Country: Italy
Year: 1962
Duration: 106'
Mamma Roma is a former prostitute who now has a vegetable stall at the local market. She decides to take back her sixteen-year-old son Ettore, who was raised by farmers, to fulfill her dream of giving him a life in the city. But the woman is blackmailed by her pimp, who forces her to go back out on the street. When Ettore discovers what his mother does for a living, he quits his job as a waiter at a restaurant and becomes a petty thief. He is arrested after stealing a transistor ratio and dies, wracked by fever-induced delirium.
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
“I shoot very short frames which I then coordinate and edit into something which is exactly what I had in mind before I began shooting. Magnani isn’t used to this way of shooting […] and, thus, I realize that it was very hard for her to adapt herself to a work method which captures the feelings, the expressions, the psychological passages in a culminating moment which is absolute and immobile. […] I mean that the way I perceive acting, even though I want it to be absolutely real, or better, realistic, is nonetheless contrary to every form of naturalism.”
Cast
& Credits
director, story, screenplay
Pier Paolo Pasolini
cinematography
Tonino Delli Colli
film editing
Nino Baragli
production design
Flavio Mogherini
music
Antonio Vivaldi
cast and characters
Anna Magnani (Mamma Roma), Ettore Garofolo (Ettore), Franco Citti (Carmine), Silvana Corsini (Bruna), Luisa Loiano (Biancofiore), Paolo Volponi (Priest), Luciano Gonini (Zaccarino), Vittorio La Paglia (Mr Pellissier), Piero Morgia (Piero), Franco Ceccarelli (Carletto), Marcello Sorrentino (Tonino), Sandro Meschino (Pasquale), Franco Tovo (Augusto), Pasquale Ferrarese (Lino), Leandro Santarelli (Begalo), Emanuele di Bari (Gennarino il Trovatore), Maria Bernardini (Bride), Santino Citti (Bride’s Father), Lamberto Maggiornai (Sick Man)
producer
Alfredo Bini
production
Arco Film
