Haunting Authorship: Pasolini’s Murder in Glauber Rocha’s A Idade da Terra and Aoulad-Syad’s Fi Intidar Pasolini

Abstract

ABSTRACT Pier Paolo Pasolini’s death has been the subject of numerous works in media from cinema to graphic novels. Most focus on Pasolini’s assassination, its murky political implications, and the events surrounding the last hours of his life. Although this copious material was generated in an effort to bring justice to his death, in most cases it has ended up underplaying the multilayered approach to death and authorship present in Pasolini’s works. Here, I ask whether it is possible to consider Pasolini’s death through lenses other than that of the events surrounding his murder. I consider two films: Glauber Rocha’s last film, A Idade da Terra (The Age of the Earth, Brazil, 1980), and Fi Intidar Pasolini (Waiting for Pasolini, Morocco, 2007) realized by Daoud Aoulad-Syad. These Global South directors not only depart from a journalistic approach to Pasolini’s death, they also reinvent, translate, and, to a certain extent, ‘provincialize’ it.