|
|
|
Pier Paolo Pasolini Gino Moliterno is Convenor of Film Studies at the Australian National University (Canberra). He is also General Editor of the Routledge Encyclopedia of Contemporary Italian Culture. |
 |
| Outside Italy Pasolini is usually remembered as one
of the most significant of the directors who emerged in the second wave
of Italian postwar cinema in the early 1960s but, within Italy itself, Pasolini
was always much more than just a distinctive and innovative filmmaker. By
the time he came to make his first film, Accattone, in 1961, he had
already published numerous collections of poetry, two highly-acclaimed novels,
had collaborated widely in cultural-literary journals and firmly established
himself as one of Italy's leading writer-intellectuals. In the 15 years
that followed, before being brutally murdered in 1975 — and always
inspired by what he himself called "a desperate vitality" and
a “love of Reality” — he made a dozen feature films and half
a dozen shorts, wrote, translated and sometimes directed theatrical works,
published several further collections of poetry, two volumes of critical
essays, painted some 40 canvases and, through his numerous articles in journals
and his caustic columns in daily newspapers, became the loudest dissenting
voice in Italian political and cultural debate. Intensely passionate and
iconoclastic, often paradoxical and contradictory, Pasolini was almost certainly,
as Zygmunt Baranski has written in a recent critical reappraisal, Italy's
major post-war intellectual. (1) Born in Bologna in 1922, the year that Fascism came to power, Pasolini spent his early years in various small towns of Northern Italy as the family followed the father, an infantry officer with fascist leanings, in his military postings. Pasolini's sympathies, however, would always remain with his mother, a schoolteacher who cultivated a love of poetry and who transmitted this devotion to her son. In the mid-1930s the family returned to Bologna where Pasolini finished his schooling and enrolled in the University. During this time he also spent long periods in his mother's native Northern region of Casarsa, falling in love with its peasant culture and beginning to write poetry in its distinctive dialect. At Bologna University he majored in literature but also studied art history with the renowned art-historian Roberto Longhi, an experience that would later profoundly influence the visual style of his earlier films. At the end of the war, which had claimed the life of his younger brother, Pasolini and his mother settled at Casarsa where he worked as a schoolteacher while also being active in cultural-literary circles and becoming secretary of the local branch of the PCI (the Italian Communist Party). In 1949, however, he was accused of homosexual activity with students and immediately suspended from his teaching and expelled from the Party. Profoundly disillusioned, he moved to Rome with his mother and settled in one of the borgate or shanty-towns at the margins of the city. Here, while eking out a living from a variety of odd jobs, he became fascinated with the sub-proletarian and petty-criminal life going on around him, and began to write about it. However, Ragazzi di vita, his first full-length novel dealing with the world of the borgate, published in 1955, saw him officially charged with offences to public decency. He was eventually exonerated, in part due to the strong support of many of the leading intellectuals and writers, but this would be only the first of many times that Pasolini and his “scandalous” work would be subjected to official censure and harassment. In fact, from this point until his brutal murder in 1975, Pasolini would continue to play the role of Italy's most notorious intellectual provocateur (intellettuale scomodo), with his books, films and ideas consistently generating controversy and with Pasolini himself often ending up in court. On the positive side, however, his graphic depiction of the Roman underworld brought an increasing number of offers of scriptwriting from established Italian directors like Mauro Bolognini and Federico Fellini so that Pasolini's move to cinema became almost a foregone conclusion. The Films As an established poet and writer, Pasolini came to embrace cinema above all as an alternative form of self-expression, equal in potential to writing itself. In fact, in the film theory that he would develop from the mid-1960s onward, Pasolini would characterise cinema precisely as a writing with reality, a writing that would yield what he called a "cinema of poetry" the more the filmmaker was able to stylistically manipulate it for the purposes of self-expression. (2) But self-expression, for Pasolini, was never merely a matter of aesthetics but always opened onto the social and political. In fact perhaps more than any other artist-intellectual in recent Italian history, Pasolini felt completely and personally co-opted by the massive social, economic and cultural developments that were profoundly transforming Italy during this time so that his films, as with everything else he wrote or said, became always, at some level, personal responses to, and ways of intervening in, that reality. His cinema was thus always to be a blend of the lyrical and the political, the poetic and the ideological, passion and analysis.
Mamma Roma, made the following year with Anna Magnani in the lead role, was a similar exploration of the world of the Roman borgate and was, as Pasolini later admitted, the only time that he actually repeated himself. For the sake and future of her teenage son, Ettore, Mamma Roma makes a determined attempt to extract herself from a life of prostitution in the borgate, but she is fatefully drawn back to it and, at the end of the film Ettore, like Accattone, dies as the result of an attempted petty theft. Again mixing the sacred and the profane, Ettore is in the final sequence photographed in clear reminiscence of Mantegna's Dead Christ, articulating once again Pasolini's vision of the borgate as a world at the margins of bourgeois history and culture but one which, for that very reason, still retained an aura of tragedy and a violence connected to the sacred. In what was now becoming a pattern, Mamma Roma, too, attracted official censure for "offending against the common sense of decency" and was only released after lengthy legal proceedings.
The project for a film of the Gospel actually went back to 1962 but Pasolini was only able to put the film into production in 1963 after having visited the Holy Land (and also recorded his somewhat disappointed visit in the documentary, Sopralluoghi in Palestina). When he came to it, radical as always, Pasolini began by throwing out the entire tradition of pietistic representation sedimented in the gospel film genre and starting from scratch. Risking fragmentation and incoherence, he adopted a variety of expressive strategies and a multiplicity of often contrasting styles to create a socially-committed, quasi-Marxist version of the Gospel preached by a harsh and uncompromising Christ who was in many ways a revolutionary and a provocateur not unlike Pasolini himself. (3) In an interview with Oswald Stack at the time Pasolini admitted that "Catholics come out of the film feeling a bit shaken up, feeling that I have made Christ bad. He's not bad in fact, he's just full of contradictions". (4) As usual, however, a Pasolini film ignited polemics; this time the work was praised by international Catholic organizations like the OCIC (Office Catholique International du Cinéma) which awarded it its Venice prize but was severely attacked by left-wing critics who accused it of pietism and hagiography. In spite of all the controversy, or perhaps in part because of it, the film did bring Pasolini his first international recognition. Before filming the Gospel, however, Pasolini had taken the unusual step of actually making a documentary film on Italians' attitude to sex. Entitled Comizi d'amore (1964) the film consisted largely of Pasolini himself travelling from the North to the South of Italy, asking pertinent questions about sexual habits, homosexuality, divorce and abortion of Italians of all ages, gender and social class. At several stages in the film writer Alberto Moravia and psychoanalist Cesare Musatti were invited to comment on the answers given to these provocative questions and on what it said about Italy as a whole. The film remains an interesting document and testifies to Pasolini's great “love of Reality" even if, ultimately, the question of whether it had uncovered the "real" Italy was left unanswered. (5) Yet if Comizi d'amore suggested that Italy was still, in many ways, both backward and fragmented, the country had certainly changed, and for what Pasolini thought was the worse. Pasolini's long-held faith in the possibility of a Marxist-style revolution guided by Gramscian "organic" intellectuals had by now begun to falter, and the first signs of this ideological crisis surfaced in the genial Uccellacci e uccellini (1966).
Pasolini would use Totò and Ninetto again for two other charming short fables, La terra vista dalla luna (1966) and Che sono le nuvole? (1967) but at this point, with the intellectual's guiding role in any possible social revolution in severe question and with the borgate themselves rapidly becoming colonised by an ethos of consumerism and mass culture, Pasolini shifted his focus backwards to a mythic time and place when ritual and a sense of the sacred still held sway. The result was Edipo re, a remarkable adaptation of Sophocles' great tragedy which was brilliant in its creation of a promordial, archaic and a-historical mythopoetic setting, completely outside the recognizable iconography of ancient Greek culture (the film was, in fact, mostly shot in Morocco). But the film was also remarkable in the way it succeeded in adapting Sophocles' tragedy both objectively (most of the text was actually conserved) and subjectively, to express Pasolini's own oedipal conflict with his father. A prologue and an epilogue set respectively in 1922 and in postwar Bologna serve to relate the Oedipus myth both to modern times and to Pasolini himself, thus effectively creating what Pasolini himself called a "kind of completely metaphoric - and therefore mythicised - autobiography". (6) Pasolini would return to this mythic setting in his adaptation of Medea in 1969 where he would use the tragic and ill-fated relationship between Medea and Jason to express the clash between an archaic culture based on magic and a sense of sacred violence, and its inevitable destruction at the hands of a modernising, rationalistic culture. For Pasolini this clash was still going on, in Italy in the inarrestible destruction of traditional peasant culture by the spread of neocapitalist consumerism and in the world at large in the exploitation of the Third World. Thus, around this time, throwing down the gauntlet to the all-conquering consumer ethos which he so despised, Pasolini consciously set out to make a number of "difficult" films that would remain "unconsumable" and "indigestible" for the great mass of Italians and accessible only to a cultural èlite. The first of these consciously "difficult" films was Teorema (1968) which Pasolini had already published as a novel. In the film an enigmatic, handsome stranger, played by Terence Stamp, introduces himself into the home of a bourgeois Milanese family and proceeds over a short period to physically and emotionally seduce all of them, including the maid. Then, as abruptly and mysteriously as he arrived, he departs, leaving all of them to cope with the existential void that he has opened up in their previously complacent existence. Pasolini himself said that the film was allegory for the irruption of a sense of authenticity into the lives of an alienated bourgeoisie and predictably all four members of the bourgeois family (father, mother, daughter and son) deteriorate into states approaching madness although Emilia, the maid, returns to her peasant village and, after a period of penitence, performs a number of miracles and achieves sainthood. The film ends with the haunting image of the father, having given away his factory to the workers and having taken off all his clothes, running naked and screaming through a biblical desert landscape. The film's powerful indictment of the sterility of contemporary bourgeois values was immediately recognised by no less than the jury of the OCIC (Office Catholique Internationale du Cinéma) which awarded it its prize at Venice. This decision, however, was immediately and violently contested by the rest of the Catholic authorities who soon had the film withdrawn and its author formally charged with obscenity. Pasolini was before the courts for two years before the charges were finally dismissed and the film formally released in 1970. By this time, however, he had already gone on to make what is probably his most "indigestible" film before Salò (1975).
Nevertheless Pasolini's next films would be the three elegant literary adaptations of Il Decameron (1971), I racconti di Canterbury (1972) and Il fiore delle mille e una notte (1974), which he would group together under the title of the "Trilogy of Life" and which he would originally characterise as his most "non-political" films. Lavish in their costumes and settings and splendidly-photographed, with non-professionals chosen, as in the borgate days, for their stunningly-expressive faces and powerful screen presences, these were thoroughly "consumable" films and in fact provided Pasolini with his greatest ever commercial success. Later on, contrary as ever, Pasolini would suggest that, in another way, these were also his "most political" films, the politics here being not ideological but sexual, there in the erotic, sexually-energised human body which was being everywhere celebrated in these films and which Pasolini claimed was the only site to have yet escaped domination by consumer capitalism. However, the runaway commercial success and popularity of the films, coupled with the hundreds of soft-porn imitations which were allowed to flood the market in their wake, forced Pasolini to rethink the extent to which the sexualised human body could have been said to have escaped being colonised by consumerism, the result of this rethinking being a public "abjuration" of the Trilogy, printed as the introduction to the published screenplays. But the most thorough abjuration of the Trilogy of Life was undoubtedly Pasolini's next and final film, Salò o le 120 giornate di Sodoma.. The film was released (and then, predictably, immediately withdrawn under charges of obscenity) only two weeks after Pasolini's brutal murder at the hands of a young male prostitute, and the gruesome murder of its author inevitably came to colour interpretations of the film itself. It is certainly Pasolini's most difficult and most claustrophobic film, its cold crystalline cinematic precision — a correlate of its relentless logic and its implacable representational cruelty — making it something of an anomaly among Pasolini's usually more loosely structured expressionistic films. Yet in essence, as a tighly-constructured but transparent allegory, it's a return to the style of films like Porcile and Teorema, with the Sadean text and the reference to Fascism functioning as the pretext for an uncompromising representation of the unbridled exercise of Power over bodies, effectively of bodies commodified and reduced to things. If in the Trilogy Pasolini had, naively perhaps, celebrated bodies and sex as indices of a profound vitality and touchstones of authenticity here, in the most total reversal, bodies become mere sites for the inarrestible imposition of power, for what Pasolini himself called Power's own anarchy. The unmitigated bleakness and nihilism of this vision is clearly a far cry not only from the celebration of the body in the Trilogy but also from the possibility of an outside to dominant power in the borgate films or an elsewhere to neocapitalist consumerism expressed in the adaptation of the Greek plays. Yet this utter desperation and lack of hope represented Pasolini's response to what he saw as a corrupted and degraded Italian reality around him in the mid-1970s. As he was making Salò, in fact, Pasolini was also calling from his column in the Corriere della sera for the arrest and trial of all the major Italian Christian Democrat politians for their part in Italy's degradation. More difficult to ascertain, however, is the question of how far this nihilistic and depairing vision, expressed so uncompromisingly in this final film, may have contributed to Pasolini's own death. Leaving aside whether or not he was killed as part of a conspiracy, did he, perhaps, after months of filming those atrocious scenes, go out that night in November seeking his own death? But perhaps this is to phrase the question wrongly since Death was ever present in Pasolini's cinema: most of the figures in Pasolini's films live against Death and eventually succumb to it. Accattone dies, Ettore dies, Stracci dies, Julian dies eaten by pigs and Christ, of course, also dies. And Death even found a place in Pasolini's film theory. In an interview around the time of Edipo re Pasolini suggested that: Apart from the extraordinary achievement of individual films, then, this may be the ultimate fascination that Pasolini and his cinema still retain for us: not only a provocative, heretical, scandalous cinema that proposes both Marxism and a sense of the sacred, both revolution and a return to myth but also and above all a complete coincidence between Cinema and Life, Art and Reality. © Gino Moliterno, November 2002 Endnotes:
Filmography
Appunti
per un'Orestiade africana (Notes for an African Oresteia)
(1970) 63 mins Select Bibliography Zygmunt
Baranski (ed.), Pasolini Old and New: Surveys and Studies, Dublin,
Four Courts Press, 1999
Articles in Senses of Cinema Salò:
15 years of Vision
by Alberto Pezzotta
Web Resources Compiled by Albert Fung
Film
Directors - Articles on the Internet
|
contents great directors cteq annotations top tens about us links archive search