Profile of Pier Paolo Pasolini on Famous Like Me

Pier Paolo Pasolini (March 5, 1922 – November 2, 1975) was an Italian poet, film director, and writer, who often made films about the social outcast and rebels. He is known for casting actors with little or no acting experience.

Biography

Pasolini was born in Bologna, traditionally the most leftist of Italian cities. He was the son of a soldier who became famous for saving Mussolini's life. Pasolini began writing poems at the age of seven. His works were first published when he was 19.

Pasolini had belonged to the communist clubs of his town. In his youth, he wrote several poems in Friulian, a language that he learnt from his mother, who was from Friuli. He had also created an association to foster the use of Friulian in literature.

He was drafted in World War II, and after subsequent imprisonment by the Germans, managed to escape. After the war, he joined the Communist party, but was expelled two years later on the grounds of his homosexuality, which he publicly declared on many occasions. At the time, a public declaration of being gay could cause scandal across the political spectrum. All the same, his world view remained essentially communist throughout his life.

Work

His first novel, Ragazzi di Vita (1955), dealt with male prostitutes, pimps and thieves, resulting in obscenity charges against him, the first of many instances where his art caused him legal problems.

Accattone! (1961), his first movie, also about the Roman underworld, likewise brought him into conflict with conservatives, who demanded stricter censorship. Strangely, supported by the Catholic Church, he directed the black-and-white The Gospel According To St. Matthew (1964), widely hailed the best cinematic adaptation of the life of Jesus, who was portrayed by Enrique Irazoqui. While making the film, Pasolini vowed to direct it from the "believer's point of view," but later, upon viewing the completed work, realized that he had expressed his own beliefs instead.

In Theorem (1968), starring Terence Stamp as a mysterious stranger, he depicted the sexual coming-apart of a bourgeois family (later to be repeated by Francois Ozon in Sitcom).

Later movies centered on sex-laden folklore, such as Il fiore delle mille una notte (Arabian Nights, 1974), Boccaccio's Decamerone (1970) and Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (1972), own to the Trilogy of life. His final work, the only one from the expected Trilogy of death, Salò (1975), went far beyond what most movie-goers could stomach at the time, because of its scenes of intensely sado-masochistic graphic violence. Based on the novel by the Marquis de Sade, it continues to be his most controversial film.

In his 1966 film, Uccellacci e Uccellini, a sort of picaresque - and at the same time mystic - fable, he wanted the great Italian comedian Totò, to work with one of his preferred "naif" actors, Ninetto Davoli. It was a unique opportunity for Totò to demonstrate that he was a great dramatic actor.

Significance

Pasolini, as a director, created a sort of second neorealism, which deeply and constantly touched picaresque tones, showing a sad reality - hidden, but real, concrete - which many social and political lobbies had no interest in seeing brought to light. Mamma Roma, with an extraordinary Anna Magnani, the story of a prostitute and her son, is an astonishing punch in the stomach for the common morality of those times. The doubt that Pasolini often inserted in his works, that such realities are less distant from us than we imagine, is one of his major contributions to a change in the Italian psyche, and an unrepeated example of poetry applied to cruel realities.

The director also promoted the concept of "natural sacredness" in his works, the concept that the world is holy in and of itself, and does not need any spiritual essence or supernatural blessing to attain this state. Indeed, Pasolini was an avowed atheist. The contrast between public opinion and what Pasolini was able to show, focused on sexual moralism, was perhaps what made him encounter general disapproval and effectively he was perhaps the man who most suffered cultural discrimination for his homosexuality. Pasolini's poetry, lesser known outside of Italy, often deals with his highly revered mother and his same-sex love interests, but this is not the main and only theme. As a sensible and extremely intelligent man, he depicted certain corners of the contemporary reality as very few other poets were able to do.

In politics too, or better, in the social debate, Pasolini was able to create scandal and debate with some assertions that were as much unheard as, at the same time, true: during the disorders of 1969, when university students were acting in a guerrilla-like fashion against the police in the streets of Rome, all the leftist forces declared their complete support for the students, and described the disorders as a civil fight of proletarians against the system. Pasolini, instead, alone among the communists, declared that he was with the police or, to be precise, with the policemen, the real proletarians who were sent to fight against boys of their same age for a poor salary and reasons which they could not understand because they had not had the fortune of being able to study.

Death

Pasolini was murdered brutally by being run over several times with his own car at the beach of Ostia near Rome. Pino Pelosi, a hustler, was arrested and confessed to murdering Pasolini. On May 7th, 2005, he retracted his confession, claiming that unidentified men had killed Pasolini. He gave threats of violence against his family as the reason for his erstwhile confession. The investigation into Pasolinis death has been re-opened following Pino's recantation.

His murder is still not completely explained: some contradictions in the declarations of Pelosi, a strange intervention by Italian secret services during the investigations and some lack of coherence of related documents during the different parts of the judicial procedures brought some of Pasolini's friends (actress Laura Betti, a close friend, particularly) to suspect that his murder had been commissioned. It is true, indeed, that Pasolini, in the months just before his death, had seen many politicians, telling them that he was aware of certain crucial secrets. Following Pelosi's statement of May 2005, the Rome police has reopened the murder case.

Quotes

"If you know that I am an unbeliever, then you know me better than I do myself. I may be an unbeliever, but I am an unbeliever who has a nostalgia for a belief." (1966)

"The mark which has dominated all my work is this longing for life, this sense of exclusion, which doesn't lessen but augments this love of life." [Interview in documentary, late 1960s]

Filmography

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