Pier Paolo Pasolini

Early life

Pasolini was born in Bologna, traditionally one of the most leftist politically of Italian cities. He was the son of Carlo Alberto Pasolini, a lieutenant in the Italian army, and Susanna Colussi, an elementary school teacher. His parents married in 1921, Pasolini was born in 1922 and named after his paternal uncle. His family moved to Conegliano in 1923 and, two years later, to Belluno, where another son, Guidalberto, was born.

In 1926, Pasolini's father was arrested for gambling debts. His mother moved with the children to her family's house in Casarsa della Delizia, in the Friuli region. That same year, his father Carlo Alberto, first detained and then identified Anteo Zamboni as the would-be assassin of Benito Mussolini following his assassination attempt. Carlo Alberto was persuaded of the virtues of fascism.

Pasolini began writing poems at the age of seven, inspired by the natural beauty of Casarsa. One of his early influences was the work of Arthur Rimbaud. In 1931, his father was transferred to Idria in the Julian March (now Idrija in Slovenia); in 1933 they moved again to Cremona in Lombardy, and later to Scandiano and Reggio Emilia. Pasolini found it difficult to adapt to all these dislocations, though he enlarged his poetry and literature readings (Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Shakespeare, Coleridge, Novalis) and left behind the religious fervour of his early years. In the Reggio Emilia high school, he met his first true friend, Luciano Serra. The two met again in Bologna, where Pasolini spent seven years completing high school. Here he cultivated new passions, including football. With other friends, including Ermes Parini, Franco Farolfi, Elio Meli, he formed a group dedicated to literary discussions.

In 1939 Pasolini graduated and entered the Literature College of the University of Bologna, discovering new themes such as philology and aesthetics of figurative arts. He also frequented the local cinema club. Pasolini always showed his friends a virile and strong exterior, totally hiding his interior turmoil. He took part in the Fascist government's culture and sports competitions. In his poems of this period, Pasolini started to include fragments in Friulan, a dialect he did not speak but learned after he had begun to write poetry in it. "I learnt it as a sort of mystic act of love, a kind of félibrisme, like the Provençal poets."

Early poetry

In 1942, Pasolini published at his own expense a collection of poems in Friulan, Versi a Casarsa, which he had written at the age of eighteen. The work was noted and appreciated by such intellectuals and critics as Gianfranco Contini, Alfonso Gatto and Antonio Russi. His pictures had also been well received. Pasolini was chief editor of a magazine called Il Setaccio ("The Sieve"), but he was fired after conflicts with the director, who was aligned with the Fascist regime. A trip to Germany helped him also to perceive the "provincial" status of Italian culture in that period. These experiences led Pasolini to revise his opinion about the cultural politics of Fascism and to switch gradually to a Communist position.

In 1942, the family took shelter in Casarsa, considered a more tranquil place to wait for the conclusion of the Second World War, a decision common among Italian military families. In the weeks before the 8 September armistice, Pasolini was drafted. He was captured and imprisoned by the German Wehrmacht, but escaped disguised as a peasant and found his way to Casarsa. Here he joined a group of other young enthusiasts of the Friulan dialect who wanted to give Casarsa Friulan a status equal to that of Udine, the official regional standard. From May 1944 they issued a magazine entitled Stroligùt di cà da l'aga. In the meantime, Casarsa suffered Allied bombardments and forced enlistments by the Italian Social Republic, as well as partisan activity.

Pasolini tried to remain apart from these events. Starting in October 1943, he, his mother and other colleagues taught students unable to reach the schools in Pordenone or Udine. This educational workshop was considered illegal and broke up in February 1944. He had his first experience of gay love for one of his students. His brother Guido, aged 19, joined the Party of Action and their Osoppo-Friuli Brigade, taking to the bush near Slovenia. On 12 February 1945 Guido was killed in an ambush planted by Italian Garibaldine partisans serving in the lines of Tito's Yugoslavian guerrillas. It was a harrowing tragedy for Pasolini and his mother.

Six days later Pasolini and others founded the Friulan Language Academy (Academiuta di lenga furlana). Meanwhile, on account of Guido's death, Pasolini's father Carlo Alberto returned to Italy from his detention period in November 1945. He settled in Casarsa. Also in November, Pasolini graduated from university after completing a final thesis about the work of Giovanni Pascoli (1855–1912), an Italian poet and classical scholar.

In 1946 Pasolini published a small poetry collection, I Diarii ("The Diaries"), with the Academiuta. In October he traveled to Rome. The following May he began the so-called Quaderni Rossi, handwritten in old school exercise books with red covers. He completed a drama in Italian, Il Cappellano. His poetry collection, I Pianti ("The cries"), was also published by the Academiuta.

Relationship with the Italian Communist Party

On 30 October 1945, Pasolini joined the pro-devolution association Patrie tal Friul, founded in Udine. The political status of the region became a matter of contention between different political factions. Pasolini wanted a Friuli based on its tradition, attached to its Christianity, but intent on civic and social progress, as opposed to those advocates of regional autonomy who wanted to preserve their privileges based on "immobilism". He also criticized the Communist Party for its opposition to devolution and their preference for Italian centralism. He founded the party Movimento Popolare Friulano, but ended up quitting it, persuaded that it had come to be controlled and used by the Christian-Democrat Party in order to counter the Yugoslavians, who in turn were attempting to annex large swaths of the Friuli region.

On 26 January 1947 Pasolini wrote a declaration that was published on the front page of the newspaper Libertà: "In our opinion, we think that currently only Communism is able to provide a new culture." It generated controversy partly due to the fact he was still not a member of the Italian Communist Party (PCI).

He was planning to extend the work of the Academiuta to the literature of other Romance languages and met the exiled Catalan poet, Carles Cardó. After joining the PCI, Pasolini took part in several demonstrations. In May 1949, Pasolini attended the Peace Congress in Paris. Observing the struggles of workers and peasants, and watching the clashes of protesters with Italian police, he began to conceive his first novel. During this period, while holding a position as a teacher in a secondary school, Pasolini stood out in the local Communist Party section as a skillful writer defying the notion that communism was contrary to Christian values, even though Pope Pius XII had excommunicated communist sympathizers from the Church.

The local Christian-Democrats took notice. In the summer of 1949, Pasolini was blackmailed by a priest to renounce politics or lose his teaching position. Similarly, after some posters were put in the loggia of San Giovanni, Giambattista Caron, a Christian-Democrat deputy, warned Nico Naldini that his cousin Pasolini "should abandon communist propaganda" to prevent "pernicious reactions".

A small scandal broke out during a local festival in Ramuscello in September 1949. Someone informed Cordovado, the local sergeant of the carabinieri, of sexual conduct (masturbation) by Pasolini with three youngsters aged sixteen and younger after dancing and drinking. Cordovado summoned the boys' parents, who hesitated, but did not file charges, despite Cordovado's urging. He nevertheless drew up a report, and the informer elaborated publicly on his accusations, sparking a public uproar. A judge in San Vito al Tagliamento charged Pasolini with "corruption of minors and obscene acts in public places". He and the 16-year-old were both indicted.

The next month, when questioned, he would not deny the facts, but talked of a "literary and erotic drive" and cited André Gide, the 1947 Nobel Prize for Literature laureate. Cordovado informed his superiors and the regional press stepped in. According to Pasolini, the Christian-Democrats instigated the entire affair to smear his name ("the Christian-Democrats pulled the strings"). He was fired from his job in Valvasone and he was expelled from the Communist Party by the party's Udine section, which he considered a betrayal. He addressed a critical letter to the head of the section, his friend Ferdinando Mautino and claimed he was being subject to a "tacticism" of the Communist Party. In the party, the expulsion was opposed by Teresa Degan, Pasolini's colleague in education. He also wrote her a letter admitting his regret for being "such a naive, even indecently so". His parents reacted angrily and the situation in the family became untenable.

In January 1950 Pasolini moved to Rome with his mother Susanna to start a new life. He was acquitted of both charges in 1950 and 1952. "I came to Rome from the Friulan countryside. Unemployed for many years; ignored by everybody; driven by the fear to be not as life needed to be". Instead of asking for help from other writers, Pasolini preferred to go his own way. He transferred his Friulan countryside inspiration to Rome's suburbs, the infamous borgate where poor proletarian immigrants lived in often horrendous sanitary and social conditions. After one year sheltered in a maternal uncle's flat next to Piazza Mattei, Pasolini and his 59-year-old mother moved to a run-down suburb called Rebibbia, next to a prison, for 3 years.

He found a job working in the Cinecittà film studios and sold his books in the 'bancarelle' ("sidewalk shops") of Rome. In 1951, with the help of the Abruzzese-language poet Vittorio Clemente, he found a job as a secondary school teacher in Ciampino, a suburb of the capital. He had a long commute involving two train changes and earned a meagre of 27,000 liras.

Success and charges

In 1954, Pasolini, who now worked for the literary section of Italian state radio, left his teaching job and moved to the Monteverde quarter. At this point, his cousin Graziella moved in. They also accommodated Pasolini's ailing, cirrhotic father Carlo Alberto who died in 1958. Pasolini published La meglio gioventù, his first important collection of dialect poems. His first novel, Ragazzi di vita (English: Hustlers), was published in 1955. The work had great success but was poorly received by the PCI establishment and, most importantly, by the Italian government. It initiated a lawsuit for "obscenity" against Pasolini and his editor, Garzanti. Although exonerated, Pasolini became a target of insinuations, especially in the tabloid press.

In 1955, together with Francesco Leonetti, Roberto Roversi and others, he edited and published a poetry magazine called Officina. The magazine closed in 1959 after 14 issues.

In 1957, together with Sergio Citti, Pasolini collaborated on Federico Fellini's film Le notti di Cabiria, writing dialogue for the Roman dialect parts. He also co-wrote the dialogue for Fellini's La dolce vita.

In 1960 he made his debut as an actor in Il gobbo and co-wrote Long Night in 1943. Along with Ragazzi di vita, he had his celebrated poem Le ceneri di Gramsci published, where Pasolini voiced tormented tensions between reason and heart, as well as the existing ideological dialectics within communism, a debate over artistic freedom, Socialist realism and commitment.

His first film as director and screenwriter was Accattone in 1961, again set in Rome's marginal quarters. It was a story of pimps, prostitutes and thieves that contrasted with Italy's postwar economic reforms. Although Pasolini tried to distance himself from neorealism, the film is considered to be a kind of second neorealism. Nick Barbaro, a critic writing in the Austin Chronicle, called it "may be the grimmest movie" he has ever seen. The movie aroused controversy and scandal. In 1963, the episode "La ricotta", included in the collective movie RoGoPaG, was censored and Pasolini was tried for "offense to the Italian state and religion".

During this period Pasolini frequently traveled abroad: in 1961, with Elsa Morante and Alberto Moravia to India (where he went again seven years later); in 1962 to Sudan and Kenya; in 1963, to Ghana, Nigeria, Guinea, Jordan and Israel (where he shot the documentary, Sopralluoghi in Palestina). In 1970 he traveled again to Africa to shoot the documentary, Appunti per un'Orestiade africana.

In 1966 he was a member of the jury at the 16th Berlin International Film Festival.

In 1967, in Venice, he met and interviewed the American poet Ezra Pound. They discussed the Italian movement neoavanguardia and Pasolini read some verses from the Italian version of Pound's Pisan Cantos.

The late 1960s and early 1970s were the era of the so-called "student movement". Pasolini, though acknowledging the students' ideological motivations, thought them "anthropologically middle-class" and therefore destined to fail in their attempts at revolutionary change. Regarding the Battle of Valle Giulia, which took place in Rome in March 1968, he said that he sympathized with the police, as they were "children of the poor", while the young militants were exponents of what he called "left-wing fascism". His film of that year, Teorema, was shown at the Venice Film Festival in a hot political climate. Pasolini had proclaimed that the Festival would be managed by the directors.

In 1970 Pasolini bought an old castle near Viterbo, several miles north of Rome, where he began to write his last novel, Il Petrolio, where he denounced obscure dealing in the highest levels of government and the corporate world (the ENI, CIA, the mafia, etc.). The novel-documentary was left incomplete at his death. In 1972 he started to collaborate with the extreme-left association Lotta Continua, producing a documentary, 12 dicembre, concerning the Piazza Fontana bombing. The following year he began a collaboration for Italy's most renowned newspaper, Il Corriere della Sera.

At the beginning of 1975 Garzanti published a collection of his critical essays, Scritti corsari ("Corsair Writings").

Murder

Pasolini was murdered by being run over several times with his own car, dying on 2 November 1975 on the beach at Ostia. Multiple bones had been broken and his testicles crushed by what appeared to be a metal bar. His body had been partially burned, the autopsy report revealed, by gasoline after the point of death. It has long been viewed as a mafia-style revenge killing, extremely unlikely for one person to have carried out. Pasolini was buried in Casarsa. Giuseppe (Pino) Pelosi (1958-2017), then 17 years old, was caught driving Pasolini's car and confessed to the murder. He was convicted in 1976, initially with "unknown others", but this was later removed from the verdict.

Twenty-nine years later, on 7 May 2005, Pelosi retracted his confession, which he said had been made under the threat of violence to his family. He claimed that three people "with a Southern accent" had committed the murder, insulting Pasolini as a "dirty communist".

Other evidence uncovered in 2005 pointed to Pasolini having been murdered by an extortionist. Testimony by Pasolini's friend Sergio Citti indicated that some of the rolls of film from Salò had been stolen, and that Pasolini had been going to meet with the thieves after a visit to Stockholm on 2 November 1975. Citti's investigation uncovered additional evidence, including a bloody wooden stick and an eyewitness who said he had seen a group of men pull Pasolini from the car. The Roman police reopened the case following Pelosi's retraction, but the judges responsible for the investigation found that the new elements were insufficient to justify a continued inquiry.

1968 protests

Pasolini generated heated public discussion with controversial analyses of public affairs. For instance, during the disorders of 1968, when the autonomist university students were carrying on a guerrilla-like uprising against the police in the streets of Rome and all the leftist forces declared their complete support for the students, describing the disorders as a civil fight of proletariat against the System, Pasolini, alone among the communists, declared that he was with the police; or, more precisely, with the policemen.

He considered them true proletariat, sent to fight for a poor salary and for reasons which they could not understand, against pampered boys of their same age, because they had not had the fortune of being able to study, referring to "poliziotti figli di proletari meridionali picchiati da figli di papà in vena di bravate" (lit. "policemen, sons of proletarian southerners, beaten up by arrogant daddy's boys"). He found that the policemen were but the outer layer of the real power, e.g. the judiciary and the judges. Pasolini was not alien to courts and trials. During all his life, Pasolini was frequently entangled in lawsuits filed against him, up to 33, variously charged with "public disgrace", "foul language", "obscenity", "pornography", "contempt of religion", "contempt of the state", etc., for which he was always eventually acquitted.

The 1968 revolt was seen by Pasolini as an internal, benign reform of the establishment in Italy, since the protesters were part of the petit bourgeoisie. Notwithstanding his position, he saw it as a way of goading protesters into re-thinking their revolt, and did not stop him from contributing to the autonomist Lotta continua movement.

The rising society of consumption

He was particularly concerned about the class of the subproletariat, which he portrayed in Accattone, and to which he felt both humanly and artistically drawn. Pasolini observed that the kind of purity which he perceived in the pre-industrial popular culture was rapidly vanishing, a process that he named la scomparsa delle lucciole (lit. "the disappearance of glow-worms"). The joie de vivre of the boys was being rapidly replaced with more bourgeois ambitions such as a house and a family. He described the coprophagia scenes in Salò as a comment on the processed food industry.

Pasolini's stance finds its roots in the belief that a Copernican change was taking place in the Italian society and the world. Linked to that very idea, Pasolini was also an ardent critic of consumismo, i.e. consumerism, which he felt had rapidly destroyed Italian society since the mid 1960s to the early 1970s. As he saw it, the society of consumerism ("neocapitalism") and the new fascism had thus expanded an alienation / homogenization and centralization that the former clerical-fascism had not managed to achieve, so bringing about an anthropological change.

That change is related to the loss of humanism and the expansion of productivity as central to the human condition, which he despised. He found that 'new culture' was degrading and vulgar. In one interview, he said: "I hate with particular vehemency the current power, the power of 1975, which is a power that manipulates bodies in a horrible way; a manipulation that has nothing to envy to that performed by Himmler or Hitler."

Strong criticism of Christian Democracy

The June 1975 elections saw the rise of leftist options, and dwelling on his blunt, ever more political approach and prophetic style during this period, he declared in the Corriere della Sera the time was reached to put the most prominent Christian-Democrat figures to trial in a court, where a staging would be needed showing them walking in handcuffs and conducted by the carabinieri.

Pasolini also declared the Christian-Democatric party leadership was "riddled with Mafia influence".

Television linked to cultural alienation

He was angered by economic globalization and cultural domination of the North of Italy (around Milan) over other regions, especially the South. He felt this was accomplished through the power of TV.

He lashed out at publicity and television. A debate TV program recorded in 1971, where he denounced censorship, was not actually aired until the day following his murder in November 1975. In a reform blueprint drawn up by himself in September and October 1975 (he got closer to the Communist Party, "an island of salvation"), among the desirable measures to be implemented, he cited the abolition of compulsory secondary school, and television.

Others

He opposed the gradual disappearance of Italian languages and dialects by writing some of his poetry in Friulan, the regional language of his childhood. His opposition to the liberalization of abortion law made him unpopular on the left.

After 1968 he left communism, claiming instead the Radical Party (Partito Radicale): left-libertarian, liberal, anti-clerical and led by his friend Marco Pannella. In 1975, leaving a letter to Congress with radical party on written :" Dear Pannella, dear friends, dear radical Spadaccia [...] you don't need to do anything else (I believe) that continue to be yourself: which means continuously be unrecognizable. Forget immediately i grandi successi: and continue straight ahead, obstinate, eternally opposed, to demand, to want, to identify yourself with the other; to shock; to blaspheme."

Sexuality

The LGBT encyclopedia states the following regarding Pasolini's homosexuality:

While openly gay from the very start of his career (thanks to a gay sex scandal that sent him packing from his provincial hometown to live and work in Rome), Pasolini rarely dealt with homosexuality in his movies.

In 1963 Pasolini met "the great love of his life," fifteen-year-old Ninetto Davoli, whom he later cast in his 1966 film Uccellacci e uccellini (literally Bad Birds and Little Birds but translated in English as The Hawks and the Sparrows), Pasolini became the youth's mentor and friend. "Even though their sexual relations lasted only a few years, Ninetto continued to live with Pasolini and was his constant companion, as well as appearing in six more of his films."

Works

Pasolini's first novel, Ragazzi di vita (1955), dealt with the Roman lumpenproletariat. The book caused obscenity charges to be filed against Pasolini, the first of many instances in which his art provoked legal problems. The movie Accattone (1961), also about the Roman underworld, also provoked controversy, and conservatives demanded stricter censorship by the government.

He wrote and directed the black-and-white The Gospel According to Matthew (1964). It is based on scripture, but adapted by Pasolini, and he is credited as writer. Jesus, a barefoot peasant, is played by Enrique Irazoqui. While filming it, Pasolini vowed to direct it from the "believer's point of view", but later said that upon viewing the completed work, he realized he had expressed his own beliefs.

In his 1966 film Uccellacci e uccellini (literally Bad Birds and Little Birds but translated in English as The Hawks and the Sparrows), a picaresque—and at the same time mystic—fable, Pasolini hired the great Italian comedian Totò to work with Ninetto Davoli, the director's lover at the time and one of his preferred "naif" actors. It was a unique opportunity for Totò to demonstrate that he was a great dramatic actor as well.

In Teorema (Theorem, 1968), starring Terence Stamp as a mysterious stranger, Pasolini depicted the sexual coming-apart of a bourgeois family. (Variations of this theme were filmed by François Ozon in Sitcom and Takashi Miike in Visitor Q).

Later movies centered on sex-laden folklore, such as Boccaccio's Decameron (1971), Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales (1972), and Il fiore delle mille e una notte (literally The Flower of 1001 Nights, released in English as Arabian Nights, 1974). These films are usually grouped as the Trilogy of Life. While basing them on classics, Pasolini wrote the screenplays and took sole credit as writer. This trilogy, prompted largely by Pasolini's attempt to show the secular sacredness of the body against man-made social controls and especially against the venal hypocrisy of religious state (indeed, the religious characters in The Canterbury Tales are shown as pious but amorally grasping fools) were an effort at representing a state of natural sexual innocence essential to the true nature of free humanity. Alternately playfully bawdy and poetically sensuous, wildly populous, subtly symbolic and visually exquisite, the films were wildly popular in Italy and remain perhaps his most enduringly popular works. Yet despite the fact that the trilogy as a whole is considered by many as a masterpiece, Pasolini later reviled his own creation on account of the many soft-core imitations of these three films in Italy that happened afterwards on account of the very same popularity he wound up deeply uncomfortable with. He believed that a bastardisation of his vision had taken place that amounted to a commoditisation of the body he had tried to deny in his trilogy in the first place. The disconsolation this provided is seen as one of the primary reasons for his final film, Salo, in which humans are not only seen as commodities under authoritarian control but are viewed merely as ciphers for its whims, without the free vitality of the figures in the Trilogy of Life.

His final work, Salò (Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom, 1975), exceeded what most viewers could accept at the time in its explicit scenes of intensely sadistic violence. Based on the novel 120 Days of Sodom by Marquis de Sade, it is considered Pasolini's most controversial film. In May 2006, Time Out's Film Guide named it the "Most Controversial Film" of all time. Salò was intended as the first film of his Trilogy of Death, followed by an aborted biopic film about Gilles de Rais.

Legacy

As a director, Pasolini created a picaresque neorealism, showing a sad reality. Many people did not want to see such portrayals in artistic work for public distribution. Mamma Roma (1962), featuring Anna Magnani and telling the story of a prostitute and her son, was an affront to the public ideals of morality of those times. His works, with their unequaled poetry applied to cruel realities, showing that such realities were less distant from most daily lives, and contributed to changes in the Italian psyche.

Pasolini's work often engendered disapproval perhaps primarily because of his frequent focus on sexual behavior, and the contrast between what he presented and what was publicly sanctioned. While Pasolini's poetry often dealt with his gay love interests, this was not the only, or even main, theme. His interest in and use of Italian dialects should also be noted. Much of the poetry was about his highly revered mother. He depicted certain corners of the contemporary reality as few other poets could do. His poetry, which took some time before it was translated, was not as well known outside Italy as were his films. A collection in English was published in 1996.

Pasolini also developed a philosophy of language mainly related to his studies on cinema. This theoretical and critical activity was another hotly debated topic. His collected articles and responses are still available today.

These studies can be considered as the foundation of his artistic point of view: he believed that the language—such as English, Italian, dialect or other—is a rigid system in which human thought is trapped. He also thought that the cinema is the "written" language of reality which, like any other written language, enables man to see things from the point of view of truth.

His films won awards at the Berlin International Film Festival, Cannes Film Festival, Venice Film Festival, Italian National Syndicate for Film Journalists, Jussi Awards, Kinema Junpo Awards, International Catholic Film Office and New York Film Critics Circle. The Gospel According to St. Matthew was nominated for the United Nations Award of the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) in 1968.

In 2014 Abel Ferrara directed a biopic about Pasolini, with Willem Dafoe in the lead role. It was selected to compete for the Golden Lion at the 71st Venice International Film Festival.

In 2015 Malga Kubiak directed a drama movie based on the story of Pier Paolo Pasolini's life and death titled PPPasolini. The movie was screened at 7th edition of LGBT Film Festival In Warsaw, Poland and received a People's Choice Award at the festival.

Feature films

All titles listed below were written and directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini unless stated otherwise. Although obviously Oedipus Rex and Medea are loosely based on plays by Sophocles and Euripides respectively, Pasolini took significant liberties with original texts and is solely credited for the writing of these films. The latter is also true for the gospel according to St. Matthew.

Documentaries

Episodes in omnibus films

Narrative

Poetry

Essays

Theatre