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Vol. IX comparative cinema Roberta No. 16 2021 Vannini Ruiz de Samaniego, Alberto, and 142-146 José Manuel Mouriño. eds. 2011. La voz de Pasolini. Primeros apuntes de un ensayista cinematográfico. Madrid / A Coruña: Maia / Fundación Luis Seoane. 556 pp. Date submitted: 08/02/2021 Date accepted: 25/03/2021 [email protected] Spring 1962. Pier Paolo Pasolini is filming Mamma Roma in the environs of an unknown Rome the filmmaker has been discovering for several years with the patience, attention and observation skills of an explorer. The blazing sun forces the whole team to take several breaks, during which Pasolini, together with Carlo di Carlo— assistant director in that film—meditate aloud in front of a tape recorder. The idea is to record the “Diario di Mamma Roma” (“Mamma Roma’s Diary”) as a moment of reflection about that film and also more generally about cinematographic writing itself: the language codes that the image reveals and the possibilities of subversion and reworking thereof. In 2005, Di Carlo discovered the recorded tapes, which would be transcribed in the catalogue La voz de Pasolini. Primeros apuntes de un ensayista cinematográfico (Pasolini’s Voice. First Notes from a Film Essayist), edited by Alberto Ruiz de Samaniego and published by Maia Ediciones. The catalogue also included Di Carlo’s own notes written during the filming of Mamma Roma, some drawings that Pasolini made as sketches for the frames, some notes written by Anna Magnani and one hundred and thirteen photographs of this shooting and that of La ricotta (1963), belonging to the exhibition La voz de Pasolini held at the Luis Seoane Foundation in A Coruña between February 4th and April 10th, 2011.1 The catalogue also includes other essays that complete the volume—in Spanish and Galician versions—with a series of reflections about the relationship between cinematographic research and practice in Pasolini’s cinema. It is undoubtedly an essential contribution in the field of publications comparative cinema comparative on Pasolini in Spain. In the 1960s the peculiar cinematographic form of the appunti filmici (“film notes”) was something unprecedented, a half-cooked creative process and one of the first samples of a procedure that would reach a capital importance in the author’s filmography. The elements that compose these appunti filmici are rich and diverse, and respect the hybrid and interdisciplinary character of Pasolini’s own work. Their documentary, investigative nature is a feature that does not cease to exist in the director’s famous “narrative” films. The Pasolinian appunti are therefore situated in a dimension prior to the filmic discourse: they do not yet constitute discourse, but neither they are a mere space or referential image. It is here where the search for a landscape, a face, a gesture, a look is carried out, the place in which the narration takes place. The cinema as a note, the practice of “shooting the shot” becomes then a poetic exercise; a way of filming the cinematographic gesture. 143 The diary of the tape recordings is followed, in the volume La voz de Pasolini, by an interview with Carlo di Carlo made by Antonio Bertini and published for the first time in Teoria e tecnica del film in Pasolini (1979). In addition to being in Mamma Roma, Di Carlo was Pasolini’s film assistant also in La rabbia (1963) and La ricotta (an episode of Ro.Go.Pa.G) and therefore was, in the words of José Manuel Mouriño, “an exceptional witness of the way in which Pasolini’s intense working process continually distills innumerable indications and significant appendices” (2011, 66).2 The interview offers a mixed vision of a figure that was controversial, but, above all, compromised with the creative process of his own work. In the essay “Diario sonoro de Mamma Roma: Primeros apuntes de un ensayista cinematográfico” (“Audio-diary of Mamma Roma: First Notes from a Film Essayist”), José Manuel Mouriño advances the hypothesis that the diary of the tape recordings was not born with the simple idea of “taking notes,” of recovering certain suggestions to which those sessions resulted; rather, there was the will, on the side of the filmmaker, to make clear the technical meditation, the spontaneous registration of the explanatory word. Each frame, each sequence, keeps the documentary grain of its origins. “The pause and the distance allow him to conceive that germinal moment of his cinema as a starting point from which to continuously manage the implications of every decision” (2011, 71). Adopting the word, through Review VANNINI ROBERTA 2011. eds. José Manuel Mouriño. and Alberto, de Samaniego, Ruiz cinematográfico. Primeros apuntes de un ensayista de Pasolini. La voz 2021 Vol. IX IX Vol. No. 16 No. his own voice, opens the path to the cinematographic essay as a means of meditation on the filmic “object.” Alberto Ruiz de Samaniego, in his essay “El sueño de un film. Sobre los apuntes cinematográficos de Pasolini” (“The Dream of a Film: comparative cinema comparative On Pasolini’s Film Notes”) points to Walter Benjamin’s study of the Trauerspiel to read the appunti filmici in a baroque key. Quoting the Berlin thinker, “Baroque emblems can be understood as half-made products” (2005, 372). This same idea of material in statu nascendi is the one that dominates in the appunti: they are made both as finished works and as works that refer to something that needs to be done. Pasolini will always work in a similar way: “superimposing a plot—an archaic, ancestral narrative principle: mythological or fabulous—on what he is contemplating at that very moment, without either of those two instances—and this is what is significant—dominating in a relevant way” (Ruiz de Samaniego 2011, 86). The status of the appunti allows raw material to dominate the screen (Mariniello 1999, 264, quoted in Ruiz de Samaniego 2011, 86). This work “in the shade” is officially inaugurated in La rabbia, the first specific mise en oeuvre to dispose of the “cinematographic fact” announced by the sound diaries of Mamma Roma. Subsequently, in Location Hunting in Palestine (Sopralluoghi in Palestina per il Vangelo secondo Matteo, 144 1964) and later in Notes for a Film on India (Appunti per un film sull’India, 1969) and Notes Towards an African Orestes (Appunti per un’Orestiade Africana, 1970), Pasolini will take up many of the signs that the sound diaries indicate. Is there a space for communication between Mamma Roma, Accattone (1961) and La ricotta—more narrative films—on one side, and La rabbia, made with the collage and montage of archival materials, on the other? According to Marco A. Bazzochi, in “Escrito con el cuerpo: cine y alegoría en Pasolini” (“Written with the Body: Cinema and Allegory in Pasolini”), There is a strong and secret bond between the horror-clouded eyes of Anna Magnani [in Mamma Roma] and the bright, smiling eyes of Marilyn [in La rabbia]. It is about the allegorical link between images and bodies, between faces and gestures that unifies Pasolini’s cinema and allows us to interpret it today as a denunciation of the shocks suffered by History and which by way of the montage process emerge suddenly before our eyes: the drama of this story can be glimpsed as much in the suffering face of a boy as in the frozen smile of a Hollywood star (2011, 117). Such poeticization of the cinema implied a sympathy for the international proletariat that would drive him to devise a film titled Appunti per un poema sul Terzo Mondo, never shot. The representation of the subaltern subject in Pasolini’s work is linked to Review VANNINI ROBERTA 2011. eds. José Manuel Mouriño. and Alberto, de Samaniego, Ruiz cinematográfico. Primeros apuntes de un ensayista de Pasolini. La voz 2021 Vol. IX IX Vol. No. 16 No. a redefinition of realism that, during the 60s, would give rise to what he called a semiotic of reality. What you see are images taken from reality; images that, despite being amalgamated with the speech, belong to that other irreducible language that is that of reality; images that the word cannot fully own. comparative cinema comparative What is that “something real” that happens in the screen that Pasolini mentioned? In the essay “Solo la revolución salva el pasado” (“Only Revolution Saves the Past”), which closes the volume, Gonzalo de Lucas raises a possible answer to this question: that “something” is “what happens in front of the lens and that the filmmaker wants to preserve in the face of its transience” (2011, 161). In Pasolini’s cinema, the mysterious beauty of humanity is involuntarily put there by the very flow of life; in the social hell, there is a point, a look, a body, a space, a gesture where certain feverish vitality survives that Pasolini is constantly searching for. The director himself defined his movies as “a series of very brief frames, in which each frame has a lyrical-figurative origin, rather than a cinematographic origin.” Now, all of these brief frames have in some, let’s say, poetical way—or almost physiological—their synthesis in this image, this face, this close-up. Each photograph extracted from time surrounding his films contains the rage of 145 a planned exorcism: the ability of certain actors to assume the character found by Pasolini in the depths of their eyes. The way in which Pasolini used the appunti has inspired and still inspires the next generations of cinematographic essayists. The cinema starts from the camera to then go towards the encounter with reality with the aim of increasing sensitivity of all spectators, to reflecting once more on the old and offering new meanings to the images.

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