Pier Paolo Pasolini Research Articles

‘Of o toun were they born, that highte Strother’: Dialect and Pasolini in I racconti di Canterbury

Pier Paolo Pasolini’s I racconti di Canterbury (The Canterbury Tales) (1972), a reinterpretation of Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, is undeniably the most controversial – and perplexing – film in his Trilogy of Life. Marked by a cacophonous filming process, one in which English and Italian actors attempted to retell a collection of stories written in a form of English that has been extinct for centuries, the triumphs of I racconti di Canterbury have seldom been recognized. Pasolini’s reinterpretation of Chaucerian dialect is especially understudied, despite how Chaucer was the first English writer to differentiate his characters through written language. My article first focuses on the dialect in Chaucer’s ‘The Reeve’s Tale’ (c.1400) and then, its reimagination in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s film I racconti di Canterbury. My research highlights Pasolini’s commendable fidelity to his source material and his success in replicating Chaucer’s representations of class difference.

‘Nostalgia for the sacred’: Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Theorem

As a pervasive term in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s work, ‘nostalgia’ remains theoretically enigmatic and often politically contradictory. This article argues for the critical potential of nostalgia in Pasolini’s political aesthetics through a seemingly unlikely subject: his 1968 film and novel Teorema (Theorem). Set in post-war Milan, Theorem depicts the transformative encounter between a godlike visitor and five archetypes of the bourgeois household. After he leaves, they must reckon with his departure. I suggest that Pasolini’s formal and theoretical interest in nostalgia is crucial to understanding Theorem’s aesthetic invocation of the sacred, which the film stages through an interplay of presence and absence in bodies, spaces and temporalities. Unpacking the etymological roots algos (‘pain’) and nostos (‘return’), my reading forges intertextual connections within Pasolini’s oeuvre while also suggesting that Pasolini’s oblique, materially rooted nostalgia encourages a re-evaluation of the critical productivity of this term more broadly.

Memories of Joy for a Futureless World: Aesthetic and Political Commitment in Jasieński and Pasolini

Discussions of cultural disappearance are often couched in terms of nostalgia and tragedy. Bruno Jasieński in Bal manekinów and Pier Paolo Pasolini in Ragazzi di vita offer an alternative form of remembering disappearance through memories of joy, understood as a distinctly political practice. Acutely aware of the untenability of what they were celebrating (pockets of liberty from cultural uniformity, in local cultures and aesthetic experimentation, respectively), both writers maintained a sense of political commitment, offering a good broader model for thinking about a world without a future.

“Every Single Word Is Now a Tempest of Gestures”: Luigi Ballerini's and Beppe Cavatorta's Anthology of Italian Poetry Those Who from Afar Look Like Flies

Abstract This essay is a long review of the anthology of Italian poetry Those Who from Afar Look Like Flies. Beginning with a brief discussion of the editor's extensive introduction and an evaluation and explanation of the overall anthology project, the review essay goes on to explore, in some depth, a selection of the numerous poets who appear in this 2,116-page volume. Among the many poets discussed are Pier Paolo Pasolini, Francesco Leonetti, Alfredo Giuliani, Elio Pagliarani, Antonio Porta, Edoardo Cacciatore, Corrado Costa, Antonio Delfini, Mario Diacono, Amelia Rosselli, Emilio Villa, Andrea Zanzotto, and numerous others. Specific poems are analyzed and contextualized within the larger context of contemporary Italian “Research” poetry.

Suspended meanings: Pier Paolo Pasolini’s and Ritwik Ghatak’s ‘epic melodramas’

Pier Paolo Pasolini’s encounter with India is well known, but India’s engagement with Pasolini’s work is much less considered. This article puts the work of Pasolini in dialogue with the work of Bengali director Ritwik Ghatak, one of the most important figures in Indian parallel cinema. Ghatak discussed the Italian director’s work on several occasions. More importantly, Ghatak’s intellectual path and films have notable similarities with Pasolini’s. Both directors, Ghatak and Pasolini, pursued a ‘heretical’ approach to Marxist ideology by contaminating it with a passionate identification with the marginalized communities of today’s Bangladesh and southern Italy, respectively. Drawing from film critic Bhaskar Sarkar’s notion of epic melodrama, I suggest an analysis of two coeval films, Mamma Roma () and Meghe dhaka tara (The Cloud-Capped Star) (), in order to expose the directors’ complex location between Brechtian aesthetic, epic-religious vision and melodramatic motives. This article argues that these epic-melodramatic films suspend a final interpretation, providing an aesthetic correlative to the unreconciled position of the people the directors aimed to represent.

Nel verso impenetravi la | tua notte.

“Nel verso impenetravi la | tua notte” Notes for a Pasolinian heritage in Amelia Rosselli’s verses Amelia Rosselli and Pier Paolo Pasolini represent two of the most relevant characters of the second half of the Italian twentieth century. Their diversity and independence, as opposed to other cultural and literary perspectives of that time, are significant and allow for an interesting comparison, particularly with regard to their poetic contexts. Pasolini is always studied as a “complete” intellectual, while Rosselli is recognised as the poet of lapsus and trilingualism. The essay intends to analyse some noteworthy aspects of the relationship between them, starting from Pasolini’s role in introducing Rosselli to the public and proceeding to interpret Pasolini’s presence in several key passages of Amelia Rosselli’s work, from Variazioni belliche to Impromptu. The alleged dependence of Amelia Rosselli regarding the Pasolinian lexicon will be discussed. Pasolini couldn’t help but be astonished by her ability and diversity, even if he himself commits some mistakes of simplification, maybe caused by the excessive rush to be considered as the discoverer of an exceptional poet.

Christ stopped in Timisoara: a film by Andrei Ujica about The gospel by Pier Paolo Pasolini

Christ stopped in Timisoara: a film by Andrei Ujica about The gospel by Pier Paolo Pasolini

Pasolini Overseas: His Reception in Canada

After briefly tracing the history of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s travels in the Americas through the photographs that immortalize him, I focus my attention on the reception of his work and thought in Canada. I con­sider it significant especially in the context of gay, queer, and LGBTQ+ culture and among Italian-Canadian intellectuals. In the Canadian context, characterized by linguistic and cultural plurality, writers and essayists of Italian descent translate Pasolini’s works, absorb his lessons, and draw on his thought to explore mainly identity-related issues. In the queer artistic milieu, it will be Pasolini’s biographical journey in par­ticular that attracts the attention of intellectuals and performers who, by manipulating his works and images, transform him into an icon of the different.

The West German and Italian Left in the “Two Cultures” Debate: Trasnationalization and Localization (1964–1969)

Abstract This article delves into the transnational aspects of the “Two Cultures” debate initiated by the British chemist and writer C. P. Snow, and explores how Italian and West German intellectuals localized and translated aspects of the debate within their respective political landscapes. Snow described the relationship between science and the humanities, and attributed a unique social responsibility to science. Prominent leftist thinkers, including Gino Martinoli, Adriano Buzzati Traverso, Aldo Visalberghi, Giulio Preti, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Karl Steinbuch, Hans Mohr, Hilde Domin, Jürgen Habermas, and Robert Jungk, engaged Snow's ideas, each formulating their stance on the role of science. These intellectuals were divided in their response. Some concurred with Snow, viewing scientific advancement as a cornerstone of social progress and considering the scientific ethos as a model for political emulation. Others, however, were critical, questioning the very notions of scientific progress, rationality, and modernization. This intellectual discourse foreshadowed the New Left's critique of scientism in the 1970s, a movement that significantly challenged the longstanding marriage between socialism and science.

Helena Lumbreras’s foundational filmmaking experience in Italy during the 1960s: An artistic biography

Helena Lumbreras (1935–95), founder of the Colectivo de Cine de Clase in Francoist Spain, started her film career at Rome’s Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia. The politically charged atmosphere of 1960s Italy marked a turning point for the young filmmaker professionally and ideologically. Her Italian sojourn proved remarkably influential, since it allowed her to delve into cultural materials that were censored in Spain and drew her into left-wing intellectual circles. During these years (1962–70), she encountered film directors and theorists like Pier Paolo Pasolini and Cesare Zavattini, who deepened her interest in collective film movements. She took her first step towards politically engaged cinema with her graduation film, España (1964). In the following years, her deepening involvement with the anti-Francoist movement coincided with her prioritization of documentary over fiction. This veered her career away from representational political cinema towards militant political cinema, which she would eventually put into practice in her homeland.

PASOLINI E O CORPO COMO RESISTÊNCIA

The Italian poet and filmmaker, Pier Paolo Pasolini, was a great critic of his time, above all, of the capitalist system that tried to impose on the world a single model of life based on the consumption of goods. Through the so-called mass culture, this system managed to form the popular spirit, transforming everything into merchandise, including the human body. The Enlightenment, “civilized” world also revealed itself to be a world of barbarism, a world that involves and controls bodies and minds. These bodies co-opted by power are bodies without autonomy, without freedom. Pasolinian cinema presents movements that are attempts to distance itself and resist the developmentalism of the present, although this distancing takes place from and in view of the present itself. His films bring strong, brutal, critical scenes, but also small glimpses, dancing scenes, in which the bodies seem to break free of their chains, connecting again with their ancestry.

Peter Weiss: Experiment und Engagement heute

In the introductory essay, the volume’s editors trace the project that gave rise to this collection of contributions on Peter Weiss, his work, and his fortunes back to the events celebrating the centenary of his birth in 2016. The reflections start from Milo Rau, as an example of a contemporary author and director who finds in the mastery of Peter Weiss a point of reference for an art combining formal experimentalism with political engagement. The relevance of this present-day reference to Weiss as an example of the “aesthetics of resistance” is then addressed in detail, which leads on to the discussion of the main idea and thematic structure of the volume.The twelve papers are divided into two equal halves. In the first section, entitled “Essay und Prosa – Experimente mit Subjekt, Kunst und Politik”, six scholars investigate Peter Weiss’s essayistic and fictional writing, its cultural and artistic context, and its legacy for literature up to the 21st century. Lesser-known articles in Swedish and seminal interventions in the public debates of the 1960s, experimental prose and canonical novels, are thus reinterpreted using the tools of contemporary literary theory.In the second section, a further six scholars examine Weiss’s cinematographic and theatrical work and his reflections on media and performance. These contributions give new insights into Weiss’s documentary films, revolutionary dramas, and media aesthetics and politics, as well as their influence up to the present day. Under the title “Performative Engagements: Film, Theater, Medien”, contributions are brought together that range from earlier models, such as Hölderlin, Artaud, and Brecht, to contemporaries like Pier Paolo Pasolini, and finally to today’s theatre, again with Milo Rau.

Performative Cinema and Its Techniques

The aim of this paper presentation is to analyze in-depth the transition and transformation of performance art into the world of cinema, creating the notion of performative cinema – a notion that is very present in today`s cinematic language, however not enough recognized as a movement in itself. The core mantra of performative cinema is the involvement of the spectator – both the emancipation of the viewer in an age of consumerist blockbusters and his awakening into a certain state of mind (in some cases, performative cinema can even lead towards transcendental meditation). The paper will briefly follow the origins of performative cinema and its techniques, with roots in the works of Alejandro Jodorowsky, Pier Paolo Pasolini and Pere Portabella, while reaching into the present through works of film auteurs like Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Yorgos Lanthimos. The presentation will focus to unveil and analyze the approaches of performative cinema, conveying how it works as a piece of performance art in itself – and how its relay into cinema can be direct, with a dadaesque influence through a transgressive political message (`Holy Motors` by Leos Carax representing an example), or more subtle – through nuances and refined directorial interventions (Weerasethakul`s `Memoria`). The systematic analysis of these movies as core examples of performative cinema means an enterprise into both the narrative elements and the visual identity of the films, with the purpose of classifying a genre that has remained unknown for too long, deserving the treatment of a cinematic wave in itself.

Pasolini and Popular Music

ABSTRACT This article explores popular music in the films of Pier Paolo Pasolini. Pasolini conceived of two broad categories of popular music: folk music, which he understood to represent pre-capitalistic, pre-industrial cultures; and contemporary, radio-ready musical genres like pop and jazz, which he tied to bourgeois culture. I show how these two categories, like so many of Pasolini’s categorical distinctions, were permeable, and explore his own role as mediator and transmitter of music.

Language in displacement: The word-image in the poetry of Marília Garcia

This article studies the interactions between poetic language and cinematographic language in the poetry of Marília Garcia. Taking into account the research of Rosa Maria Martelo (2007, 2012), this work explores dialogs between poetry and cinema to analyze the poem “estereofonia” (stereophonia) in the book Camera Lenta (Slow Motion). In addition, the article positions the poem closer to the cinema of poetry, a cinematographic genre described by Pier Paolo Pasolini (1982). Ultimatley, it concludes that cinematographic syntax organizes the word-images of Marília Garcia’s poetics.

The Duality of Paul in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Saint Paul: The Katechon and the Collapse of a Film Project

Recent scholarship on Pier Paolo Pasolini has put into focus many of the Italian intellectual’s lesser-known works. Among these is his screenplay for an unrealized film on the topic of the apostle Paul, San Paolo. Analyses of the film address Pasolini’s portrayal of Paul as dichotomic, as a representation of both revolutionary and conformist. In examining the criticism that addresses the duality of Saint Paul’s, this representation proves essential to understanding the role Pasolini intended the apostle to play. Paul, one of the architects of the Christian religion, is in fact the katechon that he names in 2 Thessalonians. Paul as the katechon is thus the force that holds back evil and annihilation. In doing so, however, he also prevents Man’s final redemption. As such, his portrayal of Paul is blasphemy, and Pasolini sent this screenplay to Don Emilio Cordero, head of Sampaolo Films, a Catholic film company charged with making religious movies in line with Church doctrine. This depiction of Paul proves one reason the film remains unmade and not solely the astronomical costs evident from the screenplay, as has been generally accepted until now.

Coming Out

Abstract: This is a memoir excerpt from Marcasciano, an activist for the rights of the trans community in Italy has been behind the civil rights and liberties achieved in the country during the 1970s. In this section, Marcasciano reflects on her experience as a member of the first generation of LGBTQIA activists in Italy, specifically her first time coming out in November of 1975 after the murder of Pier Paolo Pasolini.

Angels, Guests and Sadists: On-Screen Poetry in the Cinema of Pier Paolo Pasolini

This article considers how poetry features in Pasolini’s cinema. It argues that the manner in which Pasolini films poetry provides insight into his theory of an affinity between poetry and film, and into more general judgements concerning social reality. The article begins with an analysis of the final sequence of Salò (1975) where I argue that Ezra Pound’s poetry provides a soundtrack for the spectacle of torture in which the film’s libertines engage. Following this, I consider Pasolini’s 1965 text “The Cinema of Poetry” and use this text as a way of reading the role played by a copy of Rimbaud’s collected poems in Teorema ( Theorem, 1968). I then move to consider the relationship between oral recitation and text in Il decameron ( The Decameron, 1971) and Il fiore della mille e una notte ( The Arabian Nights, 1974). In doing this, I argue that one can observe a shift across these films whereby poetry and orality move from being a foundational moment for reciprocal community to being a vehicle for an ambiguous and violent fate. The article then considers the conspicuous presence of reading and writing within Salò before ending with a consideration of one scene towards the end of the film in which Pasolini appears to invest a recitation of the Gospel with a disruptive force that is otherwise lacking in his final film.

Pasolini and Minor Comparativism: Transnationalizing Dialect Poetry

Comparative Literature as a discipline seems caught between the macroscopic perspectives of World Literature and a fascination with the untranslatable and the incommensurable. This has made it difficult to elaborate methodologies for reading the local and the minor transnationally, which insist on linguistic and historical rigour but remain open to hermeneutical border-crossing. I reconstruct some aspects of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s engagement with Friulian, a language spoken in northeast Italy, focusing specifically on his poetry in Friulian and connected translation practices from sound to written work, between dialect to national language, and laterally across minoritized cultures. Foregrounding the extraordinary fertility of Pasolini’s explorations of language, history and politics as well as his biases and failed attempts, this essay proposes not a model to imitate but a repertoire of possible approaches to ‘minor comparativism’.

Fragments of Reality: Landscape and Sexuality in Arabian Nights (1974)

This article explores themes of sexuality and landscape in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s film . Utilizing an auteurist perspective and incorporating scholarly sources, archival images, critical reception, and the filmmaker’s writings, this article also examines the linkages between Pasolini’s biography and his formally challenging, politically conscious cinematic adaptation of the ancient Arabic anthology, One Thousand and One Nights.