In his 1966 film The Hawks and the Sparrows, Pier Paolo Pasolini shows viewers a “narrative poem” concerning religion, Marxism and the various social strata present in Italy, here specifically in the outskirts of Rome. As in The Gospel According to St. Matthew (Pasolini, 1964), Pasolini utilizes religious imagery among other “stylemes” and “im-signs” in order to expound on the hypocrisy of capitalism and the shortcomings of religious as well as Marxist ideologies as they pertain to the “real world”. In the film’s second-act digression, a “left-wing intellectual” crow tells Totò and his son Ninetto a story about Franciscan friars tasked with teaching God’s message of love to the hawks and the sparrows. The story is a parable for the futility of religious dogma, as it is in the hawks’ nature to eat the sparrows, regardless of abstract concepts of love. The hawks respond, “we are all God, then”; the sparrows question the value of the friars’ message, as it does not solve their problems of hunger. These themes are repeated later in the film, when Totò and Ninetto travel to different homes in the countryside, further illustrating the presence of an inescapable social hierarchy for which the film proposes the solution of Marxist ideology—a solution that ultimately fails when applied to the characters’ social reality.
In his essay “The Cinema of Poetry”, Pasolini emphasizes the importance of what he terms “free indirect discourse” in poeticizing the medium of film. However, The Hawks and the Sparrows presents distinct points of view through interactions between characters, namely Totò and his son with the people they encounter along their journey. At first, this seems to present a lack of continuity in Pasolini’s argument—a flaw which is definitely present in his essay. But Pasolini’s use of people and animals to embody abstract ideologies turns these characters into semiotic markers rather than concrete personalities.
This technique is augmented by the presence of the parable in the film, in which Totò and Ninetto also play the 13th-century friars who must spread the gospel to the birds. The crow’s role of ideological lecturer attributes these social lessons to the natural order of the world, and the film’s surrealist imagery and noticeable camera movement (e.g. jump cuts, montage sequences, etc.) fulfill Pasolini’s requirements for “poetic cinema”.
The film concludes with a callback to the film’s first scene, in which Totò explains to Ninetto the influence of the moon on the tides: “It draws all the garbage to the shore.” Continuing their journey, Totò, Ninetto and the crow come upon a woman named Luna, the Italian for “moon”. Both men feign stomachaches and take turns “swimming” through a cornfield to reach Luna; they each have sex with Luna in the corn. Afterwards, finding the crow pedantic and boring, the two men kill and eat it, leaving its steaming remains on the side of the road and walking onward. This scene is the final, definitive instance of nature winning out over pure ideology: the humans are higher on the food chain than the crow, so they kill him, and the mission of the friars is once again a failure, now with humans proven to be no better than the animals the friars sought to lecture. The previous montage of footage from Italian Communist leader Palmiro Tagliotti’s funeral, the intellectual with whom the crow’s ideology is explicitly aligned, foreshadows this end for the crow.