For my intervention for Exploded View I have taken as a starting point Pier Paolo Pasolini’s claim that the ‘ragazzi di vita’ (street urchins, hustlers) who mentored him in his explorations of the Roman outskirts, showed nothing but indifference towards ancient monuments. Pasolini’s earliest mention of this attitude can be found in the short stories he wrote the early 1950s, especially in Squarci di notti romane [‘Glimpses of Roman nights’]. The narrator relates how for Arnardo, a ‘ragazzo di vita’, the Theatre of Marcellus, the Colosseum, are nothing but than ‘a pile of broken stones’ [‘quattro pietre rotte’]. Such an indifference was surprising and yet refreshing for Pasolini, who «wanted to try for a moment to wander around Rome possessing within himself, in all his cells, the Geography of the boy. [...] He would no longer know which way the Tyrrhenian Sea lies, how many years separate us from the death of Belli, and finally hate the broken stones of the Theatre of Marcellus». For Pasolini the true, authentic ‘origin’ is not to be found in the ‘broken stones’, i.e. the monuments, artefacts frozen in museums; that antiquity is not vital; the archaic dimension is embodied in the ragazzi di vita. This discovery would inform Pasolini’s subsequent literary and cinematic works at least until Hawks and Sparrows (1966). In his first film Accattone (1961), Pasolini expounded what he thought was the Roman sub-proletariat’s attitude towards antiquity in a scene of set on the Appia Antica. I have chosen that scene as the subject of my work for Exploded View as it sums up a certain critical attitude that I endorse.
Building on research I carried a few years ago [Jacopo Benci, ‘“An extraordinary proliferation of layers”: Pasolini’s Rome(s)’, in Dorigen Caldwell, Lesley Caldwell (eds), Rome: Continuing Encounters between Past and Present (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), pp. 151-186], my work plan includes the following:
● a study of the relationship between Pasolini and ‘the antique’, involving research in libraries in Rome, such as the Central National Library, the Umberto Barbaro Cinema Library, the Library of the Department of History of Art and Spectacle at Sapienza;
● a survey of the Via Appia Antica, Fourth Mile, to gather a ‘re-photographic’ documentation of the two main locations (the so-called ‘Pyramid’ mausoleum and the standing statue of a man in a toga) used by Pier Paolo Pasolini in the film Accattone;
● extracting relevant footage and audio from a DVD of Accattone at a professional video editing facility;
● shooting video footage of the Via Appia Antica, Fourth Mile, approximating as much as possible the positions and angles of the original matching shots of Accattone;
● editing (at the aforementioned professional editing facility) my video footage on the Via Appia Antica, with the visual and sound elements drawn from the Pasolini film;
● develop a commentary to articulate Pasolini’s concept of (metaphorically and literally) ‘turning one’s back’ to the past, and of the ruins as ‘a pile of broken stones’; Integrate the above elements into a video work, which may also be accompanied by works combining still image and text, and possibly by a presentation (lecture).
Building on research I carried a few years ago [Jacopo Benci, ‘“An extraordinary proliferation of layers”: Pasolini’s Rome(s)’, in Dorigen Caldwell, Lesley Caldwell (eds), Rome: Continuing Encounters between Past and Present (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), pp. 151-186], my work plan includes the following:
● a study of the relationship between Pasolini and ‘the antique’, involving research in libraries in Rome, such as the Central National Library, the Umberto Barbaro Cinema Library, the Library of the Department of History of Art and Spectacle at Sapienza;
● a survey of the Via Appia Antica, Fourth Mile, to gather a ‘re-photographic’ documentation of the two main locations (the so-called ‘Pyramid’ mausoleum and the standing statue of a man in a toga) used by Pier Paolo Pasolini in the film Accattone;
● extracting relevant footage and audio from a DVD of Accattone at a professional video editing facility;
● shooting video footage of the Via Appia Antica, Fourth Mile, approximating as much as possible the positions and angles of the original matching shots of Accattone;
● editing (at the aforementioned professional editing facility) my video footage on the Via Appia Antica, with the visual and sound elements drawn from the Pasolini film;
● develop a commentary to articulate Pasolini’s concept of (metaphorically and literally) ‘turning one’s back’ to the past, and of the ruins as ‘a pile of broken stones’; Integrate the above elements into a video work, which may also be accompanied by works combining still image and text, and possibly by a presentation (lecture).
