Poetry of Squalor : Exploring the borgata in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Accattone

This essay focuses on Pasolini’s cinematic representation of the Roman slums, or the borgate, in Accattone by analysing on various levels its significance as a specific topographical space. My primary argument is that Pasolini’s alternate take on the borgate, replete with myth, utopian idealism and ideological ambition, nonetheless remains a flawed striving of romanticism,whose redemption remains out of reach, and whose doom is inescapable.