Pasolini,Mamma Roma, andLa Ricotta

ByGary Indiana

ON FILM/ESSAYS— JUN 21, 2004

作者:Gary Indiana

译者:覃天

校对:易二三

来源:《标准收藏》

Indefatigably productive, ingenious, exasperating, narcissistically didactic, slyly self-promoting, abject, generous, exploitative, devoted to the wretched of the earth with honest fervor and deluded romanticism: Pier Paolo Pasolini can easily exhaust the adjective-prone, as man and artist, his person and his work riddled with contradictions.

他不知疲倦地拍摄,作品又具有独创性;他的电影容易让人恼怒,却又带着自恋的说教;狡猾地推销着自己,同时也充斥着卑鄙和不幸;既慷慨大度,也充满了剥削,他总是带着最诚挚的热情和迷惑的浪漫主义,专注于拍摄那些令人痛苦和难受的事物。这些形容词都难以概括皮埃尔·保罗·帕索里尼,作为一个男性和艺术家,他个人以及他的作品都充满了矛盾。

He is unique to postwar Italian culture and politics, unique in his degree of loathing for its fifties and sixties economic miracle and its impact on the country’s cities, the countryside, and its dialect subcultures, unique in his nervous mingling of intense, alienated Catholicism with Gramscian Communism; inLa ricotta,the words of his own poetry, spoken by the film director played by Orson Welles (which had, alas, to be dubbed in Italian by Gregorio Bassani), “I am a force out of the Past. Only in tradition do I find my love...” embody the contradictions that made Pasolini the most controversial and certainly the most persecuted Italian artist of his day. For this worshipper of vanishing times and values was the victim of the most entrenched prejudices surviving from the past. Embracing the stereotype of the noble peasant, he was hounded throughout his career by the homophobia and pious ignorance of peasants, and finally got murdered by one.

帕索里尼对意大利战后的文化和政治局面的看法是十分独特的,独特在于,他个人厌恶意大利五十至六十年代经济奇迹对城市、乡村和方言亚文化造成的影响,并且,当他将强烈而疏远的天主教与葛兰西的共产主义紧张地融合在一起时也是独一无二的;在《软乳酪》这部短片中,奥逊·威尔斯扮演的电影导演(这首诗的意大利语配音由格雷戈里奥·巴萨尼配音)朗读了帕索里尼自己的诗句:「我是一种来自过去的力量。只有在传统中我才能找到我的爱......」展现出了使帕索里尼成为他那个时代最具争议性,当然也是最受迫害的意大利艺术家的矛盾。对于帕索里尼,这个信奉消失的时代和价值观的人来说,他是来自过去的最根深蒂固的偏见的受害者。他接受了贵族农民的刻板印象,在他的整个职业生涯中,他一直受到农民对同性恋的憎恶和虔诚而又无知的困扰,并且最终被其中一名农民杀害。

His entire output as an artist—poems, plays, films, novels, essays, and journalism—adds up to more than the sum of its parts, and it’s especially the films that seem hit-or-miss on the vertiginous level of Pasolini’s own ambition. Pasolini’s cinematic legacy is a jumble of brilliant moments and fizzles, a sprawl in which almost everything is interesting yet much of it reflects the hazards of both lyrical and experimental film.

他作为艺术家的全部作品——诗歌、戏剧、电影、小说、散文和新闻,加起来超过了各个部分的总和,特别是那些看似漫不经心,且又带着帕索里尼个人野心,令人眩晕的电影。帕索里尼的电影遗产是辉煌时刻和失败的掺杂在一起的产物,他几乎所有的作品都很有趣,但其中大部分反映了抒情电影和实验电影的风险。

Mamma Roma,Pasolini’s second feature, and in its antic way, the thirty-five minuteLa ricotta,which immediately followed it, are among Pasolini’s most audaciously shaped and satisfying movies.Mamma Romais the story of a prostitute who rises from the subproletariat to the lower middle class, reclaims her son, Ettore, after an absence of many years, and moves him to Rome with her, where she tries to transcend her past while concealing it from him. This project of self-gentrification and of “urbanizing” an illiterate provincial youth is doomed, however, not least by the reappearance of Mamma Roma’s old lover and pimp, Carmine—quite literally “a force from the Past”—who twice compels her to moonlight from her hard-won position as a market stall proprietor and return to the streets she walked for thirty years.

帕索里尼的第二部电影《罗马妈妈》,以及紧随其后、时长35分钟的电影《软乳酪》,都是帕索里尼最大胆、最令人满意的电影之一。《罗马妈妈》讲述了一个妓女从无产阶级挣扎到下层中产阶级的故事,在阔别多年后,她重新接受了她的儿子埃托雷,并把他带到了罗马,在那里,她试图脱离,同时又对他隐瞒了自己的过去。然而,这个自我中产阶级化和「城市化」的计划注定要失败,尤其是罗马妈妈的旧情人和皮条客卡尔米内的再次出现——确切地说,是「来自过去的力量」——他两次迫使她从来之不易的市场摊位上兼职,回到她走过了30年的街道上。

From a formal viewpointMamma Romais both an extension of the postwar neorealism of Rossellini and De Sica and its repudiation, a film of mostly short, even stuttery scenes broken by longer, surreal passages where Anna Magnani, in the title role, strides along the kind of ill-lit outdoor brothel found in every city, which American pimps and prostitutes refer to as “the track,” soliloquizing about fate as various interlocutors momentarily fall into step with her and then fade into the night.

从形式上看,《罗马妈妈》既是罗西里尼和德西卡战后新现实主义的延伸之作,也是对新现实主义的否定。这部电影中,大多数简短的,甚至是不连贯的场景,被更长的超现实主义段落打断——电影中,罗马妈妈的扮演者安娜·马尼亚尼大步走在每个城市都能找到的那种光线昏暗的户外妓院里,美国的皮条客和妓女们把这种妓院称为「小道」,在不同的谈话者立刻步调与她一致的时候,她独白地谈论着命运。

Mamma Roma’s attempt to give her son a better life has, thanks to Magnani’s grandiloquent acting, the flavor of tragic opera. As one character tells her, “You’d hang on the cross for him, wouldn't you?” But Ettore, whom we first see sitting alone on a bench of a revolving carousel, has no real interest in “bettering himself,” despite some initial enthusiasm for a waiter job his mother and two accomplices have blackmailed a restaurant owner into giving him. He prefers the company of other aimless boys and their adventures in petty crime. His resentment of his mother for his long abandonment (it is never clear who raised him) quickly eclipses the novelty of her outsized personality and her copious affection for him; he feels suffocated by her determination to improve his lot, and completely at sea in his new urban environment.
罗马妈妈想要给他的儿子更好的生活。多亏了马尼亚尼夸张的表演,让这部电影有了悲剧歌剧的意味。正如其中一个角色对她说的,「你已经把他挂在了十字架上,不是吗?」但埃托雷,我们第一次看到他独自坐在旋转木马的长凳上,对「改变自己」没有真正的兴趣,尽管他的母亲和两个同伴最初热情地为他看上了一份服务员的工作,并且勒索这家餐厅的老板给了他这份工作。然而,他更喜欢和其他漫无目的的男孩们在一起,加入他们小规模犯罪的冒险活动中去。他对母亲长期遗弃他,产生的怨恨(他永远不清楚是谁抚养他的),很快就盖过了她强大个性的新鲜感和她对他的深厚感情;对于母亲改善生活的决心,他感到窒息,并且在这个新的城市环境中完全茫然,不知所措。

Mamma Roma’s own desire to rise has a strangely oscillating quality. The world she aspires to, a belt of dreary housing flats andpetit bourgeoisbusinesses on the Roman outskirts, is an up-market version of the ugliness she endured as a prostitute. Her efforts at “respectability” consist of going to Mass, hawking fruit and vegetables from a street wagon, and avoiding her previous profession. She visits a priest for advice, but when he tells her, “You can’t make something of nothing,” she readily draws on the wiles of the very underworld she has struggled to escape to get what she wants for Ettore.

罗马妈妈自己对崛起的渴望有着一种奇怪的,摇摆不定的品质。她所向往的世界,是罗马郊区一条沉闷的住房公寓带和小资产阶级商业圈。那是她作为妓女忍受的,丑陋世界高档版本。她为「体面」所做的努力包括参加弥撒,在街头马车上叫卖水果和蔬菜,以及避开她以前的妓女同行们。她去向一位牧师寻求建议,但当他告诉她,「你不能无中生有」时,她很容易地利用她努力逃离的下流社会的诡计,得到她想要为埃托雷得到的东西。

And this is the crux ofMamma Roma.It isn’t that Mamma is morally flawed—though Pasolini viewed her attempt to find a place in a rapidly changing society as an expression of moral decay, because of this new society’s consumerism and spiritual vacancy—she is socially doomed, and the forces that have made her life a bitter struggle for longer moments of joy than the few she gets to experience (teaching Ettore to tango, clinging to him as the motorcycle she’s bought him roars along the roadway) are the same that literally doom her son.

这就是罗马妈妈的症结所在。这并不是说,她在道德上有缺陷——尽管帕索里尼认为,由于这个新社会的消费主义和精神空虚,她试图在一个快速变化的社会中找到一席之地,这是道德沦丧的表现——她的命运是被社会决定的。那些让她的生活苦苦挣扎的力量,比她能体验到的为数不多的快乐时刻(比如罗马妈妈教埃托雷跳探戈,以及罗马妈妈坐在她给他买的摩托车上,在路上呼啸而过时紧紧抓住他)要多得多,这种力量同样也施加在了他儿子的身上。

The overt Oedipal aspect of this film is a familiar element in Pasolini’s work. Strange to say, we never learn whether Carmine is actually Ettore’s father (something assumed by many critics), since Carmine never claims to be, and Mamma Roma, in one of her hallucinatory night-world promenades, says that “her husband” was Ettore’s father; but she also says this husband, presumably a young man, was arrested and taken away right after their wedding, leaving her “a virgin at the altar.” Moreover, at an earlier point she describes her forced marriage as a teenager to a man over sixty, who has outlived both her parents. (Where is he? She never tells us.) Carmine accuses her of seducing him when he was a simple country boy, and that she was already forty at the time. One would almost conclude that Ettore has no father and that Mama Roma is, like the city she’s named for, “eternal,” the archetype of the mother whose fatherless child is also her lover, if only in her own imagination. (Pasolini, whose sexual tastes ran to street boys like Ettore, loathed his father, who died in 1958, and worshipped his mother, whom he then lived with until the end of his life. He cast her as the Virgin Mary inThe Gospel According to Saint Matthew[1964].)

这部电影公开的恋母情结是帕索里尼作品中熟悉的元素。奇怪的是,我们永远不知道卡尔米内是否真的是埃托雷的父亲(很多批评家假设他就是),因为卡尔米内从未自称是埃托雷的父亲,而罗马妈妈在她的一次幻觉夜游中说,「她的丈夫」就是埃托雷的父亲;但她也说,她的丈夫,大概是一个年轻人,在他们的婚礼刚结束后就被逮捕并带走了,留下她这个「祭坛上的处女」。此外,在早些时候,她描述了自己十几岁时被迫与一名六十多岁的男子结婚的经历,这名男子的寿命比她的父母都要长。(他如今在哪里?罗马妈妈从未告诉过我们。)卡尔米内指责她在他还是一个单纯的乡下男孩时就勾引他,当时她已经四十岁了。人们几乎可以得出这样的结论:埃托雷没有父亲,而罗马妈妈,就像她这个名字的来源城市——罗马一样,代表着「永恒」。(译者注:罗马因历史悠久,并存有大量古迹而被称为「永恒之城」。)她失去父亲的孩子同时也是她的情人,即使这也只是在她自己的想象中。(帕索里尼的性品味转向了像埃托雷这样的街头男孩,帕索里尼厌恶他的父亲——他于1958年去世,并崇拜帕索里尼的母亲。帕索里尼之后和母亲一起生活,直到去世。(在《马太福音》[1964]中,帕索里尼让自己的母亲扮演了圣母玛利亚。)

Mamma Romawas attacked by both the Right and the Left, for opposite reasons, momentarily censured after its premiere at the 1962 Venice Film Festival when a local cop charged it with obscenity, and caused a minor riot when a group of neo-Fascist students invaded its Roman premiere. In a more subtle sense, even its star and director attacked it, or each other, over the issue of Magnani’s performance, which both (mistakenly) found less than wonderful, also for opposite reasons. The stormy reception of the film failed to reap the usual commercial success, and was hardly the first of Pasolini’s troubles (his novels and other writings had incited prosecutions and protests before he ever picked up a camera, and his first film,Accattone,had raised a formidable hue and cry). The “scandal” of Pasolini’s work made him a large public figure, and a large public target.

出于不同的原因,《罗马妈妈》在1962年威尼斯电影节上首映后同时遭到了右翼和左翼的攻击。当时一名当地警察指控它淫秽,并在一群新法西斯学生入侵罗马首映式时引发了一场小规模的骚乱。在更微妙的意义上,即使是《罗马妈妈》中的明星——马尼亚尼和导演帕索里尼也在马尼亚尼的表演问题上互相攻击,双方都也是(错误地)出于不同的原因认为影片不太精彩,这部电影引起的暴风雨般的反响未能获得通常商业上的成功,这并不是帕索里尼遇到的第一个麻烦(他的小说和其他作品常常在他拍摄之前就已经引发了起诉和抗议,他的第一部电影《乞丐》曾引发了人们可怕的抗议)。帕索里尼作品中的「丑闻」使他成为了一个瞩目的公众人物和目标。

But none of Pasolini’s earlier provocations were quite as incendiary asLa ricotta,the director’s contribution to the compilation film Rogopag (Rossellini, Godard, Pasolini, and Ugo Gregoretti). A profoundly religious film,La ricottais an explosion of disgust at consumer society and its vulgarity, a scabrous reproach to the Catholic Church for its abandonment of the poorest members of that society, a film about a film about the Crucifixion that shows Christianity’s central symbolic event being staged within a circus of depravity. Its Christ is a starving film extra who gives his own box lunch to his hungry family, loses a meal he’s stolen to a visiting movie star’s lap dog, and, after managing to stuff himself with ricotta cheese, dies from indigestion on the cross.

但帕索里尼早先的任何一次挑衅都没有《软乳酪》这部影片具有煽动性,这是帕索里尼为《罗戈帕格》这部电影拍摄的其中一部短片(罗西里尼、戈达尔、帕索里尼和乌戈·格雷戈雷蒂联合执导)。《软乳酪》是一部宗教色彩浓厚的电影,是对消费社会及其粗俗的厌恶情绪的爆发,同时也是对天主教会抛弃社会中,那些最贫穷的人的粗暴指责,这是一部关于消费者社会及其粗俗的电影。这是一部关于电影的电影,一部展现苦难的影片。在《软乳酪》中,基督教的核心象征,也就是十字架甚至矗立在堕落的片场中。电影中的基督是一个饥饿的临时演员,他把自己的午餐盒饭给了饥饿的家人,而他偷来的一顿饭却被一位来访的电影明星的哈巴狗吃了,在设法把过多的里科塔奶酪(原产于意大利的一种奶酪)塞进嘴里后,他因为消化不良死在了十字架上。

As Enzo Siciliano puts it in his biography of Pasolini, “this movie set is nothing but the temple overrun by the moneychangers.”La ricottauses all the technical and moral ironies of filmmaking, the disjunction between “reality” and artifice, to paint a world of implacable cruelty ruled by money and cynically contrived spectacle.

正如恩佐·西西里亚诺在他写的帕索里尼传记中所说的:“这部电影的场景不过是一座被假基督这座「摇钱树」侵占的宫殿。”《软乳酪》利用了电影制作中所有的技术上和道德上的讽刺,即“现实”和技巧之间的脱节,描绘了一个由金钱统治的无情世界和玩世不恭的虚构奇观。

Soon after its release in 1963,La ricottawas seized “for insulting the religion of the state.” Pasolini was put on trial, found guilty, and sentenced to prison for four months, a conviction voided by an appeals court the following year.

《软乳酪》在1963年刚一发行,就因“侮辱国教”而被查封了,帕索里尼受审,被判有罪,并被判处四个月监禁,次年上诉法院宣布这一判决无效。

While Pasolini was far too prominent and prolific a figure in Italian culture to be silenced by lawsuits and scandals, the pattern of harassment and denunciation that bedeviled his career from the beginning intensified after the successive polemical and legal brawling overMamma RomaandLa ricotta.International fame made him a potent gadfly in Italian politics and arts. His films and writings were considered a real threat to the substantial remnants of fascism in modern Italy. His murder in 1975, shortly after completing his most scandalous and blatantly anti-Fascist film,Salò,remains fogged by rumors of conspiracy, though many have said Pasolini found a martyrdom he was looking for, in the shabby streets of the abandoned poor he celebrated and mourned.

虽然帕索里尼在意大利文化中,是一位太显眼、太多产的人物,他还是因为诉讼和丑闻而被迫沉默了。但在围绕《罗马妈妈》和《软乳酪》接连引发争议和法律纠纷后,从他职业生涯一开始就困扰他的骚扰和谴责变得更多了。他的国际知名度使他成为意大利政界和艺术界的一只强有力的牛虻。他的电影和文学作品被认为是对现代意大利法西斯主义残余物的真正威胁。1975年,在完成了他最令人反感、最大胆的反法西斯电影《索多玛的一百二十天》后不久,帕索里尼被谋杀之死仍然笼罩在阴谋传言的迷雾中,尽管许多人说帕索里尼找到了他一直寻找的殉道之所——在他曾歌颂和哀悼过的,贫民窟凋敝的街道上。