Abstract
This chapter addresses the extraordinary short film by Pier Paolo Pasolini, Cosa sono le nuvole? (1968), where live actors impersonate pupi in an idiosyncratic adaptation of Shakespeare’s Othello. Entering into dialogue with previous scholarship primarily investigating the film’s intertextual and self-reflexive qualities (Velázquez, Pirandello, etc.), the present study introduces an in-depth analysis of the aesthetic and philosophic implications of the puppet image and reference. This intermedial dynamic is examined in terms of Pasolini’s directorial choices as they relate to the opera dei pupi, other types of puppetry and puppet figures (including Pinocchio), and the puppet inherent in the acting style of some of the actors in the cast—especially Totò and Franco Franchi. By complementing intertextual interpretations with intermedial analysis, Cosa sono le nuvole? is presented as a fundamental poetic manifesto for Pasolini. It is revealed to be a film that communicates Pasolini’s fatalistic but vital views of human life and art in connection to the broader cultural history of the puppet metaphor.
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Notes
- 1.
Originally, Pasolini hoped to create his own episodic film, entitled Che cos è il cinema? [What is Cinema?], in which he would have fully highlighted Totò’s mask of the “melancholic clown,” as critic Ennio Bìspuri aptly termed it. See Ennio Bìspuri, Totò Principe Clown: Tutti i film di Totò (Napoli: Guida editori, 1997), 322. Che cos’è il cinema?, which remained an unfinished project because of the death of the great actor in April 1967, would also have contained La terra vista dalla luna (The Earth Seen from the Moon), the short film that became part of the collective film Le streghe (Witches; 1967, together with Mauro Bolognini, Vittorio De Sica, Franco Rossi, and Luchino Visconti), along with a third short film that was never made, entitled Re magio randagio e il suo schiavetto schiavo [The Stray King and His Boy Slave]. The Velázquezian posters with the titles of the three episodes at the beginning of The Clouds remain as a trace of this larger project. Cf. Emanuela Patriarca, Totò nel cinema di poesia di Pier Paolo Pasolini (Firenze: Firenze Atheneum, 2006), 135. Interestingly, shortly before Le nuvole, Cecilia Mangini (1927–), a photographer and documentary filmmaker close to Pasolini himself, filmed a brief cinematographic reportage, entitled Brindisi 1965; in it, a skit with modern pupi is used to underline the state of oppression of the working class inside the Montecatini petrochemical plant in Brindisi.
- 2.
Based on Michel Foucault’s essay on the meta-representative quality of Velázquez’s painting, Alberto Marchesini underlines how the game of Russian dolls, of enigma and evasion that gives life to the painting, runs through the entire short film at various levels and allows us to construct the dream perspective in the film: Alberto Marchesini, Citazioni pittoriche nel cinema di Pasolini (Florence: La nuova Italia editrice, 1994), 93–106. Marchesini refers to Michel Foucault’s 1966 essay, Les mots et les choses. This reading was further developed by Marco Antonio Bazzocchi’s rich study, I burattini filosofi: Pasolini dalla letteratura al cinema (Milan: Mondadori, 2007), where, however, Velázquez’s painting is placed within a dense network of references to literary and critical works (Cervantes’s Don Quixote and Collodi’s Pinocchio, but also Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis and Karl Justi’s texts). In a recent essay, Daniela Bini finds numerous points of contact with Pirandellian thought and, particularly, with Uno, nessuno, centomila, regarding the impossibility of separating fiction and reality and the inadequacy of words: Daniela Bini, “High and Low Art, Inadequacy of Words, and Self-Referentiality in Pasolini’s Che cosa sono le nuvole?” Italica, XC, no. 2 (2013): 227–44.
- 3.
J. D. Bolter and R. Grusin, op. cit., 53–54.
- 4.
Roberto Leydi and Renata Mezzanotte Leydi, Marionette e burattini: Testi dal repertorio classico italiano del teatro delle marionette e dei burattini (Milano: Collana del Gallo Grande, 1958), 16, 19.
- 5.
Other stylistic choices of Pasolini are naturally linked to this aspect, including what Patrick Rumble terms “aesthetic contamination,” referring to the use of premodern visual codes (in particular, Giotto, Masaccio, Bruegel, Bosch, and the Persian and Indian Rajput miniatures). See Patrick Rumble, Allegories of Contamination: Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Trilogy of Life (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996).
- 6.
D. Bini, op. cit., no. 90.2, 238, 243.
- 7.
For a discussion of the way Pasolini elaborates, in the historical context of the boom years, the idea of the organic intellectual proposed in Gramsci’s Quaderni dal carcere, see Claudio Valerio Vettraino, “Pasolini-Gramsci: crisi e decline dell’intellettuale organico,” Critica Impura (blog), April 17, 2012, https://criticaimpura.wordpress.com/2012/04/17/pasolini-gramsci-crisi-e-declino-dellintellettuale-organico/.
- 8.
Michele Guerra, “Figure e cinema,” in Il mondo delle figure. Burattini, marionette, pupi, ombre, ed. L. Allegri and M. Bambozzi, op. cit., 160.
- 9.
Pier Paolo Pasolini, Cosa sono le nuvole?, vol. I, Pasolini per il cinema, ed. Walter Siti and Franco Zabagli (Milan: Mondadori, 2001), 935–36.
- 10.
Totò was inspired by him, and de Marco himself recognized Totò as the heir of his technique. The influence was not only in the marionette style of the performance but also in specific sketches, among others, those of Bel Ciccillo, which Totò stole with great success from de Marco. See Ennio Bìspuri, Vita di Totò (Rome: Gremese, 2000), 45, and Roberto Escobar, Totò (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1997), 27. The case of the great actor Ettore Petrolini (Rome 1886–1936) is also part of this network of relationships, both for the acting inspiration drawn from the puppet theater (and from Italo Ferrari of Parma in particular) and for the influence he had on the young Totò; for a more detailed analysis, see A. Cipolla and G. Moretti, Commedianti figurati e attori pupazzani, op. cit., 21–25.
- 11.
Alberto Castellano and Vincenzo Nucci, Life and Entertainment of Franco Franchi and Ciccio Ingrassia (Naples: Liguori, 1982), 31.
- 12.
Leydi and Mezzanotte Leydi, op. cit., 14.
- 13.
Podering on the presence of Pinocchio in this film, Bazzocchi suggests that a reflection on death is developed by showing Pinocchio’s exit from the theater, rather than his entrance, as it occurs in Collodi’s text (Bazzocchi, op. cit., 96–97). We could also reflect on the anarchic value inherent in the representation of persons of short stature contained in Las Meninas because, in the seventeenth-century court, they represented, as jester-like figures, an accepted element of disorder and the freedom of expression.
- 14.
Luigi Pirandello, The Late Mattia Pascal (Sawtry: Dedalus, 1987), 145 (first edition of the original: Rome, “Nuova Antologia,” 1904). The quotation also contains an ironic reference by the author to the pseudoscientific poses of the theatrical performers of the time.
- 15.
Ibid., 18.
- 16.
Pier Paolo Pasolini, Empirismo eretico (Milan: Garzanti, 1991), 241 (first edition: 1972). The translation is mine.
- 17.
Death is “symbolically... the purest moment of life,” writes Roland Barthes, referring to Tacitus’s historical narrative, echoing an idea characteristic of classical tragedy. The idea also occurs in a text such as Othello, which is underlain by the conception of life as a representation understandable only at the moment when one abandons one’s part. See Catharine Edwards, “Acting and Self-Actualization in Imperial Rome: Some Death Scenes,” in Greek and Roman Actors (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 377–94. From the same source (page 389), I draw and translate Barthes’s own words, originally in Roland Barthes, “Tacitus and the Funeral Baroque,” in S. Sontag, ed., Barthes: Selected Writings (London, 1982), 166.
- 18.
The use of puppetry to evoke a greater and unknown reality beyond our perception and understanding is at the heart of Krzysztof Kieślows’s hypnotic masterpiece of cinematic introspection and metaphysical evocations, The Double Life of Veronique (1991). Here it is the character of a puppeteer, pursuing and eventually seducing the French Veronique, who allows her, through his gift of twin marionettes in her image, to acknowledge her secret awareness of ubiquitous existence.
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Pacchioni, F. (2022). The Pupo and the Theater of Life: Pasolini’s Dream. In: The Image of the Puppet in Italian Theater, Literature and Film. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-98668-1_8
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