Champion of the disinherited of postwar Italy, Pier Paolo Pasolini's masterworks reveal an obsession with martyrdom that foreshadowed his own wretched death The bleak rewards of affluence ... Mamma Roma. Photograph: BFI At the end of Mamma Roma (1962), Pier Paolo Pasolini's great film, the hero lies dying on a prison bed like the dead Christ of Mantegna or a barefoot saint by Caravaggio. Much has been made of the Renaissance and baroque iconography in Pasolini's cinema. The implied blasphemy of Caravaggio's grubby, low-life Christs excited the iconoclast in the Italian film-maker, whose wretched death was somehow foreshadowed in his own work. On the morning of 2 November...
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