Accattone: Becoming a Filmmaker

This chapter discusses the early film career of Pasolini, and dives into his political thinking, including realism, which gains a socioeconomical analysis here. The sociological core of Pasolini’s idea of reality is that the matrix of modern middle-class life is not reality, one which shares a lot with the media theories of Theodor W. Adorno and Guy Debord. While the latter accentuated the role of intellectuals (i.e., their own role) in “escaping” the matrix (false enlightenment, the spectacle), Pasolini kept the poor in the center of his Marxist project. Following this, Pasolini’s cinematic presentation of the Roman Lumpenproletariat becomes a sort of social close-up, a way of giving a voice to the wretched. The “borgate became a political place able to generate its own conditions for words, gestures, and social relations,” and the spectators rather “expectators,” gazing at the revelation of a less-known multiplicity of the world, with its irreducibly singular wretched ones: Alison Smith writes about it in her book Georges Didi-Huberman and Film.