by Jon Lackman | 13 July 2006 | Uncategorized
In a new essay collection devoted to filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini, reviewed by the Brooklyn Rail, “Marc Weis structures his essay around the director’s friendship with art historian and Piero della Francesca scholar, Roberto Longhi. From 1939 to 1943 Pasolini studied under Longhi while at the University of Bologna, completing a thesis on the city’s resident painter, Giorgio Morandi. Weiss sets up a relationship between Longhi’s humanistic critique of Renaissance paintings, and Pasolini’s own painterly vision as a filmmaker. Longhi’s interpretation of Piero’s angles as ‘sublimely peasant-like, but not rough…angelic youths come to earth like oak trunks, with thick ankles that in a few years will be unshakeable,’ finds its cinematic counterpart in Pasolini’s street youth angels in The Gospel According to St Matthew. Likwise, Longhi’s interpretation of Caravaggio’s Bacchus as a ‘sleepy worker in a Roman osteria,’ runs parallel to Pasolini’s own unorthodox casting of street urchin Ettore Garofalo, the troubled son of a prostitute in Mamma Roma, who was first spotted by the director at his real life job as a waiter in Rome. The symbiotic love affair with painting is explicitly dealt with in The Decameron (1970), in which Pasolini embodies the role of a painter, both within the film as Giotto, at work on an elaborate fresco, and as a director, constructing fantastical tableaus of peasant life based on Breugel paintings.”
