FILM SCREENINGS

Mamma Roma

1962. Italy. Directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini. With Anna Magnani, Ettore Garofolo, Franco Citti. “Arguably in Mamma Roma the sub-proletarian world provides not only the subject matter but the actual subject of the film, for the story hinges on the attempts of Mamma Roma, an ex-prostitute, to ‘go straight’ and to provide a respectable petty bourgeois existence in which her adolescent son can grow up. The attempts fail and the respectable dream evaporates and, in a sense, there is a moral in this—the first statement by Pasolini of what is to become a recurrent theme: the un-livability of the modern bourgeois and petty-bourgeois world” (G. Nowell-Smith, “Pasolini’s Originality,” in Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1977). In Italian; English subtitles. 111 min.