P. Adams Sitney (see introduction, March 13) is currently writing a book on Italian Neorealist cinema: its aesthetics, its politics, and its approach to the classics.
P. Adams Sitney will discuss the theoretical issues at stake in Pasolini's film, Hawks and Sparrows. As an homage and gravestone to Neorealism, it pays elaborate tribute to earlier films by Rossellini, De Sica and Fellini. But it also parodies them and reconceives their “brute truths” as stylistic ploys within an elaborately developed iconography of realism. The very social conditions which gave birth to Neorealism changed so radically, the film suggests, that the repetition of the tropes and topoi with which Italian cinema exposed earlier injustices necessarily turn into comic strategies.
In his theoretical writings Pasolini posed as a semiologist. Actually, his central critical debt was to the philologist, Leo Spitzer. Sitney will consider the influence of Spitzer on Pasolini's concept of the “free indirect subjective,” a phrase he used to characterize the poetics of the modern cinema. The comparison of Pasolini's theoretical texts to Hawks and Sparrows will focus attention on the historical position of the postwar Italian cinema to the Italian Communist Party, homosexuality, dialect, and The Church.