Stupendous, Miserable City: Pasolini's Rome

Description

John David Rhodes places the city of Rome at the center of this original and in-depth examination of the work of Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini-but it's not the classical Rome you imagine. Stupendous, Miserable City situates Pasolini within the history of twentieth-century Roman urban development. The book focuses first on the Fascist period, when populations were moved out of the urban center and into public housing on the periphery of the city, called the borgate, and then turns to the progressive social housing experiments of the 1950s. These environments were the settings of most of Pasolini's films of the early to mid-1960s.

"In this remarkable book, John David Rhodes makes an invaluable contribution to scholarship on cinema and the city. Analyzing Pier Paolo Pasolini's Rome films and his political and emotional engagement with the city, Rhodes has provided a fascinating and moving background to this period of Pasolini's life, vision, and politics." -Laura Mulvey "John David Rhodes portrays the social and aesthetic complexities of this world with the elan and precision of George Eliot. His outline history of Roman urbanism suggests voracious reading and many a walk through. Rhodes' writing constantly surprises. This is an insightful, engrossing book about art, urbanism and consciousness that changes the way we think about Pasolini's early career." -Sight & Sound