La Canta delle Marane (, 1962)

A sensuous and vibrant vision of a group of boys who leave home barefoot and without breakfast to congregate by a marane – a small stream – in the Roman suburbs, forming a microcosmic society in which they scavenge for food, fight, swim and play. La canta delle marane constitutes the third collaboration between Mangini and Pier Paolo Pasolini. Filmed less than a five-minute walk from his first house in Rome, his scripted narration has resonances with his novel Ragazzi di vita (1955), an ode to “pre-political rebelliousness”, to a new generation disenfranchised by the post-war Italian party system. Yet the camera which lingers for a long time over these pre-pubescent boys’ limbs has something of Pasolini’s gaze too. As the physically disinhibited but not yet disenchanted boys of La Canta move between recreation and combat, Pasolini tells of what they will become: lone, petty criminals, often imprisoned, sometimes dead.