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Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922-1975) |
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Italian director, screen writer, essayist, poet, critic and novelist, was murdered violently in 1975. Pier Paolo Pasolini is best known outside Italy for his films, many of which were based on literary sources – The Gospel According to Saint Matthew, The Decameron, The Canterbury Tales. Pasolini referred himself as a "Catholic Marxist" and often used shocking juxtapositions of imagery to expose the ills of modern society. His friend, the writer Alberto Moravia, considered him "the most important Italian poet" of the second half of the 20th century, Montale being that of the first half. "In neorealistic film, day-to-day reality is seen from crepuscular, intimistic, credulous, and above all naturalistic point of view... In neorealism, things are described with a certain detachment, with human warmth, mixed with irony – characteristics which I do not have. Compared with neorealism, I think I have introduced a certain realism, but it would be hard to define it exactly." (In Pasolini on Pasolini by Oswald Stack, 1970) Pier Paolo Pasolini was born in Bologna, traditionally the most
left-wing of Italian cities. Throughout his life, Pasolini was
especially close to his mother. As a girl, she had written poetry. His
uncle, who died at sea at the age of twenty, wrote poetry too.
Pasolini's father was a fascist and
non-commissioned officer, moving from one garrison to another. Much of
his early years Pasolini lived a rootless life. Pasolini once said, that in the film Edipo Re (1967, Oidipus Rex)
he told the story of his own Oedipus complex. "The boy in the prologue
is myself, and his father, the infantry officer, is my own father, The
mother, a governess, is also my own mother." (A Certain Realism: Making Use of Pasolini's Film Theory and Practice by Maurizio Viano, 1993, p. 177) Pasolini's family originated from Fruili, a region in the North-Eastern part of Italy where a local language, Friulano, Rhaeto-Romanic dialect, dominated, which he used in some of his early poems. However, later in life Pasolini adopted as his way of expression the crude language of the Roman suburbs. Most of his childhood Pasolini spent at Casarsa della Delizia, his mother's birthplace northeast of Venice. During this period he became deeply involved with the dialect of the region. I was twenty, not even – eighteen, consumed by the pain of the fact or maybe to the earth of an unguarded tomb... In 1937 Pasolini returned to his native city and studied art history and literature at the University of Bologna. He published articles in Architrave, the politico-literary monthly of the students, and began writing poems. Pasolini's first collection, Poesie a Casarsa, which he printed at his own expense, appeared in 1942. It reflected his intense love for "maternal tongue," Friulian landscape, and its peasants, whom he depicted also in the novel Il sogno di una cosa (1962). The poems showed Pasolini's knowledge of the poetry of Giovanni Pascoli, on whom he later wrote his thesis, and Eugenio Montale. Pasolini's early Italian verses, L'usignolo della Chiesa Cattolica, date from this period but appeared in 1958. During World War II Pasolini's brother was executed by Communist
partisans, who supported Tito. Pasolini joined the Communist Party as a
young man – in his works he often explored ideological problems, but his relationship with Communism was questioning – actually
similar to the attitude towards him by his party members. The mutual
schism led to his expelling from the party for alleged homosexuality in
1949. However, to the end of his life, Pasolini regarded himself as a
Communist, though a heritical one. His father, who had been captured as
a prisoner of war in Kenya in 1942, eventually drank himself to death
in 1958. From 1943 to 1949 Pasolini worked as a teacher in almost total
obscurity. His first great love was a young country boy, whom the
taught to compose poetry. After a scandal, he was forced to abandon his
post. Various scandals followed Pasolini throughout his life. The
avant-hgarde magazine Officina, which he edited, was obliged to cease
publication as a result of the outrage caused by his poem to the
dying Pope Pius XII: "How much good you could have done! And you /
didn't do it: / there was no greater sinner than you." (World Authors 1950-1970, edited by John Wakeman, 1975, p. 1117)
On another occasion, he was accused of helping a gangster to escape
arrest. And he was accused of having attempted an armed robbery at a
gas station. A warrant was issued, and Pasolini's house and Alfa Romeo
Giulietta were searched. "Nothing is more contrary to my nature than is
violence," Pasolini wrote in his Vie nuove
column. "I descibe violence, thus I must be violent. Look at this, one
ought to redden even at the mere stating of such nonsense." (Pasolini Requiem: Second Edition by Barth David Schwartz, 2017, pp.154-158) Pasolini's essay on Pascoli and Montale, showing his skills in close textual analysis, appeared in 1947 in the Bolognese review Convivum. An essay on Giuseppe Ungaretti, written in the years 1958-51, was later included in Passione e ideologia 1948-1958 (1960). In 1949 Pasolini moved with his mother to Rome, where he wrote poems and novels of slum life. The first two parts of a projected trilogy, Ragazzi di Vita (1955, The Ragazzi), composed in a mixture of Italian and Roman dialect, and Una vita violenta (1959, A Violent Life), established Pasolini's reputation as a major writer. In these works he depicted with neorealistic approach subproletarian life and the awakening of social awareness. Both novels were translated in the 1960s into English. The Ragazzi was accused of obscenity and confiscated by the police by the order of Prime minister Antonio Segni. Tommaso, the protagonist in A Violent Life, is a homosexual, who with his friends lives in a world without hope. After being released from a prison, he gets an opportunity to change his purposeless existence. Eventually he dies of tuberculosis. "But this novel is a great deal more than the sum of its political ideas. It is not devitalized by or dependent on Marxist philosophy. Tommaso's story has its own profound and cumulative power; his world boils with life created by Pasolini's relentless use of dialogue and vivid detail." (Anne Rice in The New York Times, November 3, 1985) During his career Pasolini published nearly ten collections of poems. Many critics, such as Alberto Moravia, hailed him as the voice of the post-war generation. With Moravia, Pasolini travelled
in the 1960s in Africa, making preparations for a film about "black
Oedipus." The idea was never realized. Pasolini also built with
Moravia a house in Sabaudia. According to Moravia, Pasolini honestly
believed that the lowest proletariat would save the world with all of
its freshness, incorruptness, and originality. "Pasolini, in his way,
was a disciple of Rousseau," Moravia said in his autobiography. (Life of Moravia by Alberto Moravia & Alain Elkmann, translated by William Weaver, 2000, p. 266) In Le ceneri di Gramsci (1957) Pasolini returned to ideological debate. He took as his starting point the theories Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937), a political leader and the cofounder of the Italian Communist Party, who spent in fascist prisons the last ten years of his life. In addition to writing scripts, Pasolini worked in the 1950s as an
actor. In 1961 Pasolini made his debut as a director. His first film, Accatone, is a re-working the novels The Ragazzi and A Violent Life.
Set in Ciampino, a suburb of Rome, where Pasolino taught from 1949 to
1951, the story centered on the life of a pimp, who was portrayed in
the manner of religious painters such as Giotto and Masaccio. Franco
Citti, the then amateur actor, played the eponymous hero. In the
background of squalid scenes, Pasolini used Bach's St Matthew's Passion. "My vision of the world is in essence epico-religious," he stated. (The Passion of Pier Paolo Pasolini by Sam Rohdie, 1995, p. 4) Accattone!
began a decade-long working companionship with the cinematographer
Tonino Delli Colli. Speaking of this film, he said: "We provoked a
minor revolution on technical level [by using] a lens . . . which
nobody wanted at the time, a 35-140 mm [with a small zoom ratio of
4:1], joined to an Arriflex, a camera that wasn't yet used in Italy . .
. we certainly inaugurated a very distinctive photographic style.
Pasolini . . . wanted to make a cinéma-vérité film whose photographic rhythm would correspond to that of the universe of Accattone! This lens offered exactly the desired result . . . " (Making Pictures: A Century of
European Cinematography, 2003, pp. 262-263) Pasolini examined further the theme of prostitution in Mamma Roma (1962),
which portrayed Rome's underworld realistically. Anna Magnani played a
prostitute who has to go back on her profession. International fame
Pasolini gained in the mid-1960s. Il Vangelo secondo Matteo (1964)
was a straightforward re-telling of the New Testament story, based on
words and scenes from St Matthew's Gospel. Pasolini loathed the
institution of the Catholic church, but his religious sense was evident
in his movies. His mother played the role of the adult Christ. Most of the film was shot in Lucan and Calabria, not far
from the regions, which Carlo Levi (1902-1975) portrayed in his novel Christo si è fermato a Eboli
(1945). The Catholic Church helped to finance the film. At the
Venice Film Festival it received the Special Jury Prize. Two years
before Pasolini had been accused of blasphemy over his satirical sketch
in RoGoPaG (1962), directed by Rosselini, Godard,
Pasolini and Gregoretti. In explaining his religious beliefs, Pasolini said: "For years I
thought that an addressee for my 'confessions' and 'testimony' existed.
Only now do I realize that he does not exist." (Poems for the Millennium: The University of California Book of Modern & Postmodern Poetry, Volume Two, edited by Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre Joris, 1998, p. 177) Saint Paul was
meant
to be a sequel to his film on the Passion of Christ. Pasolini
transposed Paul's life to "the conformism of present-day bourgeois
civility," as he explained in his plan. He worked on the screenplay in
1968, edited it further in 1974, butnever found financing for the production. Il Decameron (1971), I racconti di Canterbury (1973) and Il fiore delle Mille e una notte (1973, Arabian Nights) were based on medieval tales and celebrated the world of simple joys and sexuality. With the "trilogy of life" Pasolini acquired a more broader audience than contemporary avant-garde directors – moreover, there was plenty of nudity and voyerism on the screen. At that time Pasolini wanted to turn away from ideology, because he had understood, that "to make an ideological film is finally easier than making a film outwardly lacking ideology." (A History of Italian Cinema by Peter Bondanella and Federico Pacchioni, second edition, 2017, p. 334) In The Canterbury Tales, Pasolini himself played Chaucer, a farcical character in the opening sequence. At the end he finishes his book, smiling at the camera. Of the original 24 tales, Pasolini selected eight but combined them together in a different order, and added new scenes. The stories follow one another without any transition. Young males are cast into roles of prostitutes and loose women. As a side-production of Arabian Nights, Pasolini made a short film, Le mura di Sana'a (1973), in which he expressed his disgust for demolition of old buildings in the name of modernism. Oidipus Rex was an adaptation of an ancient text of Sophocles. Teorema (1968) was a dissection of a wealthy Milanese family through the slogan "make love, not war." Love enters the lives of the family members in the persona of a young man. At the end, the father gives his factory to workers, strips himself naked, and like John The Babtist becomes a voice in the wilderness. Using non-professional actors with professionals, Pasolini attempted to combine realism and revolutionary concepts with sex, violence, and sadism. With the gay liberation movement the community of homosexual novelists grew internationally, and along with Pasolini from it emerged such writers as Christopher Bram, James Purdy, Allan Hollinghurst, José Lezema Lima, Reinaldo Arenas, and Yukio Mishima. In the 1960s Pasolini's interest in language drew him to semiotics, although his concern with dialect marked his work from the first collections of poems. One of these early influences was the modern novelist Carlo Emilio Gadda, whose experimental novel That Awful Mess on Via Merulana, written in a mixture of Italian, Roman, Venetian, and Neopolitan dialects, appeared in a Florentine review 1946. Pasolini presented his approach to cinema in a number of essays. His opposition to the liberalization of abortion law and criticism of the radical students made him unpopular on the left. From Porcile (1969), in which the son of a Nazi father is eaten by pigs, Pasolini's films took an increasingly controversial tone, but at the same time his ideological stance became more concealed and individualistic. He denounced the student demonstrations of 1968 and opposed abortion. Pasolini once remarked: "I too, like Moravia and Bertolucci, am a bourgeois, in fact a petit-bourgeois, a turd, convinced that my stench is not only scented perfume, but is in fact the only perfume in the world." (A History of Italian Cinema by Peter Bondanella and Federico Pacchioni, second edition, 2017, p. 300) His last film, Salò o le 120 giornate di Sodoma, set in the last years of WW II in Italy, linked fascism and scatalogy and sadism. The film was banned virtually everywhere. Pasolini's creative productivity did not stop in films. He wrote several tragedies in verse and published in 1971 a new collection of poetry, Trasumanar e organizzar, which was dismissed as bad poetry. His critical writings and newspaper articles were collected in such volumes as Empirismo eretico (1972, Heretical Empiricism) and Lettere luterane (1976). Pasolini also contributed to the Milanese newspaper Corriere della sera. The circumstances surrounding Pasolini's death remain a mystery. On morning of 2 November, 1975, his body was discovered on waste ground near seaside resort of Ostia. A young male prostitute was tried and convicted for the murder in 1976. A week before his death, Pasolini had said in Sweden, that he will be killed probably very soon. He had began to investigate the Mafia's link to the prostitution business. Pasolini's massive unfinished novel, Petrolio, came out in 1992. For further reading: Pasolini on Pasolini by Oswald Stack (1969); Pasolini by T. Anzoino (1971); Vita di Pasolini by Enzo Siciliano (1979); 'The Storytellers Art' by Ben Lawton, in Modern European Filmmakers and the Art of Adaptation, ed. by Andrew S. Horton and Joan Magretta (1981); Pasolini: A Biography by E. Siciliano (1982); Italian Film in the Light of Neorealism by Millicent Marcus (1986); Pier Paolo Pasolini: Cinema as Heresy by N. Greene (1990); A Certain Realism: Making Use of Pasolini's Film Theory and Practice by Maurizio Viano (1993); Pier Paolo Pasolini: Contemporary Perspectives, ed. P. Rumble and B. Testa (1994); A Poetics of Resistance: Narrative and the Writings of Pier Paolo Pasolini by D. Ward (1995); The Passion of Pier Paolo Pasolini by Sam Rohdie (1995); Allegories of Contamination: Pier Paolo Pasolini's Trilogy of Life by Patrick A. Rumble (1995); Pasolini: Forms of Subjectivity by R. Gordon (1996); Pasolini, Chaucer and Boccaccio: Two Medieval Texts and their Translation to Film by Agnès Blandeau (2006); Pasolini Requiem: Second Edition by Barth David Schwartz (2017); Against the Avant-garde: Pier Paolo Pasolini, Contemporary Art, and Neocapitalism by Ara Merjian (2019); Pier Paolo Pasolini, Framed and Unframed: a Thinker for the Twenty-first Century, edited by Luca Peretti and Karen T. Raizen (2019); Pasolini by Antonio Tricomi (2020) - See also: Pentti Saarikoski, Matteuksen evankeliumi (The Gospel According to St. Matthew), translation into Finnish also in the 1960s. Pasolinilta on myös suomennettu valikoima Laitakaupungin valot sekä Tuhkan laulaja, valikoinut ja suomentanut Pentti Saaritsa (1999). Selected works:
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