Talking about tears in Pasolini’s cinema evokes the brief moment in Mamma Roma, when a boy hums Una furtiva lagrima in a mocking tone as he sits on a staircase. The man’s tear doesn’t even try to pass for real; it is, in short, a pure ‘tear of the cinema’, made of glycerin, but it assumes, as such, in the story, a figurative reality integrated in the ‘real’ within the fiction and the character’s psychology.
Keywords: Pasolini, Pier Paolo; motion pictures; Jesus Christ; Auerbach, Erich; heretics, Christian
Title
Figura lacrima
Author(s)
Hervé Joubert-Laurencin
Identifier
Description
Talking about tears in Pasolini’s cinema evokes the brief moment in Mamma Roma, when a boy hums Una furtiva lagrima in a mocking tone as he sits on a staircase. The man’s tear doesn’t even try to pass for real; it is, in short, a pure ‘tear of the cinema’, made of glycerin, but it assumes, as such, in the story, a figurative reality integrated in the ‘real’ within the fiction and the character’s psychology.
Is Part Of
Place
Vienna
Publisher
Turia + Kant
Date
2012
Subject
Pasolini, Pier Paolo
motion pictures
Jesus Christ
Auerbach, Erich
heretics, Christian
Rights
© by the author(s)
This version is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Bibliographic Citation
Hervé Joubert-Laurencin, ‘Figura lacrima’, in The Scandal of Self-Contradiction: Pasolini’s Multistable Subjectivities, Geographies, Traditions, ed. by Luca Di Blasi, Manuele Gragnolati, and Christoph F. E. Holzhey, Cultural Inquiry, 6 (Vienna: Turia + Kant, 2012), pp. 237–54 <https://doi.org/10.37050/ci-06_13>
Language
en-GB
page start
237
page end
254
Source
The Scandal of Self-Contradiction: Pasolini’s Multistable Subjectivities, Geographies, Traditions, ed. by Luca Di Blasi, Manuele Gragnolati, and Christoph F. E. Holzhey, Cultural Inquiry, 6 (Vienna: Turia + Kant, 2012), pp. 237–54
Format
application/pdf

References

  • Auerbach, Erich, Mimesis. Dargestellte Wirklichkeit in der abendländischen Literatur (Tübingen: A. Francke Verlag, 2001 [1946]). In Italian as Mimesis. Il realismo nella letteratura occidentale, trans. by Alberto Romagnoli and Hans Hinterhäuser, 2 vols (Turin: Einaudi, 2000 [1956])
  • Auerbach, Erich, ‘Zur Dante-Feier’, in Erich Auerbach: Geschichte und Aktualität eines europäischen Philologen, ed. by Karlheinz Barck and Martin Treml (Berlin: Kulturverlag, Kadmos, 2007), pp. 407–08
  • Bergala, Alain, ‘Montage obligatoire’, in Le montage dans tous ses états, Conférences du Collège d’Histoire de l’Art Cinématographique, v (Paris: Cinémathèque Française, 1993), pp. 1–16
  • Cassin, Barbara, Vocabulaire européen des philosophes: dictionnaire des intraduisibles (Paris: Editions Robert & Seuil, 2004)
  • Faucon, Teresa, Penser et expérimenter le montage (Paris: Presses de la Sorbonne Nouvelle, 2009)
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  • Pasolini, Pier Paolo, Saggi sulla politica e sulla società, ed. by Walter Siti and Silvia De Laude, 2 vols (Milan: Mondadori, 1999)
  • Pasolini, Pier Paolo, Per il cinema, ed. by Walter Siti and Franco Zabagli, 2 vols (Milan: Mondadori, 2001)
  • Pasolini, Pier Paolo, Tutte le poesie, ed. by Walter Siti, 2 vols (Milan: Mondadori, 2003)
  • Passerone, Giorgio, ‘Eretica commedia (Pasolini ab-gioia)’, in Passages pasoliniens, ed. by Giorgio Passerone and René Schérer (Villeneuve d’Asq: Presses du Septentrion, 2006), pp. 193–306
  • Siti, Walter, ‘Tracce scritte di un’opera vivente’, preface to Pier Paolo Pasolini, Romanzi e racconti, ed. by Walter Siti and Silvia De Laude, 2 vols (Milan: Mondadori, 1998), i, p. lxxxi
  • Skorecki, Louis, Les violons ont toujours raison (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2000)
  • Spitzer, Leo, Études de style, pref. by Jean Starobinski, trans. by Éliane Kaufholz, Alain Coulon, and Michel Foucault (Paris: Gallimard, 1970)
  • Viano, Maurizio, A Certain Realism: Making Use of Pasolini’s Film Theory and Practice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993)
  • de Voragine, Jacques, ‘lxxvi: La nativité de Saint Jean-Baptiste (24 juin)’, in La legende dorée, trans. by Teodor de Wyezewa (Paris: Seuil, 1998)
  • Žižek, Slavoj, Lacrimae rerum (Paris: Editions Amsterdam, 2005)

Cite as: Hervé Joubert-Laurencin, ‘Figura lacrima’, in The Scandal of Self-Contradiction: Pasolini’s Multistable Subjectivities, Geographies, Traditions, ed. by Luca Di Blasi, Manuele Gragnolati, and Christoph F. E. Holzhey, Cultural Inquiry, 6 (Vienna: Turia + Kant, 2012), pp. 237–54 <https://doi.org/10.37050/ci-06_13>