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AN ODDITY IN THE OPENING CREDITS for Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Mamma Roma (1962) has gone largely unremarked, probably because it is so cursory. A minute or so into the credit sequence, which is accompanied by the stately largo from Vivaldi’s Concerto for Viola d’Amore and Lute in D Minor, a fly suddenly enters at the lower right-hand side of the frame, meanders a bit before pausing on the name of an actor (Giulio de Stephanis) as if to inspect it, and then skitters off as quickly as it had emerged, its time on-screen totaling three seconds. Was the intrusion of the insect an accident most likely or, given Pasolini’s radical ways, an intentional aberration? I conferred with the Pasolini archives in Bologna, Italy, which found no reference regarding this strange anomaly, so one must assume that the fly’s brief invasion of the image either went unnoticed by the director or that, once detected, the insect was permitted its guest appearance, for reasons other than the merely pragmati ....
“Though immersed in that realistic light, the light of a specific hour with all its sun and all its shadow, everything in the mirror appears suspended, as if by an excess of truth, of the empirical. Everything appears dead.” ....