“'Twas Me Who Combed Her Hair”: Audience Participation in Two

“’Twas Me Who Combed Her Hair”: Audience Participation in Two Italian Rewritings of Othello Mariangela Tempera The last act of Othello has occasionally triggered the reaction of male spectators rushing to save Desdemona and has frequently left the entire audience tense and uneasy. Two Italian rewritings of Shakespeare’s tragedy explore the potential for audience response to Othello in original and imaginative ways. They are Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Che cosa sono le nuvole? (1968) and Un bacio . un bacio ancor . un altro bacio (1993), an educational theater piece inspired by Pasolini’s short film. This paper analyzes in depth the interplay of the film viewers with the internal audience and the performers in Nuvole, and the strategies employed by the directors to encourage audience participation in Un bacio. It also highlights how both rewritings use Othello to address issues of honor and race in Italian culture. here is something about the last act of Othello that makes the audience “feel less like spectators at an ancient art form than like by- standers at a traffic accident” (Potter 1). The annals of theater con- T 1 tain anecdotes, sometimes authentic but more often invented or unverifiable, about male spectators rushing to Desdemona’s defense. Such extreme be- havior can be explained as a racist knee-jerk reaction to the sight of a black man assaulting a white woman, but the restlessness that is shared by most audiences during Act 5, scene 2, of a well performed Othello is the result of watching a superbly crafted dramatic episode, cinematic in its construction. 1. Stendhal, for example, gives his account of an attempted rescue which should have taken place in Baltimore in 1822. But the local newspapers of the time do not sup- port his tale. See Bristol 195-96. 13 194 Mariangela Tempera As Othello enters the bed chamber, he believes that his lieutenant has just been killed and must assume that a man from the garrison is coming to inform him. He understands therefore that his window of opportunity for killing Desdemona is fairly narrow. We know that it is in fact somewhat wider, because Iago has chosen Emilia, the slowest messenger he could pos- sibly find. With rapt attention, we watch a murderer who, torn between love and hatred, keeps throwing verbal obstacles between himself and the com- pletion of his act. His lengthy monologue, “It is the cause, it is the cause, my soul!” (5.2.1-23)2 is full of soothing sounds (“snow,” “smooth,” “monu- mental alabaster” etc.) that could keep Desdemona asleep (and one of the bargains that Othello has made with himself is that he will not kill her in her sleep, lest he kills her soul, as we learn in 5.2.25-32). When she wakes, Othello offers to give her any time she may need to complete her prayers. The death threat at 5.2.31 is followed by a recap of the entire alleged affair and is carried out at 5.2.84. Emilia, whose progress we have been mentally following, arrives only seconds too late. The scene is so famous and its effect on the audience so widely ac- knowledged that it became the obvious choice for Stanley Cavell when he explored audience perceptions of theatrical make-believe: “Why do I do nothing? Because they are only pretending? . Othello is not pretending. Gar- rick is not pretending, any more than a puppet in that part would be pretending” (100-01). Unlike the “Southern yokel” who tries to save Desdemona, he suggests, we know there is nothing we can do. Stopping the performance will simply make Othello vanish: “Quiet the house, pick up the thread again, and Othello will reappear, as near and as deaf to us as ever” (101). Adaptations of the tragedy frequently exploit the peculiarity of its audience-stage relationship, featuring the spectators as co-protagonists and scripting their reactions into the Shakespearean plot. Two very successful Italian rewritings of Othello are Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Che cosa sono le nuvole (What Are the Clouds?, 1967), an art-house cult movie, and Un bacio . un bacio ancor . un altro bacio (A kiss . another kiss . one last kiss, 1993), an educational theater piece that was inspired by Pasolini’s film. They are worth analyzing together for several reasons. First of all, they both explore the role of the audience in Othello with results that are fascinating both in terms of the appropriation of Shakespeare’s text and the investigation of unconventional theatrical practices. Secondly, they high- 2. Act, scene and line numbers here and throughout refer to the Arden Shakespeare edi- tion of Othello. “Twas Me Who Combed Her Hair” 195 light how social changes in Italian society are reflected in the response of the audiences to the issues of honor and race. Art-house Shakespeare: Che cosa sono le nuvole? In the 1960s Italian directors were frequently asked to contribute a short feature to compilation films that usually belonged to the genre “comedy Italian-style,” which was very popular with the average, middle-class cinema audience. Che cosa sono le nuvole? was Pier Paolo Pasolini’s contribu- tion to one such film, Capriccio all’italiana (Caprice Italian Style, 1968).3 As it was often the case, each director worked independently of the others and the episodes had little or nothing in common. An exceptionally prolific writer and a controversial commentator of Italian politics, Pasolini was frequently reviled in life and almost universally praised after his death (1975). The original scripts of his films were published as part of his Complete Works, making it possible to examine Clouds in the light of Pasolini’s early version of the script, which is longer than the actual film and interspersed with his comments (Siti and Zabagli 933-66). Shot in one week in 1967, the 22-minute film is set in a run-down theater where a company of life-sized puppets perform Othello in front of a boisterous, naive audience. Pasolini planned it as part of an exploration of the possibilities of cinema which had started with Uccellacci e uccellini (Hawks and Sparrows, 1966) and had continued with La terra vista dalla lu- na (The Earth Seen from the Moon, 1967). All films had as protagonists Totò, a hugely famous, aging Neapolitan comedian, and Ninetto Davoli, a proletarian youth from a Roman estate who had charmed the director with his innocent gaze. Totò died shortly after completing Clouds, and the director cut short what may have become a most fascinating sequence of works. The rest of the casting is just as intriguing. Domenico Modugno, “Mr Volare,” sings the theme song while performing his duties as “Immondezzaro,” garbage collector. The puppeteer is played by Francesco Leonetti, a poet who was part of Pasolini’s sophisticated Roman coterie. Franco Franchi (Cassio) and Ciccio Ingrassia (Roderigo) are a couple of trashy comedians who starred in films that make the Carry on series look positively highbrow. Another of Pasolini’s friends, Laura Betti, plays a major role in Clouds. At the time she was better known as a singer than as an actress. Jazz club au- 3. The entire film is now available in DVD, but Pasolini’s Clouds is also viewable on www.youtube.com. 196 Mariangela Tempera diences appreciated the clever, often naughty songs that Italian intellectuals wrote for her. As virginal and demure as Mae West, she would not have been most directors’ first choice for Desdemona. Just as important as the named actors are the extras who interpret the role of the fictive audience. They are non-professionals, selected in the Ro- man slums to play themselves: a group of urban poor, entire families but also old fishwives and boys of life (Siti and Zabagli 939). The fictive audience recognizes Iago as the trickster of Italian comedy and settles down to an afternoon of family fun spiced up by rude innuendoes that the children, clustered in the first two rows, will hopefully fail to understand. It is not an unwarranted response. After all, “[t]he play’s action up until the reunion of Othello and Desdemona in Cyprus (2.1) is a perfect comic structure in miniature” (Snyder 74). Although they do not appear in the film, the Bra- bantio scenes were included in the original script, thus offering ample scope for comedy at the expense of the black outsider. By calling him “Otello il Marocchino! Pardon: il Moro, il Moro! [Otello the Moroccan!4 Pardon me: the Moor, the Moor!] (Siti and Zabagli 941), Iago sums up centuries of dis- putes about Othello’s ethnic background, whereas an outraged Brabantio goes straight for “cannibale!” [cannibal!] (942). When Iago addresses them directly, trying to gain their approval for his plot against Othello, the urban poor in the film are prepared to let him fash- ion their responses to the play. Even without the Brabantio scenes, they ap- plaud the trickster’s comic wit and ingenuity. Unlike the movie audience, however, they are not familiar with either Shakespeare’s tragedy or Verdi’s opera (which has introduced generations of Italians to the story of the Moor). After the love duet between the newly-wed, the “spectators” shift al- legiances and do not want any real harm to come to them. In the totally ho- mogeneous Italian society of the 1960s, they do not have any reason to feel threatened by the Moor, “quel negro porco, zozzo, puzzolente” [that filthy swine of a stinking negro5] as Iago defines him, without causing any indig- nation, in one of his comic crescendo.

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