on the road
by Douglas Messerli
Pier
Paolo Pasolini (screenplay and director) Uccellacci
e uccellini (The Hawks and the
Sparrows) / 1966
Pasolini’s
The Hawks and the Sparrows focuses on
his two major—and often at odds—inspirations, his communist political alignment
with the Italian poor and his emotional response to his Catholic upbringing.
In the religious tale, Brother Ciccillo
struggles long and hard to discover how to communicate with the hawks, finally
finding a way to share their language, explaining to them the blessing of God
and the Church; it is even more difficult to speak with the sparrows, until he
accidently discovers that it is not sound but “hopping” that will reveal the
truth to them. Yet even after he has miraculously conveyed the message to both,
the hawks, by their very nature, continue to kill the sparrows. And Assisi
sends them back out to explain that such acts are against the will of God.
And even the seeming sparrows of the road
trip, Totò and Ninetto, temporarily behave as hawks themselves, telling a poor,
starving woman and her family, whom they visit, that if she does not
immediately pay her rent, they will have to sell her house. The woman has been
reduced to cooking bird nests for something eat, becoming another kind of
sparrow who destroys her own kind.
A visit to a richer landowner nearby, who
seems to be throwing a Dante convention in his villa, reveals the two
travelers, however, in a different light, as he tells them that unless they pay
up, he will have to foreclose on their farm. In short, the problem is that the
hawks are not so easy to define; sometimes sparrows behave like hawks.
The death of the leftist intellectual Palmiro
Togliatti, whose funeral is also portrayed in the film, reveals that the
message of the left may never be comprehended by either the rich or the poor
(the hawks or the sparrows) which will never allow the necessary revolution to
take place.
Certainly nothing seems to “get through”
to the two “strange birds” on the road, who one by one ridiculously jump into a
field of corn to take advantage of the pleasures a prostitute whom
they encounter. Neither, it is clear, is truly
able or responsible enough to even succeed as a farmer. And it is just as clear
that they learn absolutely nothing from their voyage.
Just the like hawks, they kill and eat
the talking raven, tired of his political jargon. Italians, so suggests
Pasolini, remain in a position of stasis because they can never learn from
either their leaders or their own experiences. It is impossible indeed to save
a society that does not want saving.
Despite its bleak premise, however, the
film is a joy to watch, especially the dancing, hopping, and flapping Ninetto,
who later plays a similar role as a somewhat angelic messenger in Passolini’s Teorema. Evidently, this was the
director’s favorite of his own movies.
Los Angeles, June
9, 2016
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