Show, don’t tell! L’estetica sociale delle periferie romane nel cinema di Claudio Caligari

The aim of this essay is to offer a critical proposal on Claudio Caligari’s trilogy. The author tries to draw a line of demarcation between Pasolini’s social and cinematographic aesthetics and that proposed instead by Caligari. From a stylistic point of view, the films Amore tossico, L’odore della notte and Non essere cattivo are the three chapters of a trilogy that decree the end of Pasolini’s aesthetics. In fact, Caligari’s production tells how the arrival of hard drugs in the 1980s changed the social profile of the roman suburbs. The author focuses on the mechanism of film construction and the difficulties in creating the screenplay. In doing this he searches for the aspects that most closely match the reality represented. The analysis is also carried out thanks to documentary material on Caligari and interviews conducted with the screenwriter of the roman director’s latest film. The result is a genre that renounces beauty understood as respect for the canons of a dominant aesthetic, in accordance with the notes of the Frankfurt School on the cultural industry. The essay ends by concluding that if cinematographic art intends to allow the spectator to understand the marginality and abandonment of a territory it is necessary to describe it, not idealize it.