Pier Paolo Pasolini
Pier Paolo Pasolini is among the most controversial and provocative filmmakers ever to impact the international cinema community. Italian director, screenwriter, essayist, poet, critic and novelist, Pasolini often focused his work on the realities of the pre-industrial age, using shocking juxtapositions of imagery to expose the vapidity of modern values, oftentimes with disturbing results. Following in the footsteps of his neo-realist Italian contemporaries, his films offer viewers a certain raw beauty that is rarely seen today. Until his bizarre death in 1975, Pasolini had directed films ranging from the simple to the complex, the sadistic to the sublime, never flinching from his overwhelming desire to bring the gritty desperation of life to the screen. Pasolini achieved fame and notoriety long before he entered the film industry. A published poet at 19, he had already written numerous novels and essays before his first screenplay in 1954. Born in Bologna in 1922, his father was a non-commissioned army officer and moved frequently from one garrison to another. Having little in common with his father, Pasolini developed a strong bond with his mother, and with her encouragement, began writing poetry at age seven. After graduating from high school at 17, he returned to Bologna to attend the University and began writing for a small magazine named Stroligut. His writing continued to develop, and in 1942, he produced his first volume of poetry, Poesia a Casarsa. He also created the literary magazine, Academiuta di Lega Furlan, produced mainly in the native language of Friuli, offering a criticism of fascist power. A year later, he was drafted.

After Italy’s surrender, his regiment was captured by the Germans. Pasolini soon escaped and fled to the small town of Casarsa, where he would remain for several years. During this time, several events occurred in his life that would change his views forever. Finishing with a degree at the University in 1945, Pasolini settled in Friuli and found a job as a teacher in the secondary school of Vavasone, near Udine. It was here that he fostered an interest in politics, eventually developing an interest in the Italian Communist Party (PCI) in 1947. His writing continued, and in 1949, he published a collection of writings and drawings against the constituted democristian (an old Italian political party) entitled Manifesti Murali.

However, after being arrested and charged with “moral indignity” for his alleged affair with two boys, he was expelled from the PCI. Regardless, he remained under the sway of Marxist doctrine, finding particular inspiration in the writings of Antonio Gramsci and his belief in the revolutionary power of the Italian peasantry. Yet, soon after his expulsion, he and his mother fled to Rome where Pasolini began a new life. Here he had his first brush with the film industry. Unable to find decent work, he became a proof reader at Cinecitta and sent his books to the local bookstalls, eventually settling into a job as a teacher, earning slave wages, while living in the city’s slums.

A homosexual, he fell in with the local world of prostitutes, hustlers, pimps and thieves. Pasolini himself was often arrested in their company (he once attempted to rob a filling station and later helped a wanted criminal flee police), and in 1955, these experiences converged in his first novel, the scandalous Ragazzi di Vita. The book’s publication prompted the Italian courts to prosecute Pasolini on obscenity charges, the first of many such run-ins with the authorities. Regardless, the Roman criminal culture remained at the forefront of his later work, and his second book, 1959’s Una Vita Violenta, detailed the violent life of a child raised in the slums.

During this time, Pasolini was finally earning notice as a poet, and his 1957 collection, Le Ceneri di Gramsci, earned the Viareggio prize. He also served as editor for the avant-garde magazine Officina, which was later forced to cease publication following a Pasolini poem attacking Pope Pious XII on his deathbed. Pasolini’s first real involvement in the cinema came with his 1954 screenplay, La Donna del Fiume for Mario Soldati. Over the next several years, he would collaborate on scenarios for projects by Federico Fellini (Nights of Cabiria), Mauro Bolognini, and Luis Trenker, but in light of his other, more scandalous literary work, his film material received little notoriety.

By the 1960’s, the cinema had become Pasolini’s central focus. After scrapping the completed screenplay for a project entitled, La Commare Seca, which was later passed on to Bernardo Bertolucci, he wrote the script for Accattone (1961), a re-working of his second novel, which he directed in the slums of Rome with a largely non-professional cast. As with his literary debut, his film debut became the subject of controversy as well, with moralists holding up this picture as proof of the need for stricter censorship guidelines. Abroad, Accatone garnered honors at the Montreal and Karlovy Vary film festivals, and with his sophomore effort, Mamma Roma (1962), he won both the International Critics’ Prize at the Venice Film Festival and Italy’s Silver Ribbon award.

Pasolini next joined forces with Roberto Rossellini, Jean-Luc Godard, and Ugo Gregoretti for the 1962 anthology, RoGoPaG. His segment, La Ricotta, starred Orson Welles as a filmmaker directing a movie on the life of Christ. While intended as an attack against the vulgarization of spirituality, the piece was prosecuted for “publicly maligning the religion of the state” and banned, with Pasolini receiving a four month suspended prison sentence. He next completed 1962’s La Rabbia, a compilation of newsreel footage compiled at the behest of Opus films’ Gastone Ferrante. Comizi d’amore, a series of interviews investigating sexual mores in Italian society followed in 1963.

Though an avowed Atheist, Pasolini next began work on Il Vangelo secondo Matteo (The Gospel According to St Matthew), another retelling of the story of Christ shot in the arid foothills of southern Italy. As the international film community braced for controversy, the film’s premiere revealed perhaps the director’s most shocking artistic statement to date, a solemn, yet sincere illustration of the gospel which many touted as among the greatest biblical adaptations ever created. The worldwide critical response was highly favorable, and in addition to a pair of awards at the Venice Film Festival, it also won the Grand Prize from the International Catholic Film Office.

The 1966 comic fable Uccellacci e Uccellini followed, featuring the comic actor Toto. A pair of comedic shorts came later, Le Streghe and Capriccio all’Italiana, both again starring Toto. Originally intended for a feature length picture, they were both re-cut following his star's sudden death. Edipe Re, a deeply personal adaptation of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, premiered in 1967, and after filming La Sequenza del Fiore di Carta, an episode in the anthology Amore e Rabbia, he began work on 1968’s Teorama, the most talked about of all his films. Originally intended as a verse tragedy for the theatre, the sexually provocative tale of a mysterious stranger (Terence Stamp) whose influence leaves a bourgeois family forever altered was originally honored by the Catholic Film Office, but their award was rescinded after the picture was denounced by the Vatican. Secular authorities also charged the film with obscenity and attempted to block its distribution, but upon Pasolini’s acquittal, its release was allowed. Although many critics hailed Teorema as a masterpiece, harsher judgements came from more unlikely sources. The Marxists, for example, denounced the film for showing “a certain compassion” towards bourgeois society.

Upon completing 1969’s Porcile, Pasolini mounted the next year’s Medea, a straightforward retelling of the age-old fable. This led to 1970’s Il Decamerone, a richly textured medieval tale which won the Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival. Two more medieval tales followed, 1972’s Racconti di Canterbury (The Canterbury Tales), and 1974’s Fiore delle mille e una notte (Arabian Nights), the winner of the Cannes Special Jury Prize. These works seemed to suggest that Pasolini was beginning to move away from the mordant outrage of much of his previous work.

However, his next film, 1975’s Salo, o le Centoventi Giornate di Sodoma, was, in many respects, the most disturbing of all of his films. An adaptation of the Marquis de Sade novel set in the tail end of WWII, it depicts the atrocities suffered by a group of kidnapped boys and girls at the hands of their fascist captors. Deemed one of the most disquieting pictures ever filmed, Salo was Pasolini’s final work. On November 2, 1975, he was brutally murdered. After bludgeoning the director to death, the killer repeatedly drove over the corpse in Pasolini’s own Alfa Romeo. While the murderer was later assumed to be a 17-year-old male prostitute, one of the many slum dwellers Pasolini brought to the screen with so much conviction, speculation into the mysterious circumstances of his demise continue to run rampant. Pasolini’s death thus serves as a tragic coda to his art.

Using largely non-professional actors, Pasolini attempted to combine social realism with his revolutionary new directorial style of weaving sex, violence and sadism into every film. Pasolini brought to the screen his unique style of filmmaking which, to this day, serves as a burning example of one man’s effort to change the face of cinema forever.

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