Let me admit up front that
although I find Pasolini a brilliant, provocative, and at times
sublime filmmaker, I have a hard time connecting with The
Hawks and the Sparrows. I'm not sure if the problem lies in
me or in the way Pasolini conceptualized the film; perhaps it's some
combination of the two. Let it also be noted that some viewers are
passionately devoted to this picture and, like all of Pasolini's
films, it is definitely worth seeing and, if you're so inclined,
pondering. Maybe "pondering" is a good way to begin talking about
it. Although parts of this episodic film are very funny and certain
elements work extremely well (as discussed below), overall it feels
at once ponderous yet underdeveloped. Pasolini had set out to make
an ideological comedy but, as he remarked in a 1968 interview,
"perhaps it came out... too 'ideo-' and not 'comic' enough." Still,
the film functions primarily as a comedy, although a very dark one,
as you can see in the following summary (it is more extensive than
usual because the DVD, at the request of the Pasolini Foundation,
does not include any chapter titles or access points –
details below).
Innocenti Totò (played by Totò)
and his son Innocenti Ninetto (Ninetto Davoli), one of his eighteen
children (we never see any of the others), amble along a nondescript
road somewhere on the outskirts of Rome. They stop at a cafe, and
Ninetto joins a group of boys practicing a new line dance. Father
and son resume their walk only to stop a bit further along, when
Ninetto goes to visit his girlfriend (Rossana Di Rocco), who is
dressed as an angel for a pageant, while Totò watches an ambulance
hauling off two corpses. Totò and Ninetto then hook up with a
talking left-wing (pun intended) crow. The pendantic fowl announces
that he comes from the country of Ideology, and we soon learn of his
penchant for alluding to the likes of Marx, Brecht, Rossellini, and
Mao. He repeatedly asks them where they are going, but they never
give a direct answer.
To break the monotony, as all
three walk under the blazing sun, the crow tells an extended
medieval fable – which Pasolini dramatizes – about Brother Ciccillo
(also played by Totò) and Brother Ninetto (Davoli), two
high-spirited friars chafing under Saint Francis. He directs them to
preach Christian values to the birds, especially "the arrogant hawks
and humble sparrows." Although after months of effort the two
succeed in communicating with both species, the big birds still eat
the little ones. Saint Francis will not accept that fact, and orders
the friars to continue attempting to convert the birds. Back in the
present, Totò, Ninetto and the crow find a thatched hut in a field.
They stay there until the angry, and poor, owners violently drive
them off.
Next we find Totò and Ninetto
demanding the rent from a woman (Rosina Moroni) so destitute that
day after day she tells her starving children that it is still
night. She hopes that they will go back to sleep and not want to
eat, since there is no food. Totò and Ninetto ignore her pleas for
help. Resuming their walk, father, son and the ever-chatty crow
encounter a group of traveling actors, costumed in ancient Roman
attire. When the leading lady gives birth in the middle of their
show (entitled "How Rome Ruined the World"), Totò tries to shield
his son's eyes, to keep him from any premarital knowledge of sex.
Grinning, Ninetto points out that the "foot cream" his father is
using is in fact an expired contraceptive. Still with the crow, they
next go to the villa of their landlord, called the Engineer (Ricardo
Redi), who is hosting the swanky Conference of Dentists for Dante.
The landlord treats Totò and son as mercilessly as they had treated
the woman tenant. Booted from the villa, the three companions watch
the funeral of Togliatti (the highly-successful former leader of the
Italian Communist party). Back on a road similar to the one in the
first scene, Totò and Ninetto meet a vivacious young woman named
Luna (Femi Benussi). Father then son sneaks off into a corn field to
have sex with her, to the crow's chagrin. The two men are now more
ravenous than ever, as we move into the final section of the film.
Some of the most effective
elements in the film derive from Pasolini's love for early comedy.
The first image of the film, with Totò and son walking along an
endless dusty road, seems to pick up where Chaplin's Modern
Times (1936) left off. Totò, one of Italy's most beloved
comedians, brings together two more important elements for Pasolini.
His stony yet expressive, and hilarious, face brings to mind both
Buster Keaton and, in a surreal kind of way, a bird (and in a film
with a title like this one, that means something).
Ninetto Davoli is a perfect
foil. He is all laughter and devil-may-care hijinks, injecting the
film – which is often set in one form of wasteland or another – with
the spirit of youth although, significantly, it is not a spirit of
rebellion, but more a last burst of steam being let off before
following, literally and otherwise, in his father's footsteps. One
of the most energetic scenes comes at the very beginning, when
Ninetto joins a group of other teenage boys practicing a line dance
to a sassy pop tune (written by the great film composer Ennio
Morricone). Despite the vitality of this de facto musical number, on
another level it shows that he is all too eager to conform his own
energy to the group, by learning to dance just like everyone else.
In Pasolini, as in life, almost everything has multiple, and
sometimes paradoxical, meanings. It should be noted that offscreen
Ninetto was perhaps the great love of Pasolini's life; and they
always remained very close – making eleven films together – even
after Davoli married and became a father.
The film is also filled –
though perhaps not enough – with the trappings of silent comedy,
including pratfalls, comic chases (one of which ends in
leapfrogging), broad gestures and expressions, and more than a
little sexual inuendo.
Pasolini's world provides
ample, if often contrived, opportunities for comedy, but it is often
of a violent kind, both emotionally and physically, and reminds us
more of Theatre of the Absurd than Chaplin and Keaton. Of course,
those actor/filmmakers had a profound influence on that seminal
Absurdist Samuel Beckett (an artist as prodigiously cultured as
Pasolini), whose 1952 masterpiece Waiting for Godot is as
inconceivable without Chaplin as The Hawks and the Sparrows
is without Beckett.
One of the problems I have
with this film, despite its many original moments, is that it often
feels like Pasolini had sat down with some essays (undoubtedly his
own) on Absurdism and Existentialism, and then whipped up some
characters and scenes to embody the ideas. Unlike most of Pasolini's
other works, this one does not feel organic. Absurdist playwrights
like Beckett, Ionesco, and Genet kept popping into my head. They
clearly provided Pasolini with a philosophical blueprint for this
picture, with their vision of the harsh ridiculousness of life, as
well as their subversive style (including illogical, even
fantastical plots) that undercuts both dramatic form and the
assumptions of their audience. (The crow mentions Brecht, as any
good Marxist would, and in some ways his "alienation effect" is
analagous to the distancing strategy of the Absurdists.) The surface
of these Absurdist works is often comic, but the humor is drenched
with an underlying (Existential) pessimism about the human
condition, where we are all cut off from one another, and the
universe is seen as ultimately meaningless. Although these ideas
seemed minty fresh in high school, and although I still enjoy and
admire the authors mentioned above, their vision has since lost its
force; and too much of it seems to have trickled down into this
film. (As a gay artist, Pasolini might also have felt a certain
kinship with the young gay man named Alfred Jarry who invented
Theatre of the Absurd in 1896 with his scabrously delightful play
King Ubu; Jean Genet, perhaps even more notorious than
Pasolini – and his artistic peer – in such plays as 1956's The
Balcony, would have reminded the filmmaker even more directly
of the same-sex dimensions of the Absurdist view.)
Interestingly, Pasolini's film
seems to be simultaneously both a work of Absurdism and a tentative
refutation, or at least modification, of its assumptions. It shares
with them the basic formal techniques mentioned above; for instance,
the form of Totò and son's journey – like the structure of the film
itself – is a giant loop, as they travel around, and around and
around, Rome's "periferia" (periphery). Always moving, but never
really getting anywhere: The symbolism is both obvious yet too
opaque in how it relates specifically to this film, as opposed to a
more general Absurdist view.
Where Pasolini may part
company with the Absurdists (depending on how you read the film) is
in his focus not so much on cosmic philosophical themes but on the
somewhat more down-to-earth conflict between religion and Marxism,
which Pasolini saw as the central split in his country (as anyone
who has seen his documentary
Love Meetings
will know).
There is a good deal of
dialogue in this film, and the crow has some of the most audacious
(which is not necessariliy to say best) lines. When we first meet
him, he drones on (I'm mercifully abridging his monologue) about how
"my country is Ideology... my parents are Mr. Doubt and Mrs.
Conscience... [We] lived at Karl Marx Street number seventy times
seven..." That latter phrase is one of Pasolini's many sly in-jokes,
since it refers to his earlier masterpiece
The Gospel According to Saint Matthew
(not to mention the New Testament), when Jesus tells Peter that we
should forgive our brother when he sins against us "not... Until
seven times; but, Until seventy times seven" (Matthew
18:22). Here, Pasolini has yoked together Marx and Jesus – which may
be ideologically provocative but it's really not all that funny (and
it was intended to be). In case you think Pasolini has suddenly
converted from gay Marxist atheist to born-again Catholic, remember
that in this film he cast the same young woman, Rossana Di Rocco,
who played the angel in The Gospel as a bratty girl now
dressed in a threadbare angel costume for a school play (Ninetto
says, "You look like an airplane"). At her final appearance she
flips him the bird before she recedes into the upper story of a
decaying, empty building (in a film which is crawling with –
symbolism alert! – a series of ruined buildings surrounded by vacant
lots).
As if he were in some kind of
ideological/symbolic pissing match with the crow, Totò now tells the
little chatterbox where he and his absurdly large family reside:
"We're at Garbageville. Down-and-Out Street. Number 23, below
Cesspool Ridge, world-famous for the martyrdom of Saint Illiterate."
If a crow could roll his eyes.... At least we can.
With the vast fund of
knowledge at Pasolini's disposal, we could also see the film as a
unique take on one of his favorite poets (Pasolini has himself been
called the greatest postwar Italian poet). It is likely not
coincidental that the landlord is hosting the well-healed but
grotesque Conference of Dentists for Dante. (With its wink to
La Dolce Vita, the scene is also intentionally Felliniesque
– the filmmakers were friends, and Pasolini even wrote the "street
life" scenes in Nights of Cabiria – but then, in
Pasolini not even the in-jokes exist on just one level.)
The misadventures of Totò and
son could be a Pasolinian update of sections from the Divine
Comedy's Inferno and especially Purgatorio sections; the
omnipresent road in this film lies between two areas, Rome and the
countryside, as Purgatory lies between hell and heaven. Like the
damned souls in hell, and some of the luckier ones in Purgatory
(where so many of the world's great, but not
purely-Christian-enough, artists hang out, including Giotto – whom
Pasolini played in
The Decameron),
father and son walk in circles. If they never learn from their
mistakes, they'll remain in a Hell of repetitive alienation; but if
they do, and can "Purge" themselves of their ignorant and sinful
ways (Pasolini's conception of "sin" is more sociopolitical than
Christian-spiritual), then maybe they can finally catch one of those
buses which they're always missing and get out of wherever they are.
(That's another of the film's running gags; but with its vague
symbolism and not-quite-swift enough pacing, how thematically
resonant or even just plain funny is it?) They key to the film's
Dantesque layer may be the crow – about whom Pasolini said "there is
almost total identity between me and the crow" – who functions like
one of Dante's guides on his journey through metaphorical, not to
mention metaphysical, realms. (In the real world of filmmaking, the
bird was a pain in the tailfeathers for Pasolini to work with; it
even had the gall to die before the end of the shoot.)
The central symbol is, of
course, the one in the title, which Pasolini dramatizes in the
lengthy film-within-the-film episode. But what are we to make of the
hawks and the sparrows? The title suggests a kind of symbiotic
relationship between predator and prey, even as it symbolizes the
two great tendencies within Italian culture and, to a lesser degree,
within Pasolini himself: Catholicism and Marxism, and the violence
which can result when they clash.
Is communication possible
between man and bird? Incredibly, and hilariously (in some of the
film's funniest moments), yes. But what about communication between
hawks and sparrows? The answer to that comes when a hawk swoops out
of the sky and gobbles up a cute little sparrow – to the utter, and
hilarious, horror of the two friars. Is Pasolini pointing up the
essentially bleak view of humanity shared by Christianity (fallen,
sinful man in his pre-Redemptive state) and Marxism (exploited man
in his pre-Revolutionary state), with Nature as the culprit?
That is a weighty, and of
course important, theme if ever there was one, especially for a
comedy. But which group do the hawks represent, and which the
sparrows? Pasolini keeps the ambiguity coming, as he shows how each
group contains elements of both victimizer and victim. Paralleling
that, we see father and son in a similarly fraught dual role: They
victimize the poor woman when trying to collect her rent, and are in
turn victimized by their boss, the landlord. That vicious circle
connects not only with all of the circular/repetitive elements in
this film, but with most of Pasolini's works, from the beguiling
victimizer/victim
Accattone in
his first film to the stomach-churning debaucheries of his last,
Salò (the scatalogical horror there is presaged by the
scatalogical humor in this film).
Throughout The Hawks and
the Sparrows, Pasolini shows the strengths, weaknesses, and
inconsistencies of both ideologies. Basically, the father represents
Catholicism, the crow Marxism, and the son is still something of a
clean, or rather blank, slate. But despite Ninetto's youthful
ebullience and sharp eye, he seems relatively uninterested in
questioning the assumptions and traditions of his world, although
the film presents him – and more importantly for Pasolini, each of
us viewers – with many situations blatantly showing the absurd, if
not necessarily Absurdist, follies of Italian society.
At the end of the film, we see
father and son still traipsing along a road which looks like the one
where they began. We may recall the portentous, although mercifully
tongue-in-cheek, title card from earlier which read, "The road
begins and the journey is over. And we may also wonder if now
– after their perhaps fateful encounter with the crow – they mght
start looking at what makes things tick, and begin to understand the
different dimensions (economic, social, political, religious,
psychological) of their own benighted condition. The crow predicted
that they would (but what does he know?). And even if they do begin
looking beneath the surface of things, will the meanings they find
– if any – be the same as the ones the crow focused on? Will they be
able to combine their intrinsically comic, but powerless,
perspective with the crow's social consciousness? Will it result in
their taking action, perhaps even turning them into some kind of
revolutionaries? Or are they now ready to fall back into the
comforting, but Pasolini would say suffocating and destructive, arms
of organized religion – if they can ever get back to their home in
Garbageville? Will they find a way out of the loop which separates
Rome from the countryside, and world of Nature, beyond? Will they
now, finally, be able to catch one of those buses they keeping
missing?
At least for me, those are too
many questions, and of too monumental a nature, to leave hanging at
the end of this picture. Puzzle movies can be stimulating – just
think of Peter Greenaway's best work – but The Hawks and the
Sparrows feels both too cerebral yet not nearly
well-thought-out enough. Despite some considerable visual flair,
Pasolini needed to dramatize and visualize his arguments with more
fullness. And although his seemingly-digressive structure gave the
narrative momentum, he needed to flesh out his ideas, to embody them
in living, breathing people.
He might also have wanted to
up the comedy factor considerably. Pasolini himself felt that way,
and in fact went on to star Totò and Ninetto Davoli in a wonderfully
surreal and funny short film, "The Earth Seen from the Moon" ("La
Terra vista dalla Luna," part of the anthology film, The
Witches [La Streghe]). As he once said, in
The Hawks and the Sparrows "the ideology was not all absorbed
by the story, it had not become transformed into poetry, lightness
and grace.... I... regret that I had not made a much lighter and
more fabulous film, even a picaresque film which might have been
less meaningful ideologically but which would have been more
ambiguous and mysterious, more poetic." Mr. Pasolini, you took some
of the words right out of my mouth.
If only he had followed his
own lead, which in fact was set in one of the most original and
delightful, yet sharp, opening credits sequences I have ever seen
– or heard. The credits are sung in the style of a fizzing comic
opera aria, in the manner of Rossini. And so many names ending in a
long "i" – Pasolini, Bini, ....Uccellini – are a
lyricist's dream. (One wonders what Pasolini would have thought of
his admirer Rainer Werner Fassbinder's
Satan's Brew,
a political black comedy directed as if it were an operetta –
without anyone singing a note.)
If the comedy of The
Hawks and the Sparrows had been even funnier, the film might
have had a more visceral impact, making its intriguing political and
philosophical points more meaningful. Despite my personal
reservations (which are certainly not shared by all of Pasolini's
admirers), I hope that you will watch this picture and see what
you think.