Ara Hagop Merjian
Doctoral Student, University of California Berkeley

abstract

The Curator and the Excavator: Pasolini’s Cinematic Borgate (1957-1962) between Painting and Poetry

When planning his film Le Notti di Cabiria (1957), Federico Fellini turned to Pier Paolo Pasolini to help stage the scenes which take place in Rome’s gritty periphery – a role that earned Pasolini the appellation, by several accounts, of “curator of the idiom of the slums” (“curatore del linguaggio di borgata”). My paper explores the notion of Pasolini as a cinematic “curator” – not simply of linguistic idiom and dialect, but also of the spaces, images, and architecture out of which he builds and frames his evocations of the Roman borgata. Pasolini’s works from the years 1957 to 1962 are bound up in a thoroughly intertextual venture, particularly in their conjuring of the Roman periphery: its sites, subjects, and social relevance. Focusing particularly upon Pasolini’s depictions of the borgata in works from the late 1950s and early 1960s (Accattone, Mamma Roma, Una Vita Violenta, Le Ceneri di Gramsci, and La religione del mio tempo), I seek to place these representations in the context of both the Italian post-war “boom,” as well as some of the contemporary cultural debates that shaped cinematic production during this period. As a dialectical medium – between what Pasolini called “the eternity of style” and his more temporal, social commitments; between material squalor and aesthetic redemption – his early films from this period propose a particular, dynamic tension particular to the borgata’s words and images.

short bio

Ara H. Merjian received his B.A. in the History of Art from Yale University, and his M.A. degree from the University of California, Berkeley with a thesis on post-war Italian cinema. He is a former Fulbright scholar to Italy, and is currently Paul Mellon Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery (Washington, DC), where he is finishing his dissertation, Urban Untimely: Giorgio de Chirico and the Metaphysical City. He has published and lectured internationally on modernist painting, architecture, and film, contributing to The Visual Turn: Classical Film Theory and Art History (Rutgers UP, 2003), Germano Celant’s (ed.) Architecture and Arts, 1900-2004 (Skira), and most recently, the Routledge Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Photography and Beat Culture: Lifetsyles, Icons, and Impact (2005).