Origins

In many ways, Pasolini is alive and well in Italy today. He is cited, celebrated, and often misunderstood. Like other elements of the 1970s, whose cultural and political turmoil continues to cast a long shadow, Pasolini is very much part of contemporary discussions. If you walk into a large bookstore in Italy, you’ll find not only most of his books, often in newly crafted editions, but also the first complete collection of his letters (published in November 2021 by his long time publisher Garzanti), volumes on Accattone (his first film in 1961), on his traveling to the ‘Orient’, and even a 2022 daily planner inspired by Pasolini.

Murals representing Pasolini often appear on the walls of Rome, but he wasn’t native to the city. He was born in Bologna, the son of Susanna, an elementary school teacher who was always adored in his works (‘I had a great love for my mother … an excessive, almost monstrous love’). His relationship with his father — Carlo Alberto, a former soldier both in the First World War and during the Fascist regime — was more complex and uneven. (He dealt with this question, and several others, in a series of interviews published under the title Pasolini on Pasolini: ‘I always thought I hated my father, but in fact I didn’t hate him; I was in conflict with him, in a state of permanent, even violent, tension with him.’)

Pasolini grew up mostly in the north-eastern region of Friuli, which bordered Yugoslavia; which means he lived right at the West’s borders during the early days of the Cold War. This complicated reality contributed to the loss of his young brother, whom he called il migliore di tutti noi — ‘the best of all of us’. Guidalberto Pasolini was a member of the Brigate Osoppo (a Catholic-inspired Partisan group, with members also belonging to different political traditions) and was killed in February 1945 by Communist partisans closely linked to the Yugoslav militias during the infamous Porzûs massacre, one of the few intra-partisan killings of the Second World War.

This was an episode that left a deep mark on Pasolini’s life, but that never pushed him away from Marxism or the Communist Party of Italy (PCI). In fact, only three years after his brother was killed, he became the leader of a local cell of the party, just as he was starting to be known as a poet. He remained close to the PCI throughout his life, famously declaring that the party was ‘una specie di paese nel paese, di nazione pulita nella nazione sporca,’ ‘a sort of country within the country, a clean nation in a dirty nation.’ But Pasolini was never a party line man, he was what we might call a heterodox communist, prone to many heresies against official PCI positions. He was certainly not the only one in the cultural world: several writers and directors, including Gillo Pontecorvo, director of The Battle of Algiers, were fellow travellers of the PCI despite regular criticisms of the party.

One of Pasolini’s first run-ins with the PCI came when he was charged with sexual misconduct with three younger men, which saw him expelled from the party, and pushed him to move to Rome with his mother. There he would become part of the city’s cultural circles. He lived in numerous neighbourhoods, founding literary magazines and writing novels like the recently retranslated Street Kids. He began working as screenwriter in the 1950s, but it wasn’t until the 1960s that his most influential work began in film-making.

He would live in Rome until his tragic death, which remains shrouded in mystery, in November 1975. In the Anglophone world, Pasolini is best known for his films, which made him one of the most important representatives of European art-house cinema. Their diversity remains remarkable — some set in the Roman suburbs, others adaptations of the Christian Gospel, two based on Greek mythology and three on important literary sources from the Middle Ages (the so-called ‘Trilogy of Life’), and finally his scandalous last film, Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975), in which he used Sade (and Dante) to explore the final phase of Fascism. This, undoubtedly, will form part of Italy’s national conversation on this centenary year.

The Many Pasolinis

Jon Halliday, who conducted the Pasolini on Pasolini interviews under a pseudonym, was always adamant that he was more than a film director. For Halliday, Pasolini had a ‘restless and eclectic’ career; views echoed by Alberto Moravia, one of Pasolini’s best friends and another important intellectual in post-war Italy, who described him broadly as ‘omosessuale — scrittore — comunista — regista — giornalista politico — poeta — uomo di teatro e non so qnnate altre cose ancora’ or ‘homosexual — writer — communist — director — political journalist — poet — man of theatre and I am not sure how many other things’.

There is a conventional way to view Paso-lini’s work. Literary critic and writer Piergiorgio Bellocchio, one of the founders of the Quaderni Piacentini, an important cultural periodical of the 1960s and 1970s, talks about a semiufficiale ripartizione di comodo (semi-official convenient subdivision). First, Pasolini the poet, who published both in Italian and Friulian (the language, not dialect, of his mother’s region) starting from his youth, and was immediately acclaimed by the literary circles. His first book of poetry, published when he was just 20, was even praised by Gianfranco Contini, godfather of Italian literary criticism.

The second era is Pasolini the novelist, with his two novels, Ragazzi di vita (which appeared in English with three different titles, The Ragazzi, The Hustlers, and most recently, in Ann Goldstein’s translation, as The Street Kids) and Una vita violenta (A Violent Life, translated by William Weaver) set in the Roman suburbs, the so-called ‘borgate’. These works were the subject of significant scandals — with even the Communist ‘official’ literary critic, Carlo Salinari, attacking Ragazzi.

If something made Pasolini an international figure, with renown outside of Italy, it was certainly cinema (it also made him financially stable after years of job insecurity and occasional collaborations). This, of course, is seen as its own Pasolini, Pasolini the film-maker. And finally there is what Bellocchio refers as the corsaro-luterano del polemista polemico (Lutheran-corsair polemical polemicist), citing two of his collections of the 1970s, Lettere Luterane (Lutheran Letters) and Scritti corsari (Corsair Writings), the latter of which is still only partially translated into English. This last phase is what he remains both the most cited and misunderstood in Italy. Questions like ‘what would he have said about modern events?’, or statements like ‘Pasolini predicted everything back in the 1970s’ remain common in non-specialist discourses on the poet and film-maker.

Classifications are, by definition, conventional methods of organising, and lacking in their breadth. Even the most diehard Pasolini disciple would not defend his paintings (scholastic works at best), but he was also a fine journalist. One needs only to look at the reportage in La lunga strada di sabbia (The Long Road of Sand), written in 1959 while traveling the coasts of Italy, to see evidence for this. His varied writings from the Global South, where he started travelling intensively from the early 1960s, also provide confirmation. They demonstrate an acute journalistic eye — albeit not one that is immune from a certain Orientalism.

Pasolini was also a cultural organiser, able to bring together people and energy, mostly to create literary magazines of the type that greatly influenced Italian culture in the second half of the twentieth century. And he was a public intellectual, without any doubt one of the most important in Italy in modern times. This can’t be reduced to polemics: Pasolini gave hundreds of interviews, participated in TV shows, spoke at public events and even political rallies, interacted with pretty much all the relevant intellectuals in Italy, not only writers and artists but also politicians and even religious leaders. Just before the making of The Gospel According to St. Matthew (1964) he got close to the Christian group Cittadella di Assisi, a relationship he maintained throughout his life. All these activities in turn form part of the creativity and passionate interests that make up his life.

The Observer

While it is impossible, especially in a brief introductory piece like this, to find a common paradigm to Pasolini’s work, one may claim that Pasolini was first and foremost an observer of the world, of the reality unfolding around him. Not only of what he knew best (like his home region Friuli), but also of the one he learned to know (like the Roman suburbs, ‘I began to use the dialect of the Roman subproletariat in an objective way, to get the most exact possible description of the world I was faced with’), and even the worlds he only passed through for a brief span of time.

One can look, for example, at the beginning of the newspaper article ‘The Hippies’ Speech’ (in Italian ‘Il discorso dei capelli’): ‘The first time I saw capelloni [people with long hair, loosely translatable as hippies] was in Prague. In the hall of a hotel where I was staying, two young foreigners entered with long hair past their shoulders. They passed through the hall, reached a secluded corner, and sat at a table. They remained there for half an hour, observed by the other customers, among them myself, and then took off.’ They didn’t say a word, Pasolini continues, because ‘they did not need to talk. Their silence was rigorously functional’ as what they had was ‘the language of their hair’. He goes on using this relatively small and insignificant episode to describe how society was changing, interpreting that moment as a sign of a new, evolving world.

One could also read his short essay ‘Civil War’, which recounts a ten-day visit to New York, which had a long-lasting impression on Pasolini. In a very short space of time, Pasolini immersed himself in the life of the city, trying to understand its complex racial dynamics, and feeling the vitality of a rapidly evolving environment. As he famously wrote, ‘in Europe everything is finished; in America one has the impression that everything is about to begin’.

Stylistically, Pasolini was far from a realist. This was especially the case in cinema, where he eccentrically mixed styles, modes, and approaches: ‘Stylistically I am a pasticheur,’ he would say. But it was nonetheless from the things around him that he drew much of his inspiration. Even in the most allegorical of his works — such as the ‘Trilogy of life’, The Decameron (1971), The Canterbury Tales (1972) and Arabian Nights (1974) — where he chose to film had an enormous impact on how he recounted a story.

He made clear the importance of observation to his work: basta soltanto uscire per strada per capirlo, ‘it is enough to go into the streets to understand it’, as he wrote in the famous articolo delle lucciole (article of the fireflies), published in February 1975. In that work, Pasolini analyses the nature of the Christian Democrats (the main centre-right party in post-war Italy), connecting it to the Fascist regime, and to the ‘anthropological’ transformation of the Italian people across those years. The work employed the metaphor of the disappearance of fireflies from Italian countryside due to pollution. However, in Italian the word lucciole can mean prostitute as well as firefly, implying another reading that touches on the sexual habits of Italians as much as any environmental criticism. This was the nature of his work: a broad, playful but usually perceptive criticism of a world that was remaking itself around him.

Legacy

One hundred years after his birth, Pasolini’s works endure. And so does his radical and often scandalous life, punctuated as it was by trials and public accusations until his brutal and unexplained death.

In Italy, he is also very much alive as a public intellectual, claimed by many and sometimes framed as a prophet. It can certainly be said of Pasolini that he understood the brutal realities of capitalism and was an early critic of what we might now call its late stage. For Pasolini, this was neocapitalismo — a new phase of a hegemonic economic and social system. We can find in his writing several remarkable passages on the influence of the media, the changing habits and values of Italians, the development of consumer society, the arrival of modernisation to traditional societies, and other topics which have dominated critical debates in the decades after his death.

But it might be Pasolini’s understanding of the hidden powers which governed Italy that was most impressive. ‘I know the names of those responsible for what has been called a “coup,”’ he would say, ‘but what is actually a series of “coups” carried out to ensure the security of power.’ This claim about Italy’s strategy of tension — the massacres which took place between the end of the 1960s and beginning of the 1980s — was striking, especially in light of recent evidence that suggests far more of the violence was coordinated than many were allowed to believe at the time. The role of the intelligence services and government agents in the neo-fascist violence and in the stragi (mass killings) now seems clearer than before.

Already in 1978 journalist Nello Ajello talked about certe profezie e taluni sogni di Pier Paolo Pasolini (certain prophecies and some dreams of Pier Paolo Pasolini). But we should resist the attempt to treat him as a prophet, or to sloganise him; endeavours that have far more to do with ‘using’ Pasolini for contemporary purposes than to truly understanding his work. Rather, we should continue to read, watch, listen, and learn, as well as translate, the works of Pasolini — and to apply his methods to our world. The life of Pasolini demonstrates how much can be achieved by a careful observer.