ISSUES


ABOUT

The Art of Getting By

Brit Barton



Still, Comizi d’amore (Love Meetings), Pier Paolo Pasolini (1964)



Pier Paolo Pasolini: the post-war Italian provocateur, myth-maker, Catholic, queer, hardline Marxist, anti-fascist, and unsentimental, unapologetic embodied contradiction. As prolific an artist as he was—including twelve feature films in fourteen years before his brutal assassination—he never quite fit in, nor did he make any attempt to. In examining the violence of modernity, he reframed the bourgeois moral order through the lens of their own fascist hypocrisy. The director’s tendency towards the slower and the grittier, often inspired by art historical or biblical narratives, were enveloped moral allegories that explored the sinister sides of humanity. 

        Of Pasolini’s oeuvre, the semi-lighthearted, sarcastic, but simultaneously tender cinéma vérité documentary has such a dimensional radicality. An early work, Comizi d’amore (Love Meetings), is charming in comparison to something like Salò, but the methodology is present. His incredibly invasive questioning—along with his utter lack of, possibly even contempt for, objective posturing—is what makes the film so entertaining and yet, in retrospect, so psychologically intriguing.

        I imagine asking the same questions and I’m embarrassed. I imagine answering those same questions and I’m embarrassed. To consider it then, but also now: the embarrassment. Has anything actually changed? Where postwar positions were about confrontation and revolution, I wonder now about the repackaged power in postmodernity as more aligned with ambiguity.

        From scene to scene, he traverses an industrially divided, religiously mired postwar society. Shot in 1963, twenty years after the fall of Mussolini’s Fascist regime and in light of the economic miracle, Pasolini’s documentary is an act of sly assessments with an inconclusive ending. By interviewing a cross-section of the populace at beaches, factories, universities, plazas, streets, fields, and a dance hall, he attempts to take the temperature of a rapidly modernizing Italy. 

The subject is sex, but as always, sex is never about sex but about power.  

       The camera acts as a bystander in observation of an encounter, seeking that essence of cinematic truth beyond performance. All the while, Pasolini blends in with the crowd he attracts, if not for the microphone in hand. While the questions range from innocent or curious, deliberately obtuse, or more assertive, prodding and leading, the answers are a Rorschach test of class and gender. Through framing moral and ethical impositions on sex, love, and marriage, a focus on who oppresses and is oppressed is intersected with who or how one might be willing to accept or reject liberation.

       He starts on an unpaved Sicilian street, surrounded by half naked, barefoot children, “Do you know where you come from? How were you born?” All little boys, probably around six or seven years old, are shy and baffled by the inquiry; the stork flying down to Palermo by virtue of God’s desire is the dominant thought. A woman sings a cappella in the background with a steady shot of a church and its massive doors, the credits begin. 

       Pasolini turns to the “experts”—the novelist Alberto Moravia and philosopher/psychoanalyst Cesare Musatti who return throughout the film—and seeming to seek their blessing, he asks, “Does this survey make any sense?” Moravia defends the task, simply because it's the first to be done in Italy on the taboo subject of sex. Whereas Musatti speculates on the unlikely truth of the answers to come. “Ignorance and fear aren’t entirely unrelated.” He continues presciently, “We hide certain things to protect ourselves, so we remain ignorant of them. That’s what happens with sex.” 

       What results is essentially a study of rhetorical dynamics. Through hesitation, implication, deflection, innuendo, shame, tradition, transgression, honor; all manners of expression that boil down to the palpable anxiety of saying the right or wrong thing in public, much less the chance—maybe for the first time—to be asked for their thoughts at all. There are several scenes that are filmed but silent, overlaid with the text “self censored.” What is possibly more shameful and rhetorically damning than the act of the edit? 

***

Early on, against the backdrop of the EUR district in Rome, a group of soldiers are asked over and over again if they’d rather be a Giovanni or a good father? They joke around about their deep desire to be promiscuous but turn to their presumed failings—their ugliness or their height, for instance—until one brings up the reality that to “conquer women” one must have wealth or looks. He submits to the fact that he has neither. Still, the soldier circles back to the original question, sex is essential for health, “What else would be the reason for living?”

        Pasolini later asks “clearly middle-class” students outside of the respectable University of Bologna: Do they have any inhibitions in their lives, in conflict or as governed by their principles? Without any sense of ambivalence, the answers are a steady and certain No, until the fourth person begins to speak of love as something more than attraction—which begets the question of conformism within traditional Italian culture. Is there a broader, more radical rationale towards social conformity? No, again. Cut to the soccer field, where team Bologna speaks of sex as pleasure and Catholic upbringing with and without repression. One of the players admits the obvious and obliviousness of the pack, “I never think about it.” 

        Pasolini, determined and so clearly with his own agenda, adjusts to interviewing women outside a Milanese factory on why they haven’t opted for the riches that may come from sex work instead; they answer predictably—“decency,” “respectability,” and “morality”—until one relents, admitting that she finds sex workers to be shrewd. The voiceover segues to the next scene, “Shrewdness: the art of getting by, still the only Italian philosophy.” 


Pier Paolo Pasolini interviewing Oriana Fallaci, alongside Adele Cambria, and Camilla Cederna, in Venice during the Film Festival, 1963. DIAL Archive
Pier Paolo Pasolini interviewing Adele Cambria, Camilla Cederna, and Oriana Fallaci, in Venice during the Film Festival, 1963. DIAL Archive

Next, three women lounging at the Lido during the Venice film festival discuss women’s liberation. With emphasis, a woman (who turns out to be the famed resistance fighter and radical journalist Oriana Fallaci, also a close friend of the directors) explains that, even for the factory worker, things are undeniably better than just a few years ago. But when dismissed by the director and regarded as an exclusively Milanese phenomenon, he presses, “What about the Lumpenproletariat in Calabria?” Fallaci admits with a laugh, “Well that’s another planet.” 

        Showing the on-going performative airs of the sophisticated, educated or suave bourgeois northerner is an editorial cliche of Pasolini, who deeply romanticized the impoverished ragazzi in comparison. By that I don’t mean it isn’t untrue, the historical Italian disposition of someone from the north in comparison to the south is still a strange point of contention and hypocrisy. But the postwar was defined by rapid change: mass migration from the south to the evolving and economic industrialization of the north was on everyone’s mind and certainly on the tip of the tongue where dialect was obvious. Class and cultural differences, however minimal or regional, were part of that modernist violence that Pasolini sought to confront and expose.

        The following sequence, for good measure, is the director-as-interviewer alone in the middle of a plowed dirt field with a farmer, as the initial establishing shot demonstrates the rural isolation. You can feel the sun burrowing down on both of them, and not for leisure as with Fallaci. Though Pasolini—clad in a white linen button up and slacks—is every bit the bourgeois he disdains. The questions to the farmer concern matters of purity and a woman’s virginity. “Is it still highly dishonorable for a woman to lose her virginity before she marries?” Unphased, the farmer notes, “She must be…otherwise, she cannot marry.” Is it okay that young men sleep with other women? Without a second thought, the farmer counters, Si. Si. “Of course!” The reason, he is adamant, is because of an uncontained jealousy a southerner has that a northerner doesn’t; a fact that will never change. 

       A tracking shot of the sweeping landscape is inserted, almost like a pause for the mind. The a cappella song returns to indicate the past in tension with the present. The voiceover of Pasolini returns to the juxtaposition of b-roll footage of pastoral or street scenes of Camporeale, which the film notes for some reason—irony, maybe?—as “the heart of mafia-controlled Sicily.”  
 
He waxes poetic on what is fundamentally the crux of the film: 

       Here in the deep south, everybody has a clear idea about sex. The north is modern, but ideas about sex are confused: relics of an old ideology, incapable of grasping and judging the contemporary reality. The south is old but intact. Shame on indecent women. Shame on betrayed husbands. Shame on those who don’t kill for honor. The laws of a poor yet authentic people.

What a strange mix of dissonance and contradictions that drove this man. 

       To frame and imply the land as politically controlled and violently dominated but intact; as if clarity about sex can—as Cesare Musatti said from the get-go—ever be entirely attained, much less truthful to others or even the self; as if shame is actually the Italian philosophy, rather than the shrewd will he suggested only minutes ago. 

       The film returns to the Lido in Venice and the four discuss matriarchy within the social constructs of sex and pleasure. Italy’s hyperfixation on the woman as the adored but pedestaled, where women exist as unequals in a society that is economically behind—how could they catch up to their own desires if held back by the inherent family structure? But, Pasolini again protests, what about the south?

        Adele Cambria, another friend and notable feminist journalist, explains: “Even in the south, one must make a distinction. The proletariat, but not the rural peasantry, is very free. The middle classes are still hypocritical. The situation is different for the peasantry. For them, who possess nothing, a woman’s honor is a treasure. If you lose that, you lose everything…” 

***

The latter half of the film switches to discussions of normality, and in turn, abnormality— otherwise known as homosexuality. A brief discussion at the beach with poet Giuseppe Ungaretti prefaces the changing pace of Pasolini’s survey, subtitled: Disgust or Pity? Ungaretti, who was around seventy five, diplomatically by today’s standards but quite radical for then and there, explains, “Look, every man is made differently. I mean, every man is physically different. Every man is also different on a spiritual level. Therefore, all men are, in their own way, abnormal. All men are in a certain sense, in conflict with nature.”

       A cut to a dance hall in Milan is one of the most striking and tender moments of the film, even if it is somehow at odds with itself. After a series of sarcastic interviews, clearly intended to provoke the naivety of the subjects—“Have you ever heard of that terrible thing called ‘sexual abnormalities’?” “Do you know what masochism, sadism is? How about what an invert is?”—a quieter and prolonged take happens between Pasolini and two younger women.   

       They are comfortable and clearly familiar with one another while they lean in close together as the director’s interrogation begins. At times, they nearly share the microphone as they wink and nod to one another and to the director. “How are you different?” “I can’t say…” “Oh, it must be something terrible, then!”  There is some more coy indirection and then it’s opposite, as Pasolini asks point blank if they feel sexually normal, and what might happen if nature proposed something different. 

        There is a sense of plausible deniability, as well as something of a recognition with one another—I think. That is until they go on to call male inversion an unnatural abomination, with feelings of revulsion, and the consequential necessity for abandonment should there ever be an encounter. There is some protesting between the two of them— “You would know immediately!” “Some men are deceitful!” “...not that I’ve tried, let that be clear!” The director caps the interview with asking about their future children, what if one of them is unnatural? The hypothetical question feels like a hex.

        What became of these women? Born around 1940-something, during or shortly after the Fascist regime in Italy, but still amid the hangover of the country’s internalized resistance to change. Did they get the marriage and motherhood they cavalierly anticipated was their default future? Not to one another, of course—but to that typical, respectable man for that typical, respectable family. As discussed later, divorce was in the social sphere and up for debate, but wouldn’t be passed into law until 1970. 

        Further legalities are discussed, including the ramifications of Merlin’s law from 1958. A group of men outside of a factory in Milan make impassioned arguments of the decision that saw the government interfere in their right to visit a brothel. They protest on the grounds of disease and safety for all those involved, think of the misguided young men who will seek out things in a seedier way, in addition to the idea that “ugly men deserve sex too.” 

        When an older man disagrees with the crowd, it seems, as he closes the gap like Fallaci or Cambria before him: “To clean up our youth, we need to clean the whole of society, which is based on exploitation. Us in the factory are exploited. Women are exploited in a different way…We have to shape a more conscious, more humane society.” Later scenes in Naples and Palermo debate a similar, if not cruder, sentiment—if there was only more money and economic opportunity, prostitution wouldn’t even be necessary and men wouldn’t feel compelled by society to prove themselves sexually. If only they were united, “Like in Germany.” 

        The film ends on the final thought of normality through marriage. There is a passive reckoning with the notion of family as a monument, and marriage as further legal entanglement, which begets the thought: family as a fascist tendency of tradition and containment. A staged wedding is taking place, or at least a real wedding is being caught by the film crew; Pasolini’s forlorn voiceover contemplates love, the couple's unborn children, and the perceivable happiness of the day, where “all previous good and evil seem to vanish.” Though the footage of before, during, and after the ceremony is the narrative sequence, several steady takes of the best man looking at the groom are a focus. Just before the title card reads FINE, he wishes the kissing couple well with the thought that “your love be enriched by an awareness of your love.” I’m reminded of Musatti again. 



Brit Barton is an artist and writer based in Zurich. She is the editor of Art & Order Journal.