Pier Paolo Pasolini

Abstract

Pier Paolo Pasolini (b. 1922–d. 1975) was one of the most important and innovative figures in postwar Italian culture, whose influence, both within Italy and internationally, has continued to grow in the decades since his death. Though his international reputation rests largely on the fame he achieved as a filmmaker in the 1960s and early 1970s, he was equally prolific as a poet, novelist, playwright, film theorist, and literary critic, and, particularly in the latter portion of his career, as a political commentator and controversial public intellectual. He was a national celebrity, despite his uncomfortable “scandalous” pronouncements, who was consistently published and broadcast in Italy’s major media outlets. This eclecticism is reflected as much in Pasolini’s aesthetics—centered on adaptation, analogy, and the reciprocal “contamination” of low and high culture—as in the themes persistently explored in his films and writings. An unorthodox Communist driven by a “desperate love for reality” and a lifelong interest in popular Italian culture (particularly dialectal poetry), Pasolini was also, for example, interested in early Renaissance painting, ancient Greek tragedy, and Baroque music. He wrote novels and made films about prostitution and criminality in the Roman borgate, staged tableaux vivants of Mannerist paintings in a tragicomedy about a starving extra hired to participate in a film about the Deposition, wrote a talking Marxist crow into a picaresque allegory starring Totò, transformed his location-scouting journeys into a series of documentaries about Africa and the Middle East, adapted the Bible, Sophocles, Euripides, the Decameron, the Arabian Nights, Canterbury Tales, and, for his last film, transposed Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom to the Fascist Republic of Salò. Pasolini also a wrote a series of long-disparaged and now increasingly revalued essays on film theory, famously arguing for the conceptual analogy between death and editing and maintaining that cinema is “the written language of reality.” Much of the writing on Pasolini, which, like his own work, is staggering in volume, has been devoted to unraveling the relationships between his many and diverse sources, as well as considering his relevance as a uniquely perceptive and intransigent analyst of the radical transformation of Italian culture and society during the postwar period and the years of the economic miracle. The present article is primarily focused on scholarly discussions of Pasolini’s films and film theory, and for the most part excludes review articles and sources centered on other areas of his work. It also privileges writing available in English, although some of the most important and useful Italian texts, as well as several works in French and Spanish, have been included.