Word: roma
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Mamma Roma...
...influence in Italian culture and politics reverberates still today, especially in the anthologies of his writings and films, critical studies of these works, and biographies which seem to appear annually in the United States. This year Americans have their first opportunity to see Pasolini's second feature film, "Mamma Roma," more than three decades after its 1962 Italian release...
...constants throughout his career. Disillusioned with the Communist Party and the Catholic Church, he criticized both. Yet even in criticizing them, he clung to them, commenting on them incessantly in his films. This central conflict generates much of the beauty of his neo-realist-inspired "Mamma Roma...
...film features one-time prostitute Mamma Roma (played by Anna Magnani, one of the most popular actresses of neo-realism, with whom Pasolini had ideological as well as artistic disputes, but who nonetheless plays exquisitely what she had called "the most important role I have played so far"). After her former pimp, Carmine (Franco Citti), marries a well-to-do lady from the countryside, Mamma Roma attempts to lead a respectable life, selling vegetables in an open air Roman market. More importantly, she brings her son, Ettore (Ettore Garofolo), to Rome, with the hopes of providing him a good education...
...first, Mamma Roma succeeds in her attempt to raise her son in the petit-bourgeois world of Rome, rather than in the seedy world of Roman prostitution where she has spent her entire life. The height of her success is captured in a beautifully shot sequence where Ettore takes his mother out on the new motorcycle she has bought for him. The two speed through the streets of Rome, shouting excitedly to one another and laughing loudly atop the brand-new, shiny symbol of Mamma Roma's petit-bourgeois accomplishments...