Pier Paolo Pasolini: An Overview
by
Jonathan Rosenbaum


The critical neglect in the U.S. suffered by an Italian filmmaker as important as Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922-75) undoubtedly stems in part from the fact that he was in equal measure a Christian, a Marxist, and a homosexual - not to mention an intellectual who was fully aware of the contradictions inherent in being all of these things at once. It isn't surprising that the serious attempts in his work to reconcile these three identities often created a scandal - compounded by the fact that roughly half his features were adaptations of classics in world literature. But what is often overlooked is the degree to which this poet, novelist, theorist, and essay writer remained in the forefront of modern European cinema throughout his career. The mentor of Bernardo Bertolucci and the favorite living director of Sergei Paradjanov, he remains a vital and challenging figure whose collected works - including, paradoxically, his movies set in the remote past - constitute a dramatic and persuasive vision of the contemporary world.

Beginning in film as a scriptwriter (on such films as Fellini's Nights of Cabrina), Pasolini started out in Accatone (The Scrounger, 1961) as a radical stepson of neo-realism by adapting one of his own novels, A Violent Life - a passionate account of a pimp living in Pigneto, a squalid suburb of Rome where Pasolini had himself lived during the forties. Inspired by the frescoes of Masaccio and Giott, Pasolini gives notice at the outset that his intention isn't merely to reproduce life as he sees it, but to render it with a sense of poetry and gravity that can only be described as religious.

Indeed, he first attained worldwide notoriety with his stark and unconventional The Gospel According to St. Matthew (1964) which retells the story of Christ to the strains of Bach, Mozart, Prokofiev, Webern, African music, American blues and spirituals, and Russian revolutionary songs. His next feature, Hawks and Sparrows (1964) - a comic free-form essay in the form of a picaresque journey taken by an old friar (Toto) and a young novice (Pasolini regular Ninetto Davoli) accompanied by a talking raven - provides both an excellent introduction to Pasolini's work and one of his finest inventions. A delightful, provocative adventure that is set alternatively - and at times simultaneously - in the year 1200 and the present, it is the only film that comes to mind which starts off with singing credits, and it clearly gives the lie to any suspicions that Pasolini's underlying seriousness was uninflected by any sense of fun or wit.

Beginning in the ancient past and ending in the present, Pasolini's powerful Oedipus Rex (1967) may well be the strongest of all his classical adaptations, although his subsequent encounters with Greek tragedy both completed in 1970 - a Medea featuring the only film performance of Maria Callas (in a non-singing part), and Notes For An African Oresteia, a short feature with an original score by Gato Barbieri - should also be noted.

The controversial and pungent Teorema (Theorem, 1968) probably remains the most influential of all Pasolini's films. It grew out of notes for a verse tragedy that also yielded a novel written partially in verse, and it describes the arrival of a divine visitor (Terence Stamp) in a contemporary bourgeois household, his subsequent seduction of all four family members and the maid (Massimo Girotti, Silvano Mangano, Anne Wiazemsky, Andrès José Cruz Soublette, and Laura Betti), and the subsequent traumas and convulsions created by his n less mysterious departure.

Significantly, Teorema was Pasolini's last feature with a contemporary setting. Loathing everything that the modern world had become, he turned next in his acclaimed "Trilogy of Life" to a celebration of guiltless paganism in other eras, beginning with the erotic Decameron (1970), continuing with the scatological Canterbury Tales (1971), and ending with his very carnal and sensuous Arabian Nights (1974). He then concluded his career, before being brutally murdered, with his most extreme film, Salo (1975), an adaptation of The 120 Days of Sodom that transposes the Marquis de Sade's eighteenth-century novel to fascist Italy in 1944. As Pasolini described his intentions in a self-interview, "Aside from the metaphor of the sexual relationships (obligatory and ugly), which the tolerance of consumeristic power imposes on us nowadays, all the sex in Salo (and there is an enormous quantity of it) is also a metaphor for the relationship between power and those who are subjected to it."

From Foreign Affairs: The National Society of Film Critics' Guide to Foreign Films, Schulz Huffhines, K. (Ed.). San Francisco: Mercury House, 1991.




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