The Mumpsimus

From a recently-unearthed interview with Pier Paolo Pasolini , conducted three days before he was murdered: Have you bid farewell to the realism of your first features for good? I don't agree with this. After 15 years in Italy, they finally showed Accattone on TV. We realized it is not a realist film at all. It's a dream, it's an oneiric movie. Didn't they consider it a realistic film in Italy? Yes, but it was a misunderstanding. When I made it, I knew I was doing a very lyrical film, not oneiric as it now seems, but deeply lyrical. I used that soundtrack and shot it in a certain way for a reason. Then what happened was that the realistic world I drew inspiration from for Accattone disappeared; it is no longer there, so the film is a dream of that world. Mamma Roma is realist… Mamma Roma is more realistic than Accattone , maybe. I should watch it again. It is less accomplished, less beautiful and that's because it is less dream-like.

I love the unconscious brain! Yesterday I went to the university library and took out a bunch of books, including The Arrival , which is very impressive visually and conceptually (I'd only looked at it -- "read" seems the wrong verb for a wordless book -- once in a bookstore, and wanted the chance to really stare; also, the director of the library, David Beronä , reviewed it for Rain Taxi , so I thought it would be fun to borrow it from David's library. He was a very appropriate reviewer for it, since he's the author of Wordless Books: The Original Graphic Novels ) and The Jameson Reader (what I really wanted was Marxism and Form , but the library doesn't have that [gasp! ack!], so I was hoping to be able to trace some of the ideas I was trying to trace via the selection from Jameson 's other writings). So anyway, I looked at The Arrival , then read some Jameson, then read the Times article about Rachel Maddow getting her own show. I haven't act...