Mamma Roma is the second film by Marxist provocateur Pier Paolo Pasolini. In post-WWII Italy, the title character is a middle-aged sex worker striving to support her teenage son Ettore. By moving from the country to the Roman outskirts and selling produce at a street market, Mamma Roma attempts to adopt a more accepted lifestyle. However, she consistently returns to sex work both by her own accord and an oppressive ex-partner’s influence. The film reflects Pasolini’s lyrical variant of Italian Neorealism, a movement marked by bold social critique in which often non-professional actors portray Italy’s postwar working poor. In Mamma Roma, Pasolini’s use of locations provides symbolic weight to the pseudo-documentary bareness. One such location is a field frequented by the film’s teenage characters: through this field, we can examine the teenage subjects’ sexual exchanges, Mamma Roma’s false sense of class mobility and a parallel to Max Ernst’s Surrealist piece “Europe After the Rain II.”
The field lies on the margins of Rome and is dotted with disembodied arches. These ruins take on organic postures, jutting sporadically as if simply rock formations; the once-human space shifts to an indistinct otherness, detailing the field as a parodic city. The teenagers then apply this caricatural essence to their own behavior. Subjects ascribe to a code of conduct within any defined setting, whether that be a school, courthouse or grocery store. In contrast, the field evades this relational precedent through its ghostly dislocation. Here emerges a theater of heightened gender roles: disaffected gangs of boys claim the field as their hunting grounds, accosting idle girls amongst the overgrowth. Upon seeing a particular woman, one boy remarks that “everyone goes with her, even the garbage men. She’s good-looking, though. You should see her legs.” There is an absence of barriers between the marking and urgent perusal of feminine bodies as objects of desire. As the only informal code of an undefined space, heteronormative conquest is glaring in its stripped-down violence.
Some shots couple the ruins with newer architecture not far in the background, further construing the field as a site of the in-between. As Rome rebuilds itself after the war, the very Roman rounded arches suggest the last gasps of a defeated Classism; this tension implies the film’s central conflict of class mobility. In Pasolini’s work, a glorified subproletariat embodies Italy’s pre-industrial identity. Mamma Roma’s own working-class consciousness is soiled by the false promise of petit-bourgeois mobility; by moving from the country and miming a bourgeois conduct, she conflates personal progress with a new national capitalism. Pasolini condemns capitalism's erasure of the individual, citing a resulting automation by which bodies become sedated consumerist subjects. That shift is exposed as futile throughout the film, as Mamma Roma frequently revives her sex worker past to support Ettore. The field goes on to illustrate this strain, as the past’s structural remnants remain battered yet inevitably standing. One can reverse the earlier parodic terms, casting the ruins as genuine against the newer architecture’s vacant imitation; however honest, these ruins still accept a submissive imprecision. Negotiating this dubious identity, both the field and characters exist in a dislocated limbo.
The field moreover calls to mind the warped disaffection of Max Ernst’s 1940-42 Surrealist piece “Europe After the Rain II.” In the piece, a flag-bearing figure stands amongst the sloping rubble of an imagined postwar landscape. As in Pasolini, Ernst’s ruins impart a dual consciousness; manmade debris tilts to a bodily eruption, evident in the stark central phallus and right corner’s circulatory tangle. By trusting the subconscious as an artistic filter, the Surrealists expose an unstable waking life: Ernst’s mutations reflect the subconscious mind’s irrational rerouting of form and substance. These irrational forms are ultimately more honest, simplifying meaning through adjacency. The rubble speaks to war’s allover destruction, etching a bodily loss in toppled objects; this structural objecthood further converges meaning, as human life is objectified in its reduction to physical detritus.
If Ernst’s landscape is a straightforward Surrealist reinvention, the dualism of Pasolini’s field reflects more nuance. Whereas Surrealism filters truth through an irrational medium, Neorealism’s truth is a medium unto itself: the former centralizes dual consciousness while the latter evokes a singular bluntness. As a Neorealist duality does arise from the genre’s focus on class disparities, this duality is more thematic than compositional. However, Pasolini’s field is closer to Ernst in its symbolic ordering of reality. Rather than a barebones document, the field again arranges new meaning through layered imagery; the thematic and compositional become one, implying class tension through a tense location. This fusion reveals a further non-barrier through which the teenagers’ erotic starkness is given form: within the expressed pattern, this teenage conduct thematically inflects the field’s composition. In total, Ernst and Pasolini expose the postwar landscape as an ultimate in-between space by which reality struggles to rebuild itself.
In Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1962 film Mamma Roma, locations symbolically aid Italian Neorealist themes of the postwar working-class. One location is a field occupied by rotting architecture: these ruins describe a parodic springboard for teenage sexual conquest, an echo of Mamma Roma’s disjointed class identity and exercise in Surrealist melding of meaning. Through these components, we can better grasp the residual ruptures of Italy’s postwar social climate.
