Country: Italy
Year: 1961
Duration: 120'


“Accattone” (Beggar) is the nickname of a young boy of a Roman district, who lives off a prostitute, Maddalena. When she ends up in prison, Accattone is forced to find himself another way to survive. First he tries to reconnect with his wife, who lives with their son in her father and brother’s house. Then he tries to make Stella, an incredibly naive girl, a new Maddalena. But she is not able to do such a job. Accattone, who falls in love with her, decides to find a job and support both of them. But one day of hard work is enough to make him change his mind. In the meantime, Maddalena turns him in for exploitation and the police start to follow his activities.
Unaware of the situation, Accattone tries the stealing path. Together with a “specialist”, he tries to steal some goods from a truck. The police catch them in the act. While attempting to run away, he gets on a motorbike, but his ride won’t be long: he dies crashing against a wall.
Traduzione in inglese Francesca Sala – English translation Francesca Sala

Biography

film director

Pier Paolo Pasolini

Pier Paolo Pasolini (Bologna, Italy, 1922 - Ostia, Rome, Italy, 1975) published his first collection of poems in 1942, before graduating from university and teaching at a middle school in the province of Udine. He then moved to Rome, where in 1955 he published "Ragazzi di vita" (in English, Hustlers), which led to the first of a long series of lawsuits. He debuted in cinema in 1961 with "Accattone!", presented at Venice, which was then followed by films such as "Mamma Roma", "The Gospel According to Saint Matthew", "Hawks and Sparrows", "Oedipus Rex", "The Decameron" and "Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom", which previewed in Paris in November 1975, three weeks after his death.

FILMOGRAFIA

Accattone (1961), Mamma Roma (1962), Ro.Go.Pa.G. (ep. La ricotta, 1963), Comizi d’amore (tv, doc., 1964), Il Vangelo secondo Matteo (1964), Uccellacci e uccellini (1966), Le streghe (ep. La Terra vista dalla Luna, 1967), Edipo re (1967), Capriccio all’italiana (ep. Che cosa sono le nuvole?, 1968), Appunti per un film sull’India (1968), Teorema (1968), Amore e rabbia (ep. La sequenza del fiore di carta, 1969), Porcile (1969), Medea (1969), Appunti per un’Orestiade africana (1969), Il Decameron (1971), Le mura di Sana’a (1971), I racconti di Canterbury (1972), Il fiore delle Mille e una notte (1974), Salò o le 120 giornate di Sodoma (1975).

Declaration

film director

To those who don’t know my entire biography from the inside, like I do, Accattone appears like my first cinematographic work. It could be surprising that I suddenly made a film like Accattone, but actually, when I was your age, I used to study in Bologna, I used to love cinema and I already wanted to come here to the Experimental Cinematography Centre. But then the war came and I had to give up. My passion for cinema is one of the most important elements of my cultural education and so I’ve been thinking about cinema for all my life, so much so that a few tales published in 1950 on a magazine and that maybe you didn’t even read, and that I’ll publish again soon (I especially remember one, “Studi sulla vita di Testaccio”, written in 1959, ten years before Accattone) had some elements of a screenplay: they talked about tracking shots, panning shots etc. And also in “Ragazzi in vita”, which was written in 1951 and released in 1955, many scenes, such as the one where some guys bathe in the Aniene with some dogs, are very visual, figuratively cinematographic. This means that I didn’t suddenly came up with Accattone. And apart from that, I had also written four or five screenplays before, some of them quite challenging. (...) These were a few external elements of my history as a director; about the inner ones, that’s where it gets complicated. I came into the world of cinema without any professional basics, so that even now, when my operator talks about “photo floue” (soft focus), I’m not so sure about what it is, and I still don’t get many other technical elements that, because of my mindset, I was unable to grasp. When I started to shoot Accattone, I didn’t know the meaning of “panning shot”, which I thought was an extreme long shot; later I found out that it is a way of moving the camera. So I actually did Accattone with a deep inner background, a great charge of passion, but with a huge lack of technical knowledge, which was balanced by the way I saw things. They were so clear in my head, that I didn’t need technical elements to make them, I didn’t have to know that a “panning shot” is called “panning shot” to make a camera movement that could show the flaked walls of the Pigneto.



("Una visione del mondo epico-religiosa. Colloquio con Pier Paolo Pasolini, trascrizione di un incontro con gli allievi del Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia", in "Bianco nero", n. 6, 1964, pp. 12-23)

Based on the literal content of the film, both the Catholic and Communist critics would be right to say that Accattone is basically a religious –especially Catholic- film. (...)
Now I would say: they are surely right, but in my opinion, what actually suggests a form of religiousness in Accattone, is something that looks more external, but feels deeper: it is Accattone’s style, I would say his technique.
I had a sense of the technical sanctity of the camera movements, of the tracking shots, of the panning shots, of the style of the photography. I would label Accattone, apart from the result, a Romanesque film: a film watched from the front, almost solemnly. I would feel my tracking shots, with my Arriflex, which was my poor camera, my tracking shots on the Pigneto, on the rags, on the sun, on the mud, on the dust of Rome, which had a discovery, virginity, solemnity and balance aftertaste, which in my intentions were sacred. This technical sacredness of Accattone’s style and technique is the example of what you call my outbreak of conscience, that is an eternal presence of an outbreak of conscience in me; it is not a day, a moment or a season long, but it has been there for all my life: I’m always in a state of crisis.

(Dichiarazione del 1964, in "Pasolini nel dibattito culturale contemporaneo", Amm. Prov. di Pavia. Com. di Alessandria, 1977, pp. 95-96)

Traduzione in inglese Francesca Sala – English translation Francesca Sala

Cast

& Credits

Regia, soggetto e sceneggiatura: Pier Paolo Pasolini.
Collaborazione ai dialoghi: Sergio Citti.
Assistenti alla regia: Leopoldo Savona e Bernardo Bertolucci.
Director of photography: Tonino Delli Colli.
Art director: Flavio Mogherini.
Arredamento: Gino Lazzari.
Editor: Nino Baragli.
Music: J. S. Bach.
Coordinamento musicale: Carlo Rustichelli.
Fonico: Luigi Puri.
Cast and characters: Franco Citti (Accattone), Franca Pasutt (Stella), Paola Guidi (Ascenza). Alberto Scaringella (Cartagine), Adele Cambria (Nannina), Adriana Asti (Amore). Silvana Corsini (Maddalena), Piero Morgia (Pio), Mario Cipriani (Balilla); Polidor (un becchino), Elsa Morante (una detenuta), Dino Alleva (Iaio), Luciano Conti (il moicano), Luciano Gonini (Piede d'oro), Renato Capogna (il Capogna), Adriano Mazzelli (cliente di Amore), Mario Guerrani (il commissario), Stefano D'Arigò (il giudice istruttore), Mario Castiglione, Dino Fronti, Tommaso Nuovo (amici di Cartagine), Romolo Orazi (suocero di Accattone), Silvio Citti (Sabino), Giovanni Orgitano (lo Scucchia), Adriana Moneta (Margheritona), Sergio Citti (un cameriere), Massimo Cacciafeste (un cognato di Accattone).
Production company: Alfredo Bini per la Cino del Duca e Arco film.
Italian distribution: Cino del Duca (poi Nuova Comunicazione - Arci).
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