Twisted Realism takes Pier Paolo Pasolini’s film Mamma Roma (1962) as case study to investigate both the period of "economic miracle" in Italy and the contemporary Italian context. A polyphony of voices recounts the scenario of the film as well as different aspects of its production and diffusion, which manifest political moments within the broader cinema agency. The video revisits some shooting locations of Mamma Roma and embodies a new geography of the contemporary Rome. It investigates various "aesthetics of reality" in the cinematographic depictions of the urban development of the INA-Casa Tuscolano district, a large-scale social housing project built in 1950-1960, and deconstructs the propagandistic logics of a series of "documentary" films that promoted both the government plans and a new expression of identity and citizenship. Twisted Realism evokes how the Italian art cinema of the 1960s has been commodified in a process of privatisation of culture and monopolisation of the mediascape, as well as how it has been appropriated for writing an unifying version of the national history. Bringing together personal and institutional archive material with individual memories, it uncovers the power relations and state violence that gave a decisive impulsion to Pasolini´s project behind the mercantile discourses on the "glorious Italian cinema of the 1960s".
Works in the exhibition:
TWISTED REALISM, HD Film, 75min, 2012
Part Five Documentation, Slide projection, 80 Slides, 2012
Links: www.parallelhistories.org
