A Screenplay in the Form of a Comic Strip: Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Drawings for La terra vista dalla luna

Abstract

This article analyzes the drawings that Pier Paolo Pasolini made for his short film, La terra vista dalla luna, in 1967. Pasolini originally intended to publish his sketches in a comic book that, in the end, he did not complete. These drawings eschew any clear-cut definition. They are an attempt at a comic book, but they also visualize Pasolini’s screenplay so closely that they could be the film’s storyboard. Whether they are functional to the film or conceived to tell the same story in a different medium, these drawings represent a residual text that sheds light on Pasolini’s conversion to the figurative arts. His hand-drawn images investigate the function of colour, while exemplifying Pasolini’s observations on linguistic contamination, the merging of high- and lowbrow expressive forms, free indirect style and the new literary monstra represented by hybrid narrative structures.