Culture warrior

It’s safe to say, then, that Star’s protagonist is not a carbon copy of Mishima, despite the novelist’s status as Japan’s first Sūpāsutā (superstar). Twenty-three and blindingly gorgeous, Rikio Mizuno, known by the anglicised monomer Richie, is a Japanese James Dean. ‘I am a speeding car that never stops,’ Richie muses, conflating the icon with the instrument of his death. ‘I’m huge, shiny and new, coming from the other side of midnight… I ride and ride and never arrive.’ Unlike Dean, Richie survives past his twenty-fourth birthday, the addition of a single year weighing on him like a death sentence. At the story’s conclusion, when Richie is confronted by the crinkled visage of a matinee idol of yesteryear, he realises that having celebrated the twenty-fourth birthday Dean was denied by his Porsche 550 Spyder, ‘Little Bastard’, he has missed his chance to, as Dean said, ‘Live fast, die young and leave a good-looking corpse.’ 

Anyone who has been to a gay guy’s thirtieth birthday party will recognise the sentiment.

The blue room

Gay saints

Frescoes are cinema avant la lettre, or at least the tech. Wall spanning, the Renaissance frescoes anticipate not only the magnitude and dynamism of cinema but the possibilities of the camera to manipulate the eye. For Pasolini, cinema is essentially oneiric; key narrative developments hinge on dreams, as in Accattone, not because they are shortcuts to the interiority that cinema otherwise denies but because films themselves are dreamwork, beholden to dream logic. In the written Gospel According to Matthew dreams are especially prominent, the otherwise gnomic character of Joseph receiving no fewer than four nocturnal communiques from God. To dream, then, is to be most open to communion with the supernatural, the sacred and the divine.
The streetwalking sequences in Pasolini’s second film, Mamma Roma (1962), typify both his understanding of films as dreams and his conflation of the sacred with the profane. Striding through an open-­air brothel, Anna Magnani’s Mamma Roma is trailed by a procession of johns, imperiously indifferent to their presence as she soliloquises divergent scraps of autobiography. The transition from realism to dream logic is seamless – her separate accounts of her erstwhile marriage explicitly contradict one another, leaving the mystery of her son Ettore’s father unresolved.

Which way, Western artist?

Shadow for Zavros is cobwebby, a necessary concession to realism, avoided wherever possible. It manifests in surgical lines differentiating the contours of form from the seething morass of nature. Though Zavros indebts the modern Narcissus depicted in Bad Dad to Caravaggio, he has no affinity for the old master’s tenebrism; Apollonian form must triumph over Dionysian murk, lest all the fine things be swallowed.

Quinoa nation