Material Ghosts and Metacinema

Pietrangeli's Fantasmi a Roma (1961), like many of his other films, confounded critics. Maraldi writes that “in Pietrangeli's filmography— and even in the Italian productions of the time— Fantasmi a Roma is a very particular moment.” Stepping away from his concern with the female universe, the director himself explains that

An attempt to tell about specifically Roman cultural phenomenon, the film is a formal development of Pietrangeli's realist commitment, what I will call sur-realism, a metacinematic commentary on the passing of time, a stylistic symphony or palimpsest that uses the past to comment, criticize and mock the present. To borrow from Perez's statement about time and cinema, “We don't take a movie as the present, for the present is where we are, and a movie, even if it is a world [like Rome] animated into a now, is a world elsewhere.” Precisely what Pietrangeli presents to the spectator, this Rome is a world cohabited by modern and paranormal realities, creating an on-screen, crossgenerational dialogue that makes the film a comment not only on the past and the present but on cinema itself.

The film's comedy, the “sur-“ in the sur-realism, is created by the ghosts, who provide both humor and social commentary, commenting “on” (the French sur) the absurdity of the present. The ghosts, spirits from across the generations of the royal Roviano family that linger on earth due to their violent deaths, are both surreal in their comedic content, juxtaposing irrational contrasts between the past and the present, as well as critical of modern values, trends and customs. A paranormal Greek chorus or ghostly Shakespearean clowns, they fault the modern world, making the spectator laugh and reconsider the follies of consumerist culture, technology and behavioral and gender roles and standards.