The Pasolini series continues! I don’t know if I’ll have the stamina to catch all the other films that are part of this retrospective, but I figured I should at least see the films he made immediately following The Gospel According to St. Matthew.
The sources disagree on when, exactly, Love Meetings was produced, but it seems Pasolini filmed this documentary all over Italy while scouting locations for Matthew and, if the IMDB is to be trusted, released it to theatres in 1965, the year after Matthew came out. The film basically consists of Pasolini asking people hither and yon about their attitudes towards sexual liberation, machismo, divorce, gender equality, homosexuality (it’s interesting to see so many people express their “disgust” on this topic, given that we know the man holding the microphone is gay himself), the closure of the brothels, and so on, and the results are mixed, in more ways than one.
For one thing, Pasolini finds a stodgy, jealous but consistent traditionalism among the poor, and he considers this more “real” than the middle-class types who are currently moving towards something more hedonistic and self-contradictory. For another, the film offers an interesting snapshot of a nation in transition, but some of the questions are so specific to the Italian cultural issues and vocabulary of 40 years ago that some things may get lost in translation; e.g., Pasolini keeps asking people what they think about “the sexual problem,” as though they knew what “problem” he was talking about, but even after hearing him ask the question a couple dozen times, I’m still not quite sure what it means.
Also on last night’s bill was Hawks and Sparrows (1966), Pasolini’s undisputed first non-documentary film after Matthew, and, uh, wow — forget about neorealism! The film marks a definite change of pace from his earlier films — it’s a boisterous, playful sort of fairy tale or allegory, right from the opening credits, which are actually sung to the audience — but there are still touches of Matthew here and there.
The film is about a man (played by Italian comedian Totò, a Chaplin-esque sort whose body language is pretty funny) and his son (Ninetto Davoli) as they wander through Italy and encounter all sorts of odd characters and situations. One of the first people they encounter is a girl dressed in an angel costume, complete with wings, for a school play; she teases Ninetto and, IIRC, sticks her tongue out at him before she goes — and it’s the same girl who played the wing-less Angel of the Lord in Matthew!
Father and son are then joined by a talking crow or raven who is identified in the titles as a “left-wing intellectual”; he talks of a future utopia where he can live on “Karl Marx Street, No. Seventy Times Seven”, and then he tells a story about Franciscan monks (played by Totò and Ninetto) who try to convert the birds to Christianity. Totò spends a year on his knees, letting vines grow around his body, until he learns the language of the hawks; then he whistles to them, and their communication is spelled out in subtitles. Then it is time to learn the speech of the swallows, and so he kneels again; but this time, church and business types who are drawn to his miraculous skill set up a noisy carnival around him, and it becomes increasingly difficult to hear the birds; so Totò takes a page from Christ’s book and turns over the money tables and whips everyone outta there. And when he finally learns the swallows’ language, it turns out they communicate not in whistles but in hops; and so Totò and Ninetto spread the gospel by hopping. But then, alas, they witness a hawk killing a swallow — a sign that religion will make no difference to class divisions — and if I heard the instructions that the monks receive from St. Francis correctly, they would seem to suggest that religion has a vested interest in keeping those class boundaries distinct.
Beyond this, there are also a couple of episodes about debts and the enforcement thereof which bring to mind the parable about the man who was shown mercy but refused to show it. Totò also makes a passing reference to Gagarin that brings La Rabbia to mind, and it is interesting to hear him predict that one day men will reach the moon; in the end, the Soviets were indeed the first to orbit and land probes on the moon, but I don’t believe any cosmonauts ever set foot there. There are too many other strange and bizarre elements to get into here; but suffice to say there is a recurring ’60s guitar-rock instrumental tune that I still can’t get out of my head, and which is used in a deadpan way that would be right at home in the films of Finnish director Aki Kaurismaki.
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