Pier Paolo Pasolini

Mamma Roma

Mamma Roma

Anna Magnani is Mamma Roma, a middle-aged prostitute who attempts to extricate herself from her sordid past for the sake of her son. Highlighting director Pier Paolo Pasolini’s lifelong fascination with the marginalized and dispossessed, Mamma Roma offers an unflinching, neorealistic look at the struggle for survival in postwar Italy. Though initially banned in the country for obscenity, today the film remains a classic, featuring a powerhouse performance by one of cinema’s greatest actors and offering a glimpse at Pasolini in the process of finding his style.

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Film Info

  • Italy
  • 1962
  • 106 minutes
  • Black & White
  • 1.85:1
  • Italian
  • Spine #236

Available In

Collector's Set

Pasolini 101

Pasolini 101

Blu-ray Box Set

9 Discs

$174.96

Mamma Roma
Cast
Anna Magnani
Mamma Roma
Ettore Garofolo
Ettore
Franco Citti
Carmine
Silvana Corsini
Bruna
Luisa Loiano
Biancofiore
Paolo Volponi
The priest
Luciano Gonini
Zacaria
Vittorio La Paglia
Il signore Pellissier
Piero Morgia
Piero
Franco Ceccarelli
Carletto
Marcello Sorrentino
Tonino
Sandro Meschino
Pasquale
Franco Tovo
Augusto
Pasquale Ferrarese
Lino
Leandro Santarelli
Begalo
Emanuele Di Bari
Gennarino, the troubadour
Antonio Spoletini
A fireman
Nino Bionci
The painter
Nino Venzi
A client
Maria Bernardini
The bride
Santino Citti
The bride’s father
Renato Montalbano
Nurse
Credits
Director
Pier Paolo Pasolini
Written by
Pier Paolo Pasolini
Produced by
Alfredo Bini
Cinematography
Tonino Delli Colli
Edited by
Nino Baragli
Art director
Flavio Mogherini
Music coordinator
Carlo Rustichelli

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Pasolini in Berkeley
Since September, the Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive has been honoring the great Italian actor Anna Magnani with a career-spanning retrospective of her work. This Saturday, the series continues with Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1962 sophomo…
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Pier Paolo Pasolini

Writer, Director

Pier Paolo Pasolini
Pier Paolo Pasolini

Pier Paolo Pasolini’s ability to simultaneously embrace conflicting philosophies—he was both a Catholic and a Marxist; a modern-minded, openly gay man who looked to the distant past for inspiration and comfort; a staunch leftist who at one point in the late sixties infamously spoke out against left-wing student protests (sympathizing instead with the working-class police)—was matched by the multifariousness of his professional life, as a filmmaker, poet, journalist, novelist, playwright, painter, actor, and all-around intellectual public figure. What he is best known for, however, is undoubtedly his subversive body of film work. He was a student of the written word, and among his earliest movie jobs was writing additional dialogue for Federico Fellini’s Nights of Cabiria (1957). Soon he was directing his first film, Accattone (1961), a tale of street crime whose style and content greatly influenced the debut feature of his friend Bernardo Bertolucci, La commare secca (1962), for which Pasolini also supplied the original story. The outspoken and always political Pasolini’s films became increasingly scandalous—even, to some minds, blasphemous—from the gritty reimagining of the Christ story The Gospel According to St. Matthew (1964) to the bawdy medieval tales in his Trilogy of Life (1971–1974). Tragically, Pasolini was found brutally murdered weeks before the release of his final work, the grotesque, Marquis de Sade–derived Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975), still one of the world’s most controversial films.

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