux vivants , it is also the tone that reinterprets the images; conversely, in the scene with Stracci's family, for example, the medieval hymn Dies irae from the funeral mass, played on an accordion as a leitmotif , elevates the banality of the plot to a religious level. The breaks between color and black and white, the change in speed between the unsuccessful standstill of the still images of the fictional film of the bourgeois director and the frenzied time-lapse movement of the proletarian Straccis, the use of music that counteracts the images create a poetic level that the actual message of the Film transported.
Reviews
“A subtle parable, located at the point where the tragic-comic of the situation merges into the drama of the abandoned, suffering person. A film in Pasolini's work that is outstanding in its formal diversity and creativity. "
“We have to admit that only one judgment fits this episode: brilliant! […] Pasolini's episode possesses the complexity, unity, the richness of the tone and the complexity of his poems; you could also call it a little poem in film images. "
"[...] a strong film, a clenched fist made of images [...]"
“Pasolini's shortest film is definitely one of the best he has made so far. [...] Shrill and gentle, funny and tragic at the same time is the story of the Roman starvation, which Pasolini has often elevated to the symbol of the suffering person in many variations, but never with such terrible objectivity as here. "
"[...] a universe of satirical criticism, sarcastic humor and aesthetic-political reflection [...], the density of which remained unique in his entire work."
Awards
Premio Grolla d'oro for Best Director, Saint-Vincent , July 4th 1964
Web links
- The soft cheese in the Internet Movie Database (English)
- Copies of documents on the trial on Pagine corsare (Italian) ( Memento of July 24, 2016 in the Internet Archive )
literature
- Elisabeth Oy-Marra: Old and new media in dialogue: painting and film in Pier Paolo Pasolini's “La ricotta”. In: Thomas Koeber and Irmbert Schenk (eds.): The golden age of Italian film. The 1960s , Munich 2008, pp. 268–278.
- Joanna Barck: Pasolini: La Ricotta (1962) . In: Joanna Barck: Towards the film. Back to the pictures. Tableaux Vivants: Living images in the films of Antamoro , Korda , Visconti and Pasolini. transcript, Bielefeld 2008, pp. 193-271
- Piero Spila: Pier Paolo Pasolini. Gremese, Rome 2002, cf. Pp. 35-38
- Pier Paolo Pasolini: Pasolini on Pasolini: in conversation with Jon Halliday. Translated from the English by Wolfgang Astelbauer. Folio Verlag, Vienna, Bozen 1995, pp. 65–71, ISBN 3-85256-021-7 (Original edition: Pasolini on Pasolini: Interviews with Oswald Stack [ pseudonym ]. Thames and Hudson, London 1969. The interview took place in the spring of 1968 instead of)
- Friends of the Deutsche Kinemathek (Ed., Editor: Michael Hanisch): Pier Paolo Pasolini. Documents on the reception of his films in German-language film reviews 1963–1985. Berlin 1994, cf. P. 56–61 (the information on the productions was based on: Pier Paolo Pasolini - Le regole di un'illusione. 1991, ed. Laura Betti and Michele Gulinucci for the Fondo Pier Paolo Pasolini .)
- Franca Faldini and Goffredo Fofi : Pier Paolo Pasolini. Lights of the suburbs. The adventurous story of his films. Translated from the Italian by Karl Baumgartner and Ingrid Mylo. Wolke, Hofheim 1986, cf. Pp. 61–72 (the volume was compiled from: L'avventurosa storia del cinema italiano, raccontata dai suoi protagonisti. Feltrinelli 1981 / Mondadori 1984)
- Pier Paolo Pasolini. Film series 12. Third, significantly expanded edition. Hanser, Munich 1985 (edited in collaboration with the Deutsche Kinemathek Foundation ), cf. Pp. 114-118, 219, 241
- Pier Paolo Pasolini: The soft cheese (literary version of the script text). In: Ders .: Ali with the blue eyes. Stories, poems, fragments. Translated from the Italian by Bettina Kienlechner. Piper series, Piper Verlag, Munich 1990, pp. 77–98, ISBN 3-492-10917-9 (original edition: Alí dagli occhi azzurri . Garzanti, Milan 1965)
Individual evidence
- ↑ in the original: Io una forza del passato . In: Poesia in forma di rosa , Garzanti, Milan 1964. A German translation can be found in the published script, in: Ali with the blue eyes. Piper, Munich 1990, pp. 83-84. Spoken by Pasolini himself, the original can be found on Pagine Corsare ( memento from March 5, 2016 in the Internet Archive ). The film clearly refers to Pasolini as the author; the book from which the director quotes bears the easily legible title of Pasolini's last film Mamma Roma (1962).
- ↑ The journalist replied that he understood that he (the director) was walking on Via Tuscolana. Like the Via Appia , which is also mentioned in the poem, this street is in the immediate vicinity of the real location where the Cinecittà studios are located.
- ↑ cf. Enzo Siciliani: Pasolini, 1985, p. 324; Somewhat different with Pasolini about Pasolini: in conversation with Jon Halliday , 1995, p. 65
- ↑ cf. Faldini and Fofi: Pier Paolo Pasolini. Lights of the suburbs. , 1986, pp. 61-62
- ↑ for the production details see: Deutsche Kinemathek: Pier Paolo Pasolini. Documents. 1994, p. 56
- ↑ on the process see: Enzo Siciliano: Pier Paolo Pasolini. Life and work. Translated from the Italian by Christel Galliani. Fischer Taschenbuch, Frankfurt am Main 1985, pp. 327–330, 336–337 (Italian original edition: Rizzoli, Milan 1978), as well as the documents on the trial on Pagine corsare (Italian) ( Memento from July 24, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) .
- ↑ cf. Faldini and Fofi: Pier Paolo Pasolini. Lights of the Suburbs , 1986, pp. 70–72 (Di Gennaro, Bini) and Pasolini on Pasolini: in conversation with Jon Halliday , 1995, pp. 70–71; on the reactions to Accattone and Mamma Roma cf. Spila: Pasolini , 2002, pp. 27-28, 34
- ^ Nico Naldini: Pier Paolo Pasolini. Wagenbach, Berlin 1991, p. 228
- ↑ cf. Mariagrazia Fanchi: The Italian Film Audience . In: Thomas Koeber and Irmbert Schenk (eds.): The golden age of Italian film. edition text + kritik, Munich 2008, pp. 50–63, cf. P.56
- ^ Deutsche Kinemathek: Pier Paolo Pasolini. Documents. 1994, p. 58
- ^ A b Alfred Andersch: From a Roman winter. Travel pictures. Walter, Olten and Freiburg i.Br. 1966, pp. 38-39
- ↑ cf. Piero Spila: Pasolini , 2002, p. 38
- ↑ cf. Pier Paolo Pasolini: Pasolini on Pasolini: in conversation with Jon Halliday, 1995, pp. 70-71
- ↑ cf. Pier Paolo Pasolini: Pasolini on Pasolini: in conversation with Jon Halliday, 1995, p. 70
- ↑ cf. Nico Naldini: Pier Paolo Pasolini. Wagenbach , Berlin 1991, pp. 231, 327
- ^ Pier Paolo Pasolini: La belle bandiere. Dialoghi 1960-65. Edited by Gian Carlo Ferretti, Editori riunti, Rome 1977, p. 234. Quoted from Enzo Siciliano: Pasolini. Life and work. Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1985, p. 334
- ↑ Joachim von Mengershausen in the SZ , February 12, 1967; quoted from: Deutsche Kinemathek : Pier Paolo Pasolini. Documents. 1994, p. 57
- ↑ The film analysis is based on the essays by Elisabeth Oy-Marra: Painting and Work in Pasolini's “La ricotta”, 2008 and Joanna Barck: Pasolini: La Ricotta (1962), 2008
- ↑ Pier Paolo Pasolini: The soft cheese. In: Ali with the blue eyes, 1990, p. 77
- ↑ cf. Pier Paolo Pasolini: Pasolini on Pasolini: in conversation with Jon Halliday, 1995, p. 69
- ↑ Pasolini refers to Antonioni a second time when the director ironically says in the published script: he sits "completely absorbed in his lofty thoughts (" The young film "," Antonioni ", etc.)" (p 78). And to the journalist's last question "What do you think ... of our great Federico Fellini ?", He only replies as an "enigmatic final word": "He's dancing!" (P. 83)
- ↑ Bini mentions the film Barabbas (1961) in this context , cf. Faldini and Fofi: Pier Paolo Pasolini. Lights of the suburbs. , 1986, p. 69.
- ^ Elisabeth Oy-Marra: Painting and work in Pasolin's «La ricotta». 2008, p. 275
- ↑ The beginning of the German poem was quoted from the script, pp. 83-84, the Italian version from Pagine Corsare ( Memento from March 5, 2016 in the Internet Archive ).
- ↑ The review was published in 1967 in film-dienst (issue 27).
- ↑ printed in: Deutsche Kinemathek : Pier Paolo Pasolini. Documents. 1994, pp. 57-58
- ^ Pier Paolo Pasolini. Film series 12. 1985, p. 116