ACCATTONE
Italy, 1961
Director: Pier Paolo Pasolini. Story and screenplay: Pier Paolo Pasolini. Script collaborator: Sergio Citti. Cinematographer: Tonino Delli Colli. Art director: Flavio Mogherini. Film soundtrack: Johannes Sebastian Bach. Editor: Nino Baragli. Assistant director: Bernardo Bertolucci. Second Assistant: Leopoldo Savona. Cast and characters: Franco Citti (Vittorio Cataldi, “Accattone”), Franca Pasut (Stella), Silvana Corsini (Maddalena), Paola Guidi (Ascensa), Adriana Asti (Amore). Production: Arco Film (Roma)Cino del Duca (Roma). Producer: Alfredo Bini. Length: 117’.
Format: DCP. Source: Cineteca di Bologna under licence from Compass Distribution.
Original version. Subtitles: English
Restoration in 4K in 2020 by Cineteca di Bologna and The Film Foundation in conjunction with Compass Film and Istituto Luce-Cinecittà carried out in the L’Immagine Ritrovata laboratory. Restoration supported by Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation. Grading supervision by Luca Bigazzi.
Vittorio, nicknamed Accattone (beggar), is a “borgataro” of Rome, lives for the day, as a pimp for Maddalena, a prostitute. The girl ends up in prison and Accattone hopes, in vain, to be able to return to exploit his wife Ascensa; he then tries with Stella, a simple and naive girl who, even though she loves Accattone, refuses the first “customer”. Falling in love with Stella, after an empty attempt to work and live honestly, Accattone goes stealing.
The material and moral misery, sensuality without ideals, the ancestral and superstitious pagan Catholicism of an underclass from the Roman suburbs. This, according to Pasolini, is his ‘Accattone’, a debut film that goes beyond the experience of neorealism to return the epic-religious drama of a pre-bourgeois world. “In ‘Accattone’ I wanted to represent the degradation and humble human condition of a character who lives in the mud and dust of the suburbs of Rome. I felt, I knew, that within this degradation there was something sacred, something religious in the vague and general sense of the word, and so I added this adjective, ‘sacred’ with music. I said, that is, that Accattone’s degradation is, yes, a degradation, but a degradation in some way sacred, and Bach helped me to understand my intentions to the vast public ”. (Pier Paolo Pasolini)
Saturday 9th April, 2022 – 9:30pm
Sunday 10th April, 2022 – 2:00 pm
