Pier Paolo Pasolini

Pier Paolo Pasolini

Born:	March 5, 1922 Bologna, Italy
Died:	November 2, 1975 Ostia, Rome, Italy
Occupation(s):	novelist, poet, intellectual, film director, journalist, linguist, philosopher
Magnum opus:	Accattone

Pier Paolo Pasolini (March 5, 1922 - November 2, 1975) was an Italian poet, intellectual, film director, and writer.

Pasolini distinguished himself as a philosopher, linguist, novelist, playwright, filmmaker, newspaper and magazine columnist, actor, painter and political figure. He demonstrated a unique and extraordinary cultural versatility, in the process becoming a highly controversial figure.

Biography

Early years

Pasolini was born in Bologna, traditionally the most leftist of Italian cities. He was the son of a lieutenant of the Italian army, Carlo Alberto, who had become famous for saving Mussolini's life, and an elementary school teacher, Susanna Colussi. His family moved to Conegliano in 1923 and, two years later, to Belluno, where another son, Guidalberto, was born. In 1926, however, Pasolini's father was arrested for gambling debts, and his mother moved to her family's house in Casarsa della Delizia, in the Friuli region.

Pasolini began writing poems at the age of seven, inspired by the natural beauty of Casarsa. One of his early influences was the work of Arthur Rimbaud. In 1933 his father was transferred to Cremona, and later to Scandiano and Reggio Emilia. Pasolini found it difficult to adapt to all these moves, though in the meantime he enlarged his poetry and literature readings (Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Shakespeare, Coleridge, Novalis) and left behind the religious fervor of his early years. In the Reggio Emilia high school he met his first true friend, Luciano Serra. The two met again in Bologna, where Pasolini spent seven years while completing the high school: here he cultivated new passions, including soccer. With other friends, including Ermes Parini, Franco Farolfi, Elio Meli, he formed a group dedicated to literary discussions.

In 1939 he graduated and subsequently entered the Literature College of the University of Bologna, discovering new themes like philology and aesthetics of figurative arts. He also frequented the local cinema club. Pasolini always showed his friends a virile and strong exterior, totally hiding his interior travail: he even took part in the Fascist government's culture and sports competitions. In 1941, together with Francesco Leonetti, Roberto Roversi and others, he attempted to publish a poetry magazine, but the attempt failed due to paper shortages. Pasolini's poems of this period started to include fragments in Friulian language, which he had learnt at his mother's side.

First poetical works

After the summer in Casarsa, in 1941 Pasolini published at his own expense a collection of poems in Friulian, Versi a Casarsa. The work was noted and appreciated by intellectuals and critics like Gianfranco Contini, Alfonso Gatto and Antonio Russi. His pictures had also been well received. Pasolini was chief editor of the Il Setaccio ("The Sieve") magazine, but was fired after conflicts with the director, who was aligned with the Fascist regime. A trip to Germany helped him also to discover the "provincial" status of Italian culture in that era. These experiences led Pasolini to rethink his opinion about the cultural politics of Fascism, and to switch gradually to a Communist position.

In 1942, the family took shelter in Casarsa, considered a more tranquil place to wait for the conclusion of the war. Here, for the first time, Pasolini had to face the erotic disquiet he had suppressed during his adolescent years. He wrote: "A continuous perturbation without images or words beats at my temples and obscures me".

In the weeks before the 8 September armistice, he was drafted in World War II, and subsequently imprisoned by the Germans. However, he managed to escape disguised as a peasant, and found his way to Casarsa. Here he joined a group of other young fans of the Friulian language who aimed to give Casarsa Friulian a status equal to that of the official dialect of the region, Udine. Starting from May 1944 they issued a magazine entitled Stroligùt di cà da l'aga. In the meantime, Casarsa suffered Allied bombardments and forced enrollments by the Italian Social Republic, as well as partisan activity. Pasolini tried to remain apart from these events, teaching, along with his mother, those students whom war rendered unable to reach the schools in Pordenone or Udine. He experienced his first homosexual love for one of his students, just when a Slovenian schoolgirl, Pina Kalč, was falling in love with Pasolini himself. This complicated emotional situation turned into a tragic one on February 12, 1945, when his brother Guido was killed in an ambush. Six days later the Friulian Language Academy (Academiuta di lenga furlana) was founded. In the same year Pasolini joined also the Association for the Autonomy of Friuli, and graduated with a final thesis about Giovanni Pascoli's works.

In 1946 a small poetry collection of Pasolini's, I Diarii ("The Diaries") was published by The Academiuta. In October he made a voyage to Rome, and the following May he began the so-called Quaderni Rossi, handwritten in old school exercise-books with red covers. In Italian he completed a drama, Il Cappellano, and another poetry collection, I Pianti ("The cries"), again published by the Academiuta.

Adhesion to the Italian Communist Party

On January 26, 1947, Pasolini wrote a controversial declaration for the frontpage of the newspaper Libertà: "In our opinion, we think that currently only Communism is able to provide a new culture". The controversy was partially due to the fact he was still not a member of the Italian Communist Party (PCI).

He was also planning to extend the work of the Academiuta to other Romance language literatures and knew the exiled Catalan poet Carles Cardó. After his adherence to the PCI, he took part to several demonstrations and, in May 1949, attended the Peace Congress in Paris. Observing the struggles of people and peasants, and watching the clashes of the manifestants with Italian police, he began to create his first novel.

In October of the same year, however, Pasolini was charged with the corruption of minors and obscene acts in public places. He was therefore expelled by the Udine section of the Communist Party. He also lost the teaching job he had obtained the previous year in Valvasone. Living a difficult situation, in January 1950 Pasolini moved to Rome with his mother.

He later described this period of his life as a very difficult one. "I came to Rome from the Friulian countryside. Unemployed for many years; ignored by everybody; riven by the fear to be not as life needed to be". Instead of asking for help from other writers, Pasolini preferred to go his own way. He found a job as a worker in the Cinecittà studios, and sold his books in the 'bancarelle' ("sidewalk shops") of Rome. Finally, through the help of the Abruzzese language poet Vittorio Clemente, he found a job as a teacher in Ciampino, a suburb of the capital.

In these years Pasolini transferred his Friulian countryside inspiration to Rome's suburbs, the infamous borgate where poor proletarian immigrants lived in often horrendous sanitary and social conditions.

Success and charges

In 1954 Pasolini, who now worked for the literature section of the Italian State radio, left his teaching job and moved to the Monteverde quarter and published La meglio gioventù, his first important collection of dialect poems. His first novel, Ragazzi di vita, was published in 1955. The work had great success, but was received negatively by the PCI establishment and, most importantly, by the Italian Government, which even promoted a lawsuit against Pasolini and his editor, Garzanti.

Though totally exculpated of any charge, Pasolini became a favourite victim of insinuations, especially by tabloid press.

In 1957, together with Sergio Citti, Pasolini collaborated on Federico Fellini's film Le Notti di Cabiria, writing dialogues for the Roman dialect parts. In 1960 he made his debut as an actor in Il gobbo.

His first film as director and screenwriter is Accattone ("Panhandler") of 1961, again set in Rome's marginal quarters. The movie again aroused polemics and scandal. In 1963 the episode "La ricotta", included in the collective movie RoGoPaG, was sequestrated, and Pasolini tried for offence to the Italian state.

In this period Pasolini was frequently abroad: in 1961, with Elsa Morante and Alberto Moravia, to India (where he went again seven years later); in 1962 in Sudan and Kenya; in 1963 in Ghana, Nigeria, Guinea, Jordan and Palestine (where he shot the documentary Sopralluoghi in Palestina). In 1970 he traveled again to Africa to shoot the documentary Appunti per un'Orestiade africana.

The late 1960s and early 1970s were the era of the so-called "student contestation". Pasolini, though accepting the ideological motivations of the students, declared they were "anthropologically middle-class" and, subsequently, destined to fail in their revolutionary attempt. Regarding the Battle of Valle Giulia which took place in Rome in March 1968, he declared that he sympathized with the policemen, as they were "children of the poor", while the young militants were exponents of what he called "Left-winged Fascism". His film of that year, ''Teorema'', participated in the annual Venice Film Festival in a politically hot climate, as Pasolini had proclaimed that the Festival would be self-managed by the directors themselves (see also Works section).

In 1970 Pasolini bought an old castle near Viterbo, several kilometers north of Rome, where he began to write his last and unfinished novel, Petrolio. In 1972 he started to collaborate with the extreme-left association Lotta Continua, producing a documentary 12 dicembre concerning the Piazza Fontana bombing. The following year he began also a collaboration for Italy's most renowned newspaper, Il Corriere della Sera.

At the beginning of 1975, Garzanti published a collection of critical essays Scritti corsari ("Corsair Writings").

Death

Pasolini died on November 2, 1975 at the beach of Ostia, near Rome, in a location typical of his novels. He was murdered brutally by being run over several times with his own car. Giuseppe Pelosi, a seventeen year old hustler, was arrested and confessed to murdering Pasolini. On May 7th, 2005, he retracted his confession, claiming that unidentified men had killed Pasolini (he spoke of three strangers, with a southern Italian accent, insulting Pasolini as a "filthy communist"). He gave threats of violence against his family as the reason for his erstwhile confession. The investigation into Pasolini's death was reopened following Pelosi's recantation.

His murder is still not completely explained: some contradictions in the declarations of Pelosi, a strange intervention by Italian secret services during the investigations and some lack of coherence in related documents during the different parts of the judicial procedures brought some of Pasolini's friends (actress Laura Betti, a close friend, particularly) to suspect that his murder had been commissioned. An enquiry of Pasolini's friend Oriana Fallaci (on the "Europeo" magazine) brought up the inefficiency of the investigations; many clues indicate as unlikely that Pelosi killed Pasolini alone. It is true, indeed, that Pasolini, in the months just before his death, had seen many politicians, telling them that he was aware of certain crucial secrets. Following Pelosi's statement of May 2005, the Rome police reopened the murder case; judges, however, considered the new elements insufficient to continue.

Pasolini was buried in Casarsa, in his beloved Friuli. In the grave he wears the jersey of the Italian Showmen National Team, a charity soccer team founded by Pasolini, among others.

Evidence uncovered in 2005 points to Pasolini being murdered by an extortionist. Testimony by Pasolini's friend Sergio Citti indicates that some of the film rolls from Salò were stolen and Pasolini was going to meet with the thieves after a visit to Stockholm, November 2, 1975. He told others that he knew he would be murdered by the Mafia. Shortly after he was found dead in Ostia outside Rome.

On the 30th anniversary of his death, a biographical cartoon, entitled Pasolini requiem (2005), was animated and directed by Mario Verger, with passages drawn from Mamma Roma, Uccellacci e uccellini, La Terra vista dalla Luna, and at last with the description of the Ostia murder.

Works

Pasolini's first novel, Ragazzi di vita (1955), dealt with the lumpen proletariat of Rome. The obscenity charges against him that it resulted were the first of many instances where his art caused him legal problems.

Accattone (1961), also about the Roman underworld, likewise brought him into conflict with conservatives, who demanded stricter censorship.

He would then direct the black-and-white The Gospel According To St. Matthew (1964). This film is widely hailed the best cinematic adaptation of the life of Jesus, who was portrayed by Enrique Irazoqui. While making the film, Pasolini vowed to direct it from the "believer's point of view," but later, upon viewing the completed work, realized that he had expressed his own beliefs instead.

In his 1966 film, Uccellacci e uccellini (literally "Bad Birds and Little Birds", known as The Hawks and the Sparrows in the English version), a sort of picaresque - and at the same time mystic - fable, he wanted the great Italian comedian Totò to work with one of his preferred "naif" actors, Ninetto Davoli. It was a unique opportunity for Totò to demonstrate that he was a great dramatic actor as well.

In Theorem (1968), starring Terence Stamp as a mysterious stranger, he depicted the sexual coming-apart of a bourgeois family (later to be repeated by Francois Ozon in Sitcom).

Later movies centered on sex-laden folklore, such as Il fiore delle mille e una notte (Arabian Nights, 1974), Boccaccio's Decamerone (1971) and Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (1972), on to the Trilogy of Life. His final work, the only one from the expected Trilogy of Death, Salò (1975), went far beyond what most movie-goers could stomach at the time, because of its scenes of intensely sadistic graphic violence. Based on the novel 120 Days of Sodom by the Marquis de Sade, it continues to be his most controversial film; in May 2006, Time Out's Film Guide named it the Most Controversial Film of all time.

Significance

Pasolini, as a director, created a sort of second neorealism, which deeply and constantly touched picaresque tones, showing a sad reality — hidden, but real, concrete — which many social and political lobbies had no interest in seeing brought to light. Mamma Roma (1962), featuring Anna Magnani and telling the story of a prostitute and her son, was an astonishing punch in the stomach for the common morality of those times. The doubt that Pasolini often inserted in his works, that such realities are less distant from us than we imagine, is one of his major contributions to a change in the Italian psyche, and an unrepeated example of poetry applied to cruel realities.

The director also promoted the concept of "natural sacredness" in his works, the concept that the world is holy in and of itself, and does not need any spiritual essence or supernatural blessing to attain this state. Indeed, Pasolini was an avowed atheist. The contrast between public opinion and what Pasolini was able to show, focused on sexual moralism, was perhaps what made him encounter general disapproval. Pasolini's poetry, lesser known outside of Italy, often deals with his highly revered mother and his same-sex love interests, but this is not the main and only theme. As a sensible and extremely intelligent man, he depicted certain corners of the contemporary reality as very few other poets were able to do.

His films won awards at the Berlin Film Festival, Cannes Film Festival, Venice Film Festival, Italian National Syndicate for Film Journalists, Jussi Awards, Kinema Junpo Awards, International Catholic Film Office and New York Film Critics Circle.

Political views

In politics too, or better, in the social debate, Pasolini was able to create scandal and debate with some assertions that were as much unheard as, at the same time, true: during the disorders of 1969, when the autonomist university students were acting in a guerrilla-like fashion against the police in the streets of Rome, all the leftist forces declared their complete support for the students, and described the disorders as a civil fight of proletarians against the system. Pasolini, instead, alone among the communists, declared that he was with the police; or, more precisely, with the policemen, considering them true proletarians who were sent to fight against pampered boys of their same age for a poor salary and reasons which they could not understand, because they had not had the fortune of being able to study (poliziotti figli di proletari meridionali picchiati da figli di papà in vena di bravate, lit. policemen, sons of proletarian southerners, beaten up by daddy's boys in bragging mood). This ironic statement, however, didn't stop him from contributing to the autonomist Lotta continua movement.

Pasolini was also an ardent critic of consumismo, i.e. consumerism, which he felt had rapidly destroyed Italian society in the late 1960s/early 1970s, particularly the class of the subproletariat, which he portrayed e.g. in Accattone and to which he felt both sexually and artistically drawn. Pasolini observed that the kind of purity which he perceived in the pre-industrial popular culture was rapidly vanishing (a process that he named la scomparsa delle lucciole, lit. the disappearance of glow-worms"), the animalistic joie de vivre of the boys being rapidly replaced with more bourgeois ambitions such as a house and a family. The coprophagia scenes in Salò were described by him as being a comment on the processed food industry.

Not only economical globalization but also the cultural domination of the North of Italy (around Milan) over other regions, especially the South, primarily through the power of TV, angered him. He opposed the gradual disappearance of Italian dialects by writing some of his poetry in Friulian, the regional language of the region where he spent his childhood.

Quotes

"If you know that I am an unbeliever, then you know me better than I do myself. I may be an unbeliever, but I am an unbeliever who has a nostalgia for a belief." (1966)

"The mark which has dominated all my work is this longing for life, this sense of exclusion, which doesn't lessen but augments this love of life." (Interview in documentary, late 1960s)

Filmography

• Accattone (1961)
• Mamma Roma (1962)
• RoGoPaG, episode: La ricotta (1963)
• La rabbia (1963)
• Il vangelo secondo Matteo (The Gospel According to St. Matthew, 1964)
• Sopralluoghi in Palestina per Il Vangelo secondo Matteo (1964)
• Comizi d'amore (The Assembly of Love, 1964)
• Uccellacci e uccellini (The Hawks and the Sparrows, 1966)
• Edipo re (Oedipus Rex, 1967)
• Le streghe, episode: "La Terra vista dalla Luna" (The Witches, 1967)
• Capriccio all'Italiana, episode: "Che cosa sono le nuvole?" (1968)
• Teorema (Theorem, 1968)
• Appunti per un film sull'India (1969)
• Amore e rabbia, episode: "La sequenza del fiore di carta" (1969)
• Porcile (Pigpen, 1969)
• Medea (1969)
• Appunti per un romanzo dell'immondizia (1970)
• Il Decameron (The Decameron, 1971)
• Le mura di Sana'a (1971)
• 12 Dicembre 1972 (long and short version) (1972)
• I Racconti di Canterbury (The Canterbury Tales, 1972)
• Il fiore delle Mille e una Notte (A Thousand and One Nights/Arabian Nights, 1974)
• Pasolini e la forma della città (1975)
• Appunti per un'Orestiade Africana (Notes Towards an African Orestes, 1975)
• Salò o le 120 giornate di Sodoma (The 120 Days of Sodom, 1976)

Selected bibliography

Narrative

• Poems
• Ragazzi di vita (The Ragazzi, 1955)
• Una vita violenta (A Violent Life, 1959)
• Amado Mio - Atti Impuri (1982, originally composed in 1962)
• Alì dagli occhi azzurri (1965)
• Reality (The Poets' Encyclopedia, 1979)
• Petrolio (1992, incomplete)

Poetry

• La meglio gioventù (1954)
• Le ceneri di Gramsci (1957)
• L'usignolo della chiesa cattolica (1958)
• La religione del mio tempo (1961)
• Poesia in forma di rosa (1964)
• Trasumanar e organizzar (1971)
• La nuova gioventù (1975)

Essays

• Passione e ideologia (1960)
• Canzoniere italiano, poesia popolare italiana (1960)
• Empirismo eretico (1972)
• Lettere luterane (1976)
• Le belle bandiere (1977)
• Descrizioni di descrizioni (1979)
• Il caos (1979)
• La pornografia è noiosa (1979)
• Scritti corsari 1975)
• Lettere (1940-1954) (Letters, 1940-54, 1986)

Theatre

• Orgia (1968)
• Porcile (1968)
• Calderón (1973)
• Affabulazione (1977)
• Pilade (1977)
• Bestia da stile (1977)

Sources

• Aichele, George. "Translation as De-canonization: Matthew's Gospel According to Pasolini - filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini - Critical Essay." Cross Currents (2002). FindArticles. 12 Feb. 2006. A review of The Gospel According to St. Matthew as a re-writing of the Christian canon.
• Distefano, John. "Picturing Pasolini." Art Journal (1997). EBSCO. Rutgers University Alexander Library, New Brunwick, NJ. 15 Feb. 2006. The author traces Pasolini's coverage in the media in photographs. He pays particular attention to how Pasolini's manhood and homosexuality are portrayed. The author created an art exhibition with the same title.
• Eloit, Audrene. "Oedipus Rex by Pier Paolo Pasolini The Palimpsest: Rewriting and the Creation of Pasolini's Cinematic Language." Literature Film Quarterly (2004). FindArticles. A review and discussion of Pasolini's interpretation of Sophocles's text, Freud, and cinematic theory.
• Forni, Kathleen. "A "cinema of poetry": What Pasolini Did to Chancer's Canterbury Tales." Literature Film Quarterly (2002). FindArticles. 12 Feb. 2006. A review of The Canterbury Tales as both an homage to Chaucer and a parody in the Bakhtinian spirit.
• Frisch, Anette. "Francesco Vezzolini: Pasolini Reloaded." Rutgers University Alexander Library, New Brunwick, NJ. 15 Feb. 2006. In an interview, Vezzolini discusses Pasolini's influence on his art installation: "The Trilogy of Death." He discusses what Pasolini may have done had he lived, and how poetry and literature made Pasolini respectable.
• Greene, Naomi. Pier Paolo Pasilini: Cinema as Heresy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1990. Greene opens with a personal chapter on Pasolini's life and death. The second chapter discusses how Acettone and Mamma Roma were received by audiences and critics and the immediate impact of the films. La Rabbia, Il Vangelo and Comizi d'amore are discussed in relation to Gramsci and Marx. The book ends in a discussion on Pasolini's cinematic theory and his influence on future film makers.
• Green, Martin. "The Dialectic Adaptation." Rutgers University Alexander Library, New Brunswick, NJ. 15 Feb. 2006. Green compares Pasolini's The Canterbury Tales with Chaucer's original text and Pasolini's Decameron. He proposes that Pasolini was asserting his right to deal with entertaining material for its own sae, a departure from his normally serious tone.
• Pugh, Tison. "Chaucerian Fabliaux, Cinematic Fabliau: Pier Paolo Pasolini's I racconti di Canterbury." Literature Film Quarterly (2004). FindArticles. 12 Feb. 2006. An in-depth review and interpretation of The Canterbury Tales.
• Restivo, Angelo. The Cinema of Economic Miracles: Visuality and Modernization in the Italian Art Film. London: Duke UP, 2002. In part two, "The Nation, the Body, and Pasolini", Restivo discusses the creation of a "neo-Italiano" language, the "Italian" and living in a modern world. Restivo describes the political and economic situation of Pasolini's Italy and its relationship to the films. Chapter five discusses sex and the body in the creation of "the new Italian."
• Rohdie, Sam. The Passion of Pier Paolo Pasolini. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana UP, 1995. Rohdie's book deals with parts of Pasolini's life that is overlooked by other authors. He deals with Pasolini not just as a poet or a film maker, but as a full character. He puts Pasolini in a larger tradition of Western thought and shows how he uses undeveloped societies to criticize his world. Rohdie also asserts that Pasolini was neither a Socialist or a Communist, but he was a revolutionary.
• Rumble, Patrick A. Allegories of contamination : Pier Paolo Pasolini's Trilogy of life. Toronto: University of Toronto P, 1996. "The Trilogy of Life" consisted of Decameron, The Canterbury Tales and Arabian Nights. Rumble goes into great detail interpreting the trilogy and naming possible inspirations and making comparisons. A whole chapter is devoted to Decameron, but for most of the book the films as discussed together. A brief closing chapter discusses the significance of Pasolini's homosexuality on his work.
• Schwartz, Barth D. Pasolini Requiem. 1st ed. New York: Pantheon Books, 1992. Schwartz's book is an exhaustingly thorough biography of Pasolini's adult life (and death). It includes personal details, the making of his key films, accounts of his legal troubles, and summaries of the films themselves.
• Siciliano, Enzo. Pasolini: A Biography. Trans. John Shepley. New York: Random House, 1982. Written by a friend of Pasolini, it is a thorough, factual (if heavy) account of Pasolini's life.
• Viano, Maurizio. A Certain Realism: Making Use of Pasolini's Film Theory and Practice. Berkeley: University of California P, 1993. Viano analyzes Pasolini's major inspirations and influences, providing an "essential biography" before dedicating a chapter to each of his major films. Each chapter opens with a very brief summary of the film followed by an easy to read, yet thorough analysis of the film in the context of other works, other film makers, current events and the work of critics and historians. This is an excellent source for anyone seeking to understand and appreciate Pasolini's films.
• Willimon, William H. "Faithful to the script." Christian Century (2004). FindArticles. 12 Feb. 2006. A favorable review of The Gospel According to St. Matthew from a Christian perspective written by an American Bishop.

External links

• Pier Paolo Pasolini at the Internet Movie Database
• Italian site with extensive commentary on his theories, films, and literature
• Senses of Cinema: Great Directors Critical Database
• BBC News report on the reopening of the murder case
• Guy Flatley: "The Atheist Who Was Obsessed with God"
• An extensive biography at the Kirjasto site
• Doug Ireland: Restoring Pasolini
• Maria Callas in Pasolini's Medea
• Pasolini's own notes on Salo from 1974
• Pier Paolo Pasolini poems Original Italian text.

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