This website uses cookies so that we can provide you with the best user experience possible. Cookie information is stored in your browser and performs functions such as recognising you when you return to our website and helping our team to understand which sections of the website you find most interesting and useful.
Privacy Overview
Strictly Necessary Cookies
Strictly Necessary Cookie should be enabled at all times so that we can save your preferences for cookie settings.
If you disable this cookie, we will not be able to save your preferences. This means that every time you visit this website you will need to enable or disable cookies again.
3rd Party Cookies
This website uses Google Analytics to collect anonymous information such as the number of visitors to the site, and the most popular pages.
Keeping this cookie enabled helps us to improve our website.
Please enable Strictly Necessary Cookies first so that we can save your preferences!
Director's Statement
Having made AMORE TOSSICO in the early 1980s on the colonisation of Pasolini’s working-class suburbs by heroin – a film which became a cult, capturing generation after generation, and is constantly talked about on the internet, on blogs and in forums – I confess that I have often cherished the idea of returning to those locations with the aim of recording the change in the consumption and selling of drugs (in those suburbs, as is common knowledge, it is never a question of just consumption). But it was a temptation that never found sufficient motivation to turn into a real project. Only a series of recent trips into what remains of those worlds and the related discoveries helped me grasp what could really be done: not a simple factual slice of the new junkie world, but a more ambitious snapshot of the final outcome of Pasolini’s world.
As was obvious, the poet’s incitement to abolish compulsory school has remained just that; and, far from being suspended, TV programmes have spread unchallenged, creating a vulgar and rotten indistinguishable mass, going well beyond Pasolini’s most pessimistic forecasts. We are now seeing the complete dissolution of that world, surprisingly also thanks to the incursion into the mentality of those suburbs of a practice which is truly original for them: that of work. And nothing could have wiped out the original culture more thoroughly than the concept and practice of work. Just remember the start of ACCATTONE when the protagonist's foolhardy brother comes out with the fact that he must go to work and everyone immediately makes fun of him: “He’s blasphemed!” Or the penultimate scene of the same film where Franco Citti looks in dismay at the materials to be loaded on to the pick-up truck: “Tons of the stuff! How can all this iron exist in Italy!” But the whole film is a collection of attitudes and comments against the world of work, because only “animals work”. Looking at the current periphery and outskirts, immersing yourself in those environments, you immediately think that today there would be a false and misplaced note in these Christ-like destinies and endings which led characters such as Accattone, Ettore from MAMMA ROMA, Stracci from LA RICOTTA, and also Cesare from AMORE TOSSICO, to die as modern-day Christs. Nowadays every religious dimension is lost; today Accattone goes to the disco, takes and deals cocaine and pills and if then things go really well, the best that can happen is a finale similar to that which in ROCCO AND HIS BROTHERS sealed Ciro’s working-class destiny, even if no longer with Visconti’s 1960s optimism and positivity about major industry. Work which for those 'terroni' (bumpkins) driven north by the hardship of the times was already all-encompassing and brought them into line with the rest of society: work which today in the periphery, although arriving four decades late, when they are now in crisis and lurking in the most advanced parts of society, in any case sanctions the final, total, irreversible approval of the otherness of the periphery.
The field research was done through channels that have remained open since the times of AMORE TOSSICO and, above all, through Emanuel Bevilacqua, who in THE SCENT OF THE NIGHT (L’Odore della note) played the role of Rozzo. Emanuel was born and lives at Piazza Gasparri, the heart of Ostia Nuova, a short walk from the seaplane base, and is the son of one of the historic Pasolini families together with the Citti and Davoli families. His father and the uncles acted in Pasolini’s first films, starting from ACCATTONE where they played the Neapolitans (see the chapter on the families in the catalogue of the historic exhibition by Michele Mancini and Sandro Perrella, “Pasolini corpi e luoghi”, Theorema edizioni, Rome, 1981). A wealth of facts and stories came out of the twenty years – and more – which range from the period in which AMORE TOSSICO is set out onwards: a striking anthropological framework in terms of both quantity and truths. A framework which, to keep playing with the references, rather than a new ACCATTONE or a new AMORE TOSSICO could produce a new MEAN STREETS.