Hawks and Sparrows
(Uccellacci e uccellini)
Italy 1966.
Director: Pier Paolo Pasolini
Cast: Totò, Ninetto Davoli, Femi Bunessi, Rossana Di Rocco, Lena Lin Solaro
"A fractured fairy-tale with touches of Brecht and Buñuel [and] Chaplin" (Gino Moliterno), Pasolini's oddball follow-up to The Gospel According to St. Matthew features Italian comedy star Totò and Pasolini fixture Ninetto Davoli as father-and-son vagabonds setting out on a picaresque journey across modern Italy. Their unlikely travelling companion is a talking crow (!) who spouts Marxist dogma and recounts for them the tale of Ciccillo and Ninetto, two disciples of St. Francis who converted birds to Christianity. Intended as an hommage to the heyday of Italian neorealism, and to the Italian Communist Party and its late leader Palmiro Togliatti (who died in 1964), Hawks and Sparrows is as polemical as it is playful, abounding in philosophical, historical and political references, filled with comic moments, and offering a fantastical take on one of Pasolini's chief concerns: the contradictory pulls of Marxism and Catholicism in Italian society. A key (if sometimes underappreciated) work in the Pasolini canon, it marks the decisive break away from the director's neorealist roots and towards the stylized allegory and poetic mythmaking that began to characterize his work. "One of [Pasolini's] finest inventions ... a delightful, provocative adventure ... the only film that comes to mind which starts off with singing credits" (Jonathan Rosenbaum). B&W, 35mm, in Italian with English subtitles. 86 mins.