Pier Paolo Pasolini, Framed and Unframed

A Thinker for the Twenty-First Century

Luca Peretti, Karen T. Raizen

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781501328879
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film Direction & Production

This cross-disciplinary volume, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Framed and Unframed, explores and complicates our understanding of Pasolini today, probing notions of otherness in his works, his media image, and his legacy. Over 40 years after his death Pier Paolo Pasolini continues to challenge and interest us, both in academic circles and in popular discourses. Today his films stand as lampposts of Italian cinematic production, his cinematic theories resonate broadly through academic circles, and his philosophical, essayistic, and journalistic writings-albeit relatively sparsely translated into other languages-are still widely influential. Pasolini has also become an image, a mascot, a face on tote bags, a graffiti image on walls, an adjective (pasolinian). The collected essays push us to consider and reconsider Pasolini, a thinker for the twenty-first century.

1

Introduction

Luca Peretti and Karen T. Raizen

Forty years after his death, Pier Paolo Pasolini is an intellectual wellspring, a martyr, a symbol of the intangible firmaments of an ever-changing left. He is also a tote bag, a collection of marketable quotations, a firm jawline that fits as easily into a globalized Third World as it does into the mask of Captain America.¹ He has become an adjective, pasoliniano—a term that, with some wear, will be just as abused and misappropriated as Machiavellian—and his denunciative declaration “Io so” (I know) is riding a wave of popular aftershocks, revived through Roberto Saviano’s Gomorrah. Popular Pasolini has found its way into a perplexing variety of contexts and discourses. Matteo Salvini, for example, Italy’s right-wing leader who maneuvered his way to the front of the ranks in 2018, used Pasolini’s words on anti-fascism to attack the Left.² Pasolini has become “an auctoritas for every season and every occasion” as Wu Ming 1 writes.³ The scandal of his contradictions, emblematic of his life and career, carries on: Pasolini today is multiform, stratified.

These commemorations and reverberations of his multistable subjectivities⁴ are visible in Rome, Pasolini’s adopted home. In the summer of 2015, a few months before the fortieth anniversary of his death, Mamma Roma was screened in Trastevere—once a locus of counter-culture and popular identity, today gentrified and bustling with tourists. Famed Roman actor and director Carlo Verdone introduced the film, pointing to Pasolini’s innovativeness and bravery in depicting the abandoned Roman underclass; the screening attracted an audience of 3,000 and sparked a flood of news stories and hashtags. In May of the same year, street art by French artist Ernest Pignon-Ernest appeared on walls around the city. It was always the same image: a Pasolinian Pietà in which Pasolini holds a corpse of himself. Left in the public sphere, these doubled Pasolini depictions were admired, but also tagged with graffiti, torn, neglected. New plaques and memorials have cropped up throughout the city, from Via Donna Olimpia in the neighborhood of Monteverde, where Pasolini’s novel Ragazzi di Vita takes place, to a controversial monument that was unveiled in the popular area of Pigneto.⁵ The exhibition “Pasolini Roma” (2014), curated by Alain Bergala, Jordi Balló, and Gianni Borgna, highlighted the complexities of Pasolini’s relationship with Rome—but rather than being fixed in Rome itself, the exhibition traveled to different European capitals. And beyond Europe, Pasolini was the subject of a comprehensive film retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2013, as well as a wealth of recent conferences, exhibitions, and publications.

In considering Pasolini’s legacy, staying power, and adaptability, we are inevitably tempted to simplify, highlighting some particular aspect of his oeuvre or life. Yet any reference to his communism, his homosexuality, his European subjectivity, or any of his other facets must be qualified with a percussive but. He was communist but had a complicated relationship with the Italian Communist Party (PCI). His homosexuality was central to his work but he vigorously resisted being transformed into a gay icon. He had an ambivalent relationship with the avant-garde and was notoriously mercurial in his intellectual affiliations—and yet despite all his polemics against so many groups and people, it would be impossible to categorize him as iconoclast. Even assigning him the word thinker—which we use to define this volume—is fraught. Pasolini himself refused the epithet: as he said in an interview with Oswald Stack, “I am not a thinker and have never aspired to be. Sometimes, within the context of an ideology I have an intuition and thus have sometimes anticipated the professional ideologues. And stylistically I am a pasticheur: I use the most disparate stylistic material … there is always a stylistic contamination in my writings.”⁶

Thus the title of this volume must be understood with the perennial Pasolinian but. By the term thinker we do not intend to immortalize Pasolini as infallible, or to hold him up as a light in times of darkness. As Stuart Hall writes of Antonio Gramsci and Karl Marx, we cannot defer to Pasolini’s work as if it were the Old Testament.⁷ The term thinker in this volume is more interrogative than demonstrative, asking how—and truly if—Pasolini’s work and persona have value over forty years after his death, and what kind of value, and why. The threads of his thought, which have become so ingrained in both academic and popular discourses today, demand evaluation and critical reevaluation.

Recent volumes on Pasolini speak to this demand. Whereas earlier scholarship laid the foundation of Pasolini studies (if, again, we dare to assign the canonizing term studies to Pasolini scholarship) by focusing on finding continuity in his oeuvre and tracing the lineage of his thought through the different stages of his life, the latest contributions highlight his heterodoxy and find focal points from which to both explore and challenge his legacy. Notable in this regard is the 2012 volume The Scandal of Self-Contradiction: Pasolini’s Multistable Subjectivities, Traditions, Geographies, edited by Luca Di Blasi, Manuele Gragnolati, and Christoph F.E. Holzhey. The Scandal of Self-Contradiction hinges on precisely the contradictory elements of Pasolini’s life and works, probing the ways in which his subjectivity—or rather the plural, as Di Blasi, Gragnolati, and Holzhey use in the title, subjectivities—figured and continue to figure into discourses of hegemony, geography, and cultural traditions. Even more recently, Ryan Calabretta-Sajder’s edited volume Pasolini’s Lasting Impressions: Death, Eros, and Literary Enterprise in the Opus of Pier Paolo Pasolini investigates four categories within Pasolini’s output—poetry, theater, film, and culture—focusing on interdisciplinary questions and the diffusion of Pasolini’s works in Anglo-American circles. Recent monographs also continue to broaden our understanding and use of Pasolini, from Giovanna Trento’s Pasolini e l’Africa, l’Africa di Pasolini. Panmeridionalismo e rappresentazioni dell’Africa postcoloniale (2010), to Stefania Benini’s Pasolini: The Sacred Flesh (2015), to Ara H. Merjian’s Against the Avant-Garde: Pier Paolo Pasolini, Contemporary Art and Neocapitalism, 1960–1975 (2019).⁸

In 1964, during a discussion at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia, Pasolini declared, “the sign under which I work is always contamination.” This term, contamination, channels a sense of heterodoxy that differs from, say, the term contradiction, or confusion. As David Forgacs discusses in the first essay of this volume, contamination implies pollution, a mixing of disparate elements that ultimately disrupts and morphs pure substances. In the realm (or realms) of Pasolinian substance, the contamination is a stylistic one, pollution of media and language, text, communication. The goal is not chaos, but rather redirection, reformulation, the construction of new, different modes and gestures that are born from impurity. Perhaps the most famous place of Pasolinian contamination is in his Roman films Accattone and Mamma Roma, where images of the Roman borgate are accompanied by classical music, Bach and Vivaldi: the visual and verbal gergo of the down-and-out mixed with elevated tones from the canon of European art music. This overlay, Pasolini claimed, was for him a stylistic choice that derived from the literary techniques of Proust or Joyce. And contamination is truly ubiquitous in Pasolini’s work, from his early films to the checkered notes of Petrolio: language, in the many ways Pasolini manipulates it—literary, musical, cultural, political, philosophical, journalistic, and so on—hinges on pollution.

Contamination is, therefore, also the sign under which this volume operates. The essays also delve into the complexities of Pasolinian contradiction and confusion—but the element that unifies them is an attention to Pasolini’s pollution and pollutants, ways in which his work contaminated itself and surrounding discourses (and, vice versa, was contaminated by itself and by surrounding discourses). It is through this notion of contamination that we find Pasolini, perhaps the thinker, a fruitful subject of study, and a lens through which to reflect on our own times. Contamination is, after all, a temporal practice, generating and reconfiguring languages and styles for an unknown future. As Joyce writes in Ulysses, “These heavy sands are language tide and wind have silted here”: language, like sediment, over time, constructs realities.⁹

The volume takes its frame from David Forgacs’ exploration of dirt and order in Pasolini. This essay accounts for different valences of Pasolinian contamination, from the literal appearances of garbage (in Ragazzi di vita) and shit (in Salò), to Pasolini’s own fascination with dirty or disreputable places, to the vast metaphoric possibilities of his contaminated texts.

Following this introductory essay is a section on Space/Otherness/Geography, which probes the inevitable dialectic that emerges from Pasolini’s positioning of himself and his culture(s) in relation to others. Pasolini’s visions of Africa and America figure prominently in this section, as does a problematic notion of a global South. Ara H. Merjian’s essay “‘Howls from the Left’: Pier Paolo Pasolini, Allen Ginsberg, and the Legacies of Beat America” traces the complex avenues of influence that brought Ginsberg to Pasolini, and Pasolini to Ginsberg, from poetic gestures to figurations of subjectivity. Luca Caminati’s essay on cinematic depictions of decolonization post-Pasolini broaches questions of otherness while examining contemporary resonances of Pasolini’s conception of the Third World. Karen T. Raizen’s piece follows with a reading of the musical language of Appunti per un’Orestiade africana: jazz emerges as a problematic medium, positioned between Pasolini’s visions of Africa and America. Nicola Perugini and Francesco Zucconi’s essay “La Rabbia: Pasolini’s Color Ecstasy”...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Framing Pasolini
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Dirt and Order in Pasolini
• Space/Otherness/Geography
• 3 “Howls from the Left”: Pier Paolo Pasolini, Allen Ginsberg, and the Legacies of Beat America
• 4 Filming Decolonization: Pasolini’s Geopolitical Afterlife
• 5 Voicing the Popular in Appunti per un’ Orestiade africana
• 6 La Rabbia: Pasolini’s Color Ecstasy
• 7 Pier Paolo Pasolini’s La Nebbiosa: Teddy Boys and the Economic Miracle in Milan
• 8 The Loss of the Separated World: On Pasolini’s Communism
• Time/Prophecy/Production
• 9 Television, Neo-Capitalism, and Modernity: Pasolini on TV
• 10 From Accattone to “Profezia”: Pier Paolo Pasolini and Productive Failure
• 11 Pasolini for the Anthropocene
• 12 Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Political Animism
• Unframing Pasolini
• 13a Pasolini embodied
• 13b Pasolini undead
• 13c Pasolini reloaded
• Bibliography
• List of Contributors
• Index
• Copyright