fondazione giorgio cini · venezia · istituto per la musica

Arts and Artifacts in Movie

AAm · TACTechnology, Aesthetics, Communication

an international journal

6 · 2009

pisa · romafabrizio serra editore

mmx

offprint

Direttore / Editor

Giovanni MorelliFondazione Giorgio Cini, Venezia

Comitato scientifico / Scientific Board

Carmelo Alberti · Università Ca’ Foscari, Venezia Fabrizio Borin · Università Ca’ Foscari, Venezia

Francesco Casetti · Università Cattolica, Milano Roberto Cicutto · Producer Mikado Film

Antonio Costa · iuav, Venezia† Fernaldo Di Giammatteo · Film critic

and Cinema historian Roberto Perpignani · Film Editor Benjamin Ross · Director, writer

Giorgio Tinazzi · Università di Padova Riccardo Zipoli · Università Ca’ Foscari, Venezia

Coordinatore editoriale / Associate Editor

Fabrizio Borin

Per la migliore riuscita delle pubblicazioni, si invitano gli autori ad attenersi, nel predisporre i materiali da consegnare alla redazione ed alla casa editrice, alle norme specificate nel volume

Fabrizio Serra, Regole editoriali, tipografiche & redazionali, Pisa-Roma, Serra, 20092

(ordini a: fse@libraweb.net).Il capitolo «Norme redazionali», estratto dalle Regole, cit., è consultabile Online

alla pagina «Pubblicare con noi» di www.libraweb.net.

*

«aam · tac» is a Peer-Reviewed Journal.

ELEMENTAL HOUSING IN THE POSTWAR IMAGINARy*

Noa Steimatsky

In the mid 1940s, as the war in Europe was in its advanced and awful stages and, then, as it finally ended leaving behind devastation and ruin, material and human, on a vast scale,

housing for those who lost everything but bare life presented a great challenge. It com-manded immediate attention as well as long-term solutions, and it came to carry great sym-bolic weight in the culture of reconstruction and in the longer postwar imaginary. Architec-ture in Italy – in permanent or temporary, planned or improvised forms – and the modes of representation relating to it in reportage and literature, in photography and in cinema was compelled in that era to reflect on the physical and existential conditions of dwelling : on human habitation as basic need, but also as social, cultural, and psychic order.1 Surrounding an expansive notion of reinhabiting the landscape I have approached, elsewhere, this among other tropes that informed Italian cinema’s intense engagement with its postwar locations.2 In light of additional materials I will, in the present essay, excavate that trope, working ret-rospectively from the mid-1960s to the mid-1940s, traversing fiction and documentary, film and photography, and the evidence of historical experience itself, to bring into relief recur-rent images and some eloquent objects.

Consider Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Technicolor episode, La terra vista dalla luna (from Le streghe, 1966). Its principal location : the fiumara di fiumicino, a peripheral neighborhood at the mouth of the Tiber. Here, where children play in heaps of trash, one can imagine no infrastructure or resources to support what are surely illegally erected hovels. yet Pasolini’s gaze is not that of an accusing documentary inquiry, but of a tragic-comic parable wherein Totò and Ninetto Davoli, widowed father and son, bring their deaf-mute new bride, Silvana Mangano, to their ‘nest’ in the borgata. In fact it looks just like one : partly roofed with straw, it is improbably assembled and furnished with found objects and discards (fig. 1). Having made way, in the Italian economic miracle, for ever-updated gadgets and the sleek design of luxury kitchens, the plastic refuse of mass-consumer goods meets here with remnants of war, as well as earlier allusions. Mangano instantly takes up housekeeping and sorts out the heaps : fabric bits, plastic toys and containers, a hand grenade a transistor radio playing mili-tary marches, a Charlie Chaplin poster suggest a precarious abundance that cannot conceal the destitution of this pathetic habitat. Mangano rearranges the shack in a colorful brico-lage (fig. 2) : the dark, crowded space magically clears up, under stained glass windows, to accommodate some needs but perhaps more successfully the fantasy-life of this odd family. A plastic shower curtain separates the couple’s bed from the ‘child’ Ninetto’s corner : at least lying down, sleeping and dreaming – though perhaps not much more – now seem possible here. The décor – that Totò compares to the Baroque glories of St. Peter’s – even includes a squirting ornamental fountain balanced in a plastic bowl, though the serious question of

* In preparing this essay I was rewarded by discussions with Marco Bertozzi (iuav University, Venice), flavia Marcello (University of Melbourne), and John David Rhodes (University of Sussex).

1 Martin Heidegger’s seminal essay Building, Dwelling, Thinking, in Poetry, Language, Thought, transl. by Albert Hofstadter, New york, Harper Colophon, 1971, itself inspired by the postwar plight of housing, has informed my thinking in these pages.

2 Noa Steimatsky, Italian Locations : Reinhabiting the Past in Postwar Cinema, Minneapolis (mn), University of Minnesota Press, 2008, esp. Introduction and Chapter 2.

«aam · tac» · 6 · 2009

noa steimatsky46

running water and sanitation is further underlined in view of an artificial flower propped up in a chamber pot (fig. 3). Surely a question as to the pot’s less decorative uses reflects the historical fact that, well into the 1960s, numerous living quarters in Italy had no bathrooms, or only external ones. The fountain and chamber-pot vase register, then, as mock luxury that cannot compensate for the lack of essentials.

And indeed can anything here support but the most temporary existence ? We soon learn that this in fact will not suffice ; the family’s fundraising efforts that follow lead to Manga-no’s fatal fall from the Colosseum : life itself is understood to be a temporary habitation of sorts – this has always been the consolation of the disinherited. yet the borgata cannot be superseded even after death, when Mangano-the-witch returns to this same hovel. The sense of a second or third life, resurrected among the ubiquitous plastic wares, partakes in that « desperate vitality », humble and magical, that animates Pasolini’s world.1 It echo the historical project of reconstruction ; it is also akin to the film-makers’ craft. An imaginary projection of putting one’s house in order, and making do with what there is, is posited towards one viable use of such a site : a home for cinema to inhabit, a flexible set from which Pasolini assembles a precise, obverse vision of Italy’s contemporary condition.2

Michelangelo Antonioni’s almost contemporary Il deserto rosso (1964) makes use of a comparably bold palette of plastic, industrial colors as part of a distinct discourse on dwell-ing as material and psychic space. ‘How to live’ and ‘how to look’ (or, see) are posed as syn-onymous questions in the film. The central location of the factory, with its unknown object of production borne by colorful pipes and yellow smoke, inflects other sites. The exclusive interiors of the manager’s modern villetta connotes the oppressive spaces of a submarine : a machine for living that seems to emit electric pressure noises at night.3 A workers’ housing

1 Una disperata vitalità is the title of Pasolini’s cycle of poems, that forms part of Poesia in forma di rosa, Milan, Garzanti, 1964.

2 Pasolini was certainly familiar with Alberto Moravia’s short story Addio alla borgata that compares a borgata Gordiani hovel with one constructed as cinematographic set, in Racconti romani, Milan, Bompiani, 1954.

3 The exclusive interiority of this neurotic female protagonist’s house connotes the sets of numerous domestic melodra-mas in the Classical Hollywood, White Telephone, and other studio traditions. Antonioni who is in fact a supreme director of exteriors radicalizes this interiority in this sequence.

fig. 1. Pier Paolo Pasolini, La terra vista dalla luna (1966). Courtesy Cineteca di Bologna-Centro Studi«Pier Paolo Pasolini».

elemental housing in the postwar imaginary 47

development is set between fields and some experimental terrain where metal contraptions and antennae invoke a cosmic dimension. finally the fishing hut : perched on the polluted waterfront, under the fog and shadow of ships coming from great distances fantastically near, it is not quite a home, but better equipped than Pasolini’s hovel. The mattresses filling one room betray the hut’s function as sexual retreat : this is a place to lie down, to play, to imagine. But some must refashion their playing ground to match an altered perception : the engineer (Richard Harris) thus smashes the partition between the two rooms, as others join in a displaced orgiastic attack on the structure itself.1 The broken timber serves to heat up the cold, humid interior, though it does not dissolve the enveloping anxiety, within and out-side the hut. Even as the needs of this particular social set are not those of elementary sus-tenance and shelter, their actions – played out against a labor crisis in the factory – emerge as urgent, as desperate, and as vital in sorting out what remains, and what might be re-made for living in the depleted spaces of late-modern Italy.

Pasolini’s bricolage décor and Antonioni’s disassembled hut are already evolved reflec-tions on the housing problem encountered, the previous decade, in such black and white landmarks as fellini’s Notti di Cabiria (1957). The prostitute’s shack – set between new hous-ing complexes and grazing sheep in the Roman periphery – is sharply contrasted with the movie star Nazzari’s White Telephone interiors, especially its spectacular bathroom where Cabiria sleeps that night. But her cabin, with its floor wisely elevated above ground and its neatly arranged bric-a-brac it is also juxtaposed with the shocking revelation of the cave dwellings, the film’s most impressive location : holes dropping into archeological ruins spot-ting the desolate, muddy terrain where the lowest of the low dwell. fellini will not bear to show Cabiria descend, like the destitute older prostitute, into such horrific subterranean death-in-life – not even when she loses her house and all its cash value. The housing pre-dicament so eloquently threaded in the film dissolves, finally, into the bittersweet poetic of vagabond existence, the open road that beckons – from the world of cinema rather than from the world itself – when no viable solutions can be envisioned.2

1 It was John David Rhodes who first drew my attention to the ‘interior design’ project embedded in the hut sequence.2 On intersections of the housing problem and neorealist concerns see also Mark Shiel, Italian Neorealism : Rebuilding

the Cinematic City, London, Wallflower Press, 2005, and John-David Rhodes, Stupendous, Miserable City : Pasolini’s Rome, Min-neapolis (mn), University of Minnesota Press, 2007.

fig. 2. La terra vista dalla luna.

noa steimatsky48

That some Italians still lived in caves, or had to make their home among neglected ruins, was a shameful revelation in the wake of the war, a glaring testimony of underdevelopment around Rome and in the Italian South, attended to most famously in Carlo Levi’s testimony of Matera.1 Newsreel showed refugées in Rome sheltering in such improbable places as the Domus Aurea, and at the Terme di Caracalla, as we find in Vittorio Sala’s documentary titled 045 (1954) – the municipal number assigned to such out-of-place housing in archeologi-cal sites, aqueducts, pre-historic caves, and the like.2 The yoking of such fantastical locales and obviously inadequate conditions even received comedic treatment in Totò cerca casa (Mario Monicelli and Steno, 1949), where Totò and his family, displaced by war, are shifted from one temporary housing to another, including the Colosseum. Pasolini surely had this film in mind when preparing La terra vista dalla luna : for we surmise, in the earlier Totò film, that the protagonist never had a bathroom and only knows the chamber pot, in the measure of his top hat. The monumental and the elemental aspects of Totò’s housing circumstances ‘contaminate’ each other, as Pasolini would say.

Likewise in Vittorio De Sica and Cesare Zavattini’s Il tetto (1956) and Miracolo a Milano (1951) peripheral, makeshift housing is setting and point of pride for the disinherited, still in tension with official government policy that cannot answer the needs of so many forced to migrate to the big cities in the postwar era. The narrative conceit of Il tetto revolved around municipal and police inspections, rules on eviction, and what structures – with roof and adequately closing door – cannot be torn down even if precariously constructed, illegal, and partaking of the uncontrolled growth of the borgate that will generate as many problems as are resolved in the short term of the narrative. In the bittersweet conclusion of De Sica’s film the protagonists win what we understand must be only momentary relief, as they hud-dle under their almost completed roof in the single unplastered and unfloored room, with a barrel of water as their only sanitary appliance, outdoors, and nothing more.

One recalls, further back, the plight of children homeless yet tragically at home in a world of ruins : the lacunary spaces of Milan thus become a magical though precarious reign of children in Luigi Comencini’s documentary Bambini in Città (1947). Even more

1 Carlo Levi, Cristo si è fermato a Eboli, Turin, Einaudi, 1946.2 See « Settimana Incom », December 6, 1946 on refugees sheltering in archeological zones, schools, and in Cinecittà, on

which more below. See Marco Bertozzi’s discussion of Sala’s film and related work in Storia del documentario italiano : Immagini e culture dell’altro cinema, Venice, Marsilio, 2008, p. 108.

fig. 3. La terra vista dalla luna.

elemental housing in the postwar imaginary 49gravely, Rossellini’s rubble heaps in Paisà’s Neapolitan episode (1946) lead towards a devas-tating conclusion : a vast cave in which a host of dispossessed poor inhabit what one imag-ines is a temporary, but not less appalling dwelling. Part primeval habitation, part catacomb, part ruin, man-made and natural elements are joined here in the momentous space of the Mergellina caves. But how can this wretched place, that barely fulfills the minimal definition of ‘shelter’, support the vital needs of these masses of women and young children ? How do they sleep ? What are their conditions of sanitation, not to mention relative luxuries of privacy, heating, lighting ? Rossellini’s camera does not answer : the site transpires in a few brief shots that underscore its traumatic charge, imparting to this document of housing conditions in war-torn Naples emblematic gravity.

We now pause to consider that a proper notion of ‘dwelling’ and ‘home’ must exceed the bare necessity of ‘shelter’ – from air-raids as from the elements – to encompass a broader domain of safety, hygiene, retreat, locating one’s body, and oneself, in the world, in a com-munity, a culture. But can a truly habitable place be claimed in such conditions that drive these orphaned children out again, often with devastating consequences, as many neorealist films spell out ? Extreme material scarcity in terrains ravaged by war, social displacement, and all existential and psychic weight stretched the essential line that defines dwelling, and that corroborates one’s place in the world. The cave space of Paisà, vast and oppressive, where housing is reduced to primitive roots as well as sepulchral connotations, figures Ros-sellini’s ambivalent sense of a ‘year zero’. In this cave, perched against the cosmos, one re-start not from some prelapserian bower or a comforting maternal body but, in effect, from a space carved by death.

Such binding of oppositions in elemental dwelling, where ends contaminate beginnings, we discern in what must be the strangest of all lodgings : the refugee camp that occupied the Cinecittà studios from 1944 to 1950.1 Among the few existing images of the camp, in the obscure film Umanità ( Jack Salvatori, 1946) that uses it as location, we glimpse the refugee habitation units. High-angle shots reveal an entire shantytown compressed within a vast solid edifice, subdivided with cardboard, wood planks, and sheets, exposed from above like an experimental contraption for laboratory mice, and where daily life is seen to unfold in a labyrinth of boxes.2 Testimonies reveal that each such edifice housed as many as 1500 people in cubicles, that water was obtained from containers outdoors, where also cooking and bathing took place behind hanging laundry. Some displaced persons, Italian and inter-national, stayed weeks, but others lingered for years with nowhere else to settle, though it is clear that conditions inside these edifices, that had few if any windows, were not agreeable : stifling and unsanitary for the crowds and narrow quarters, noisy, dark – for not every day did there come along a film crew like Salvatori’s to light up the place.

But are we not already in the fantasmic world of cinema ? What we see in Umanità is in fact Cinecittà’s Teatro 5, the legendary sound-stage where fellini will one day reproduce Via Veneto, and where some of the most ambitious sets in film history will be constructed. We learn, moreover, that in the allotted box-spaces within these sound-stages refugees had to put together and furnish their living units from the remnants of movie sets : « the stuccoed and gilded doors that had served for the interiors of royal or patrician palaces », the décor of the fas-cist era colossals was morphed into elemental habitation.3 Does not this make perfect sense

1 I incorporate here only general oservations from my recently published essays : Cinecittà campo profughi (1944-1950) part 1, « Bianco e Nero », 560, 1, 2008 and part 2 in 561-562, 2-3, 2008, and The Cinecittà Refugee Camp, 1944-1950, « October », 128, Spring 2009.

2 A similar model is documented in other displaced persons camps, see Mark Wyman, dp : Europe’s Displaced Persons 1945–1951, London-Toronto, Associated University Presses, 1989, p. 48, and is followed to our time, as for survivors of the May 2008 earthquake in Sichuan, China, see front page photograph in the « New york Times », May 23, 2008. While their func-tion for air and lighting under a larger closed structure is evident, the connotations of these roofless cells might be explored further, also in juxtaposition with the symbolic value of the roof in De Sica’s film.

3 I quote from Adriano Baracco, L’amante grassa, « Star », 1, 1, 12 August 1944, p. 4, and also rely on the testimony of a former Cinecittà inmate, Mordechai (Marco) G., file 0.3/8309 in yad Vashem archive, Jerusalem.

noa steimatsky50within this fantastical site, this placeless place ? At once urgently real and ghostly, the camp was an eery counterpart to the artificial world of the movie studio. The refugee camp – an elementary form of emergency housing that epitomizes the first steps of reconstruction – is literally embedded here within the very space of cinema and its apparatus of fiction.

Taking one last step back in our excavation of the practice and the imaginary of dwelling in the postwar era, we find the acute vision of an architect whose personal experience and perspective foreshadowed key aspects of neorealist culture, whose flowering he will not, alas, survive to witness. Architect, exhibition designer, photographer, critic, Giuseppe Pa-gano was also founding editor of the journal Casabella, which he brilliantly propelled to the forefront of architecture theory in Europe. An advocate of Italian rationalism – which he initially understood as consistent with the cause of fascism, and later defended against the monumental excesses of the Regime – Pagano hoped to see housing nationalized, rescued from the abuses of private speculation and as part of a socialist vision of urban planning.1 He was invested in vernacular architecture as bound up with the practice, the ethic, and aes-thetic of a modernist everyday, cutting across classes, traversing city and country. Pagano’s conception of architecture, and of the architect’s true calling, posited housing as modern-ism’s prime historical realization. Even preceding his actual Resistant practice, he clearly criticized the monumental rhetoric of the fascist Regime – its neoclassical fantasy of the Roman Empire resurrected – as contradicting its stated commitment to address the needs of all classes, firstly realized in habitation.

Pagano contemplated vernacular architecture intermedially, we might now say, via di-verse uses of the image, which thus informed his investment in photography and his close association with film-makers. One might consider premonitions of this in Pagano’s early collaboration with Luigi Comencini and Alberto Lattuada in a cine-club where Jean Re-noir’s films – so deeply engaged with specific regional and urban cultures – were shown. But it is clearly articulated in his exhibition and book (for the 6th Triennale, 1936) on ru-ral architecture : a photographic feat in grid-clusters of images that elicited modernist elements in vernacular structures across Italy. In his 1938 essay Un cacciatore d’immagini, published in the journal « Cinema », a hub of proto-neorealist culture, Pagano promoted attention to neglected, hitherto unrepresented corners of Italy.2 Though ostensibly a fas-cist architect, we find Pagano’s thinking fully in the spirit of the proto-neorealism that one also traces in Elio Vittorini, Vasco Pratolini, Cesare Pavese, Pagano’s friends Carlo Levi and Alberto Lattuada. Lattuada’s extraordinary photographic pamphlet Occhio quadrato (1941) focused this future film-maker’s lens on the periphery of Milan, on the lacunary spaces that the war will aggravate, and where neorealism will find its locations between urban modernity and the humble corners of Italian quotidian life left out of fascist fare (fig. 4).3

This nascent neorealist vision is thrown into sharp and tragic relief in light of the penul-timate phase of Pagano’s life’s work. Having taken up the Resistant-Partisan cause, he was imprisoned in November 1943 in the Castle of Brescia, under Mussolini’s puppet Republic of Salò. from here he organized the escape of some 260 prisoners in July ’44, though he was eventually to be recaptured, tortured by the Koch band, and sent to Mauthausen where he perished April 22, 1945. The Brescia jail setting, the escape, and this awful ending would

1 On Pagano’s modernist ethos see flavia Marcello, Giuseppe Pagano : A Rationalist Caught between Theories and Practices of Fascist Italy, « Architecture Theory Review », 8, 2, 2003, pp. 96-112. My biographical sources on Pagano are Cesare De Seta’s Introduction to his edition of Pagano’s writings, Architettura e città durante il fascismo, Roma-Bari, Laterza, 1976 ; Riccardo Mariani, Giuseppe Pagano Pogatschnig architetto fascista, antifascista, martire, « Parametro », 35, April 1975, pp. 4-37, and Gian-carlo Palanti, Notizie biografiche, « Domus », Giuseppe Pagano Pogatschnig architetture e scritti, special issue March 1947, pp. 3-17. Ernesto Nathan Rogers, architect and editor of « Domus », was inspired by Pagano in his seminal essays Una casa a ciascuno (1945) and (1946), repr. in Ernesto N. Rogers, Esperienza dell’architettura, Turin, Einaudi, 1958, pp. 105-108, 115-118.

2 Giuseppe Pagano, un cacciatore d’immagini, « Cinema », December 1938, and see Giuseppe Pagano fotografo, ed. by Cesare De Seta, Milan, Electa, 1979. 3 See Lattuada’s Occhio Quadrato, Milan, Corrente, 1941.

elemental housing in the postwar imaginary 51seem to posit an odd perspec-tive by which to contemplate housing and yet Pagano suc-ceeded in achieving precisely this : in confinement and under conditions of extreme scarcity he thus crystalized a concep-tion of architecture as Resist-ance practice.1 His first cell in Brescia was in a rounded, sepulchral space of some 6 × 3 meters, with walls 3 meters thick, and little natural light. Here Pagano continued to write letters, poems, and arti-cles, interspersing them with notes on the minute activities of prison guards, on the differ-ent spaces of the prison with its distribution of services, keys, arms deposits, and in-cluding drawings of the prison structure and its surroundings. At the same time Pagano pro-jected a plan for an « experi-mental city », described

in all its aspects : not in utopist form, but in actual and living form, like an experimental institution, necessary to establish the needs, the resourc-es, the attitudes, and the physical, moral, and psychic inclinations of this brutish humanity.2

Between this vision and Pa-gano’s quotidian prison ex-perience we locate a special domain in the conception of dwelling as key image, with dignity accorded to its most basic, humblest aspects within an ethos of civilized life sus-tained against all odds.

In April ’44 Pagano was moved to another cell with a group of political prisoners. Surely as part of a clandestine organization of plans for escape his cellmate, Carlo Visentini, smuggled into the cell a Leica camera. Three rolls of film are reported in the scant biographical detail available on this an eclectic body of work. from here derive the 24 small, poorly reproduced but eloquent photos in the commemorative

1 In retrospect one might associate this with Robert Bresson’s emphasis on the achievement of his protagonist, also a captured Resistant, in Un Condamné à mort s’est échappé (1956).

2 Quoted in Mariani, Giuseppe Pagano, cit., p. 23.

fig. 4. Alberto Lattuada, Pulizia all’aperto, Occhio quadrato (1941). Cineteca di Bologna - Biblioteca «Renzo Renzi».

fig. 5. Pagano’s cell, Il paravento che separa nella cella le ‘attrezzature igieniche’, « Domus », Giuseppe Pagano Pogatschnig architetture e scritti,

March 1947, yale University Libraries.

noa steimatsky52issue that «Domus» devoted to Pagano in 1947.1 Some show outdoor spaces and fragments of the prison structure ; some include Pagano posing, with special emphasis on his hands handling food, shaving, resting (during an illness) in the scant sunlight thrown on the bed. These echo Pagano’s search, in his own photography, for new relationship that emerge when a given space and its di-verse objects yield a new sense of order and beauty, under op-tical conditions elicited by the camera. Of special interest are the photos depicting corners of the cell with adjustments made to its furnishings. The space in its entirely is difficult to gather exactly : even the most general views include no more than parts of the bed, the shelf, clothes hanging on a line. One corner beyond the foot of the bed receives special atten-tion (fig. 5). It can be recon-structed and inventoried quite well : a dividing screen is used as bulletin board with pictures, newspaper clips, letters and lists ; the caption indicates that it is « the screen that separates the sanitary apparatus of the cell ». In the three photos that follow in the editor’s selection on this page (figs. 6-8) differ-ent parts of the ‘sanitary appa-ratus’ are enframed. The light-ing seems carefully calibrated – this transpires even through the poor quality of the repro-ductions we have before us. The objects are ‘lowly’ in con-

notations ; they may be associated with the Neue Sachlichkeit Weimar influence that had inspired Pagano’s own photography, as well as with Giorgio Morandi’s universe of bottles and bowls, suspended in an indefinite space that would transport us elsewhere. yet some-thing more urgent transpires here, in view of the ‘Sanitary apparatus of the cell’. A bowl

1 The Pagano archive, directed by Cesare De Seta, does not own and cannot tell the whereabouts of the originals or nega-tives. In fact the photographic credit given in « Domus » is to Pagano’s « cellmates ».

figs. 6-8. Pagano’s cell, Le attrezzature igieniche della cella, l’acqua sporca, Il serbatoio dell’acqua, « Domus », 1947, cit., yale University

Libraries.

elemental housing in the postwar imaginary 53is held in a cord contraption over a basin to collect the dirty washing water ; we gather that the taller, covered bucket must be the cell latrine. The last in this sequence of images shows the cell’s small ‘Reservoir of water’ : an elevated container with a faucet propped over bowls, some cups next to it ; on its lid stand other small containers and personal items – a toothbrush, a towel.

We have noticed such ob-jects punctuating postwar filmic images, since the im-provement of hygiene was among the most important challenges for mid-century Italy, and at the heart of the housing problem, inherited from the fascist era’s own dis-courses on hygiene and mod-ernization. Even preceding its engagement with the semi-metaphor of ‘racial hygiene’, fascism raised the banner of sanitation as part of its man-agement of the environment of children, and in a range of urbanist projects, from the new model towns such as Sabaudia and Littoria, erected to heal and modernize the disease-infested Pontine Marshes, to the monumental renewal programs in the Imperial capitol. fascist urbanism involved the razing of inner city neighborhoods as part of the sventramenti – the disembowelment of central Rome.1 The cumulative strata of Medieval or later struc-tures stood in the way of the Regime’s need to clear up the Imperial center so as to under-line its grandiose Roman inheritance. This was epitomized in the Via dell’Impero (today via dei fori Imperiali) flanking the forum, that came to connect in a monumental avenue fit for parades and spectacles the Colosseum, the Altare della Patria – the gigantic, gleaming monument to Italian national unification – and Mussolini’s offices across from it in Palazzo Venezia. The case for the sventramenti was buttressed by the Regime’s declared concern for the social and sanitary conditions of urban populations. Thus lower class families who have lived there for generations were uprooted and shifted to peripheral borgate that, though new, did not always provide decent conditions, hygienic or otherwise.

It is against this backdrop that the value of Pagano’s construction and documentation of a humble ‘hygienic design project’ is underlined. We might posit it as Pagano’s last ar-chitectural-photographic work, which is at the same time an act of Resistance. This corner of a prison cell, readjusted with the most lowly objects given to support basic needs, and photographically documented, emerges as Pagano’s continued reflection on the primacy of habitation and minor architecture. Evidently he saw sense in continuing to pursue – under

1 On these topics see frank Snowden, The Conquest of Malaria : Italy 1900-1962, New Haven, yale University Press, 2006, and Paul Baxa, Piacentini’s Window : The Modernism of the Fascist Master Plan of Rome, « Contemporary European History », 13, 1, 2004, pp. 1-20.

fig. 9. Pagano’s cell : Protezione del letto contro gli insetti, « Domus », 1947, cit., yale University Libraries.

noa steimatsky54severe constraints, and even as his view of humanity seemed quite low – the « physical, moral, and psychic » values embodied in the elemental aspects of dwelling. This was articu-lated fully in his statement of 1939.

When the percentage of bathrooms in Italian habitations will be increased from 9 to 25%, this will be a significant step in our reclaiming of civilization, and we will find ourselves closer to the Roman Tradition than by apish imitation of anachronistic colonnades.1

Though it may not suffice for the health and the dignity of daily life – temporary as that life might be – the hygienic apparatus of the prison-cell is a necessary object. It complements, at the other end of our historical trajectory, that chamber-pot focalized in Pasolini’s short film with which we began.

To conclude, provisionally, with another image (fig. 9). There is special eloquence to this photograph’s attention to the leg of a bed set in a can that must be routinely refilled with water to protect the bed from climbing insects. Is this too lowly, too marginal an element of architecture culture ? Evidently, under such living conditions, enough depended on it to warrant attention to its simple construction, its maintenance, and its photographic docu-mentation. This leg of Pagano’s bed can compete with and prevail over the heroic columns that he had denounced in the Regime’s monumental rhetoric and empty display. This image expresses, in eloquent synechdoche, a human struggle as bound up with the plight of hous-ing. Neorealist culture of the liberation and reconstruction will go on to develop just such heroics of the quotidian and the minor in the years to come. But it is already prefigured here, in this inmate-architect-Resistant’s jail cell, commemorated in a small, clandestine image.

1 Giuseppe Pagano, Case per il popolo, « Casabella-Costruzioni », 143, November 1939, repr. in De Seta (ed.), Architettura e città, cit., p. 380. Ernesto Nathan Rogers, architect and editor of « Domus », was inspired by these dimensions of Pagano’s thought in his key essays Una casa a ciascuno [1945] and Programma : Domus, la casa dell’uomo [1946], repr. in Ernesto N. Ro-gers, Esperienza dell’architettura, Turin, Einaudi, 1958, pp. 105-108, 115-118.

Rivista annuale / A yearly Journal

Fabrizio Serra editore

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Autorizzazione del Tribunale di Pisa n. 25 del 5 settembre 2004Direttore responsabile: Fabrizio Serra

Sono rigorosamente vietati la riproduzione, la traduzione, l’adattamento anche parziale o per estratti, per qualsiasi uso e con qualsiasi mezzo effettuati, compresi la copia fotostatica,

il microfilm, la memorizzazione elettronica, ecc. senza la preventiva autorizzazione della Fabrizio Serra editore®, Pisa · Roma.

Ogni abuso sarà perseguito a norma di legge.

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Proprietà riservata · All rights reserved© Copyright 200 by Fabrizio Serra editore®, Pisa · Roma

Stampato in Italia · Printed in Italy

issn 824-684issn elettronico 825-50

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La pubblicazione si avvale della collaborazione del Dipartimentodi Storia delle Arti e Conservazione dei Beni Artistici «G. Mazzariol»

della Università Ca’ Foscari di Venezia.

SOMMARIO

storia e memoria del cinema · the history and memory of cinemaA cura di / Edited by Marco Bertozzi, Antonio Costa

Marco Bertozzi, Visual ecologies. From negative economic growth to cinematic inertia 11Antonio Costa, Histories of the cinema and memory of films 17Gian Piero Brunetta, Dans les limbes du cinéma: l’histoire du Sergente nella neve (Le

Sergent dans la neige) de Olmi et Rigoni Stern 23Alberto Scandola, L’inconsolable mémoire de Jean-Luc Godard 31Pierre Sorlin, How to make do with the Past. The burden of memory in the cinema of

Alain Resnais 39Noa Steimatsky, Elemental Housing in the Postwar Imaginary 45André Habib, Mémoire, histoire, ruines. Les archives du film ou la nouvelle mélancolie du

cinéma 55Viva Paci, Jouer la mémoire, résonner le souvenir, écouter l’histoire. Notes sur Chris Marker 65

collectanea

Maria Pia Pagani, L’esilio nel cinema di Nikolaj Evreinov 77 Neil Novello, Edipo Re. Sofocle e Pasolini: tragedia, sceneggiatura, film 89Marianna Vianello, Lo sguardo di Ulisse. Il montaggio a distanza di Artavazd Pele-

shian 115Silvia Vincis, A carillon, a little girl and a writer. The Liv Ullmann touch behind the Cam-

era. Choices against uncertain states. An essay and an interview 127 Carlo Grassi, The Cinema and Objects of Daily Life. Living without the Simplifying Gaze

of Habit 135