Gay saints

Frescoes are cinema avant la lettre, or at least the tech. Wall spanning, the Renaissance frescoes anticipate not only the magnitude and dynamism of cinema but the possibilities of the camera to manipulate the eye. For Pasolini, cinema is essentially oneiric; key narrative developments hinge on dreams, as in Accattone, not because they are shortcuts to the interiority that cinema otherwise denies but because films themselves are dreamwork, beholden to dream logic. In the written Gospel According to Matthew dreams are especially prominent, the otherwise gnomic character of Joseph receiving no fewer than four nocturnal communiques from God. To dream, then, is to be most open to communion with the supernatural, the sacred and the divine.
The streetwalking sequences in Pasolini’s second film, Mamma Roma (1962), typify both his understanding of films as dreams and his conflation of the sacred with the profane. Striding through an open-­air brothel, Anna Magnani’s Mamma Roma is trailed by a procession of johns, imperiously indifferent to their presence as she soliloquises divergent scraps of autobiography. The transition from realism to dream logic is seamless – her separate accounts of her erstwhile marriage explicitly contradict one another, leaving the mystery of her son Ettore’s father unresolved.