PASOLINI, PIER PAOLO (1922–1975)

Italian writer and filmmaker.

Pier Paolo Pasolini was born in 1922 in Bologna, Italy. His father was a military officer allied to the Fascist government, so the family moved around Italy as Pasolini's father transferred from post to post. His mother was trained as a schoolteacher and passed on her love of books to her son. Pasolini remained devoted to her throughout his life. Pasolini was an intense artist from an early age, moving easily between writing, drawing, painting, and ultimately filmmaking. He was a published poet at nineteen (1942): The Ashes of Gramsci (1957) remains his most famous collection of poetry. Boys of Life, the first of several novels that depict the borgate (Roman slum neighborhoods) in which he lived at the time, was published in 1955.

Pasolini's first feature-length film, Accatone (1961), also took the youth of the borgate as its subject. Pasolini's early films are in black and white and use nonprofessional actors on location, thus adhering in some respects to the aesthetic of his neorealist forebears. Yet his use of classical music as an insistent presence on the sound track (e.g., when Bach suffuses a violent street fight) belies a highly complex, constructed quality that becomes more evident in later films. In Mamma Roma (1962), Pasolini pairs young nonprofessional actors with one of Italy's most celebrated actresses, Anna Magnani (1908–1973), who plays the mother of a doomed youth, Ettore. In the closing sequence, the camera films Ettore from the bottom of his feet as he lies dead on a bare slab, a clear reference to Andrea Mantegna's famous painting Dead Christ (c. 1466). Pasolini uses a flat pictorial style that would come to define his filmmaking, enhancing the viewer's sense that he is writing or painting on the film frame.

Pasolini's evocation of profane Christ figures throughout his early work—from Accatone and Ettore to the gluttonous actor who dies of indigestion while playing Christ in RoGoPaG (1963)—incited outrage on the part of authorities. He was briefly jailed in 1963 because his contribution to RoGoPaG, "La Ricotta," was deemed blasphemous. Concurrent with his filmmaking, Pasolini continued his literary and artistic pursuits, writing plays, doing translations, and producing social, literary, and cinematic criticism. His regular articles in the Italian newspaper Corriere della sera and in the French Le monde made him one of the most influential intellectuals in Europe. In the mid-1960s, Pasolini described himself as a "mythic realist" and his cinematicprocessa"cinemaofpoetry":thatis, hecalled for filmmaking that literally wrote with images of reality (in lieu of a more naturalistic "unfolding" of reality before a camera lens).

Pasolini made his meditation on Christ figures even more explicit in The Gospel according to St. Matthew (1964). He began using a 300-mm lens, further flattening the visual plane, in an effort to reproduce Renaissance perspective as it was developed in painting. Pasolini's Matthew is a political and religious radical, more Marxist than Christian ideologically, and yet the film was praised by Catholic groups as a brilliantly humanizing depiction of the apostle. Hawks and Sparrows (1966; starring Totò, Italy's equivalent of Charlie Chaplin) also allegorizes the intersection between Marxism and Christianity, but with a much harder satirical edge.

By 1967 Pasolini had turned to a much more abstract and conceptual filmmaking. This phase comprises two adaptations from Greek mythology: Oedipus Rex (1967) and Medea (1969), starring the opera singer Maria Callas (1925–1977) in the title role. With Teorema (1968; Theorem), and Pigpen (1969), Pasolini pursued a broader inquiry into pre-industrial mythology, militating against its loss in an increasingly commodified Western culture.

In his three subsequent films, Pasolini attempted to reach a wider, less strictly intellectual audience. Known as the Trilogy of Life, they are adaptations of popular canonical works of literature: The Decameron (1971), The Canterbury Tales (1972), and Arabian Nights (1974). But in place of a more conventional retelling, this trilogy is very focused on the eroticized body—the mud, the messiness of life. Pasolini eventually renounced all three films, having found his experiment to reach "the people" a failure, but at the same time said that he considered this trilogy the most ideological of all his films for its expression of the "precommercial" human body, a body free of the repressive forces of late capitalism.

His final film, Salò, or The 120 Days of Sodom (1976), constitutes a violent rejection of the Trilogy of Life: the film is a nightmarish story set in the northern Italian state of Salò in 1944, in which beautiful young adolescents are taken to a palace by Nazis and forced to undergo various humiliations, culminating in their execution. These shocking scenes are intertwined with stories by authors ranging from Dante to the Marquis de Sade. Because Pasolini was murdered just after finishing Salò, the world never had a chance to find out what—if anything—could follow such an inferno.

See alsoCinema; Italy.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Baranski, Zygmunt G., ed. Pasolini Old and New: Surveys and Studies. Dublin, 1999.

Pasolini, Pier Paolo. A Violent Life. Translated by William Weaver. Manchester, 1996. Paperback edition of Pasolini's second novel, originally published in 1958.

Rohdie, Sam. The Passion of Pier Paolo Pasolini. Bloomington, Ind., 1995.

Schwartz, Barth David. Pasolini Requiem. New York, 1992. Detailed biography.

Steimatsky, Noa. "Pasolini on Terra Sancta: Towards a Theology of Film." Yale Journal of Criticism 11, no. 1 (spring 1998): 239–258.

Anne M. Kern