Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922-75) Who really killed Pier Paolo Pasolini?

Pasolini’s Legacy: A Sprawl of Brutality

By DENNIS LIM

Published: December 26, 2012

“It is only at our moment of death that our life, to that point undecipherable, ambiguous, suspended, acquires a meaning.” So said the filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini in a 1967 interview. The idea that death defines a person has seldom been more vividly illustrated than in the case of Pasolini, whose extraordinary life and work are invariably seen through the prism of his gruesome end. 

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Courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art

The Italian filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini delighted in presenting  images that would shake audiences, especially bourgeois audiences, out of their complacency. “La Terra Vista Dalla Luna” (“The Earth as Seen From the Moon,” 1966). 

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Courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art

“Porcile” (“Pigsty,” 1969).

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Courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art

“Teorema” (“Theorem,” 1968).

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Courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art

Edipo Re” (“Oedipus Rex,” 1967). Pasolini's films are being presented  in a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art through Jan. 5. 

His mutilated body was found in a vacant lot in Ostia, a suburb of Rome, in 1975. The assumed killer (who later recanted his confession) was a 17-year-old hustler he had picked up. 

His colleague Michelangelo Antonioni remarked that Pasolini had become “the victim of his own characters.” Completed weeks before he died, at 53, Pasolini’s last movie, “Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom,” an unrelentingly brutal adaptation of the Marquis de Sade’s catalog of degradation and torture, came to be viewed, all too neatly, as a death wish. 

In other crucial ways, though, the meaning of Pasolini remains undecipherable, ambiguous, suspended. A lapsed Catholic who never lost his religious worldview and a lifelong Marxist who was expelled from the Communist Party for being gay, Pasolini was an artist and thinker who tried not to resolve his contradictions but rather to embody them fully. With his gift for polemics and taste for scandal, he was routinely hauled up on blasphemy and obscenity charges and attacked by those on the left and the right. 

The films that brought him international renown are the subject of a retrospective at the Museum of the Modern Art that runs through Jan. 5, but they are only part of the picture. To himself and to many Italians he was above all a poet. He also wrote novels and plays, painted, composed music and published reams of political commentary and literary theory.

The museum series, the most complete Pasolini retrospective in New York in more than two decades, has been supplemented with a poetry and music recital, discussions and other events, both at the Modern and at MoMA PS1, which has a cinematic installation running through Jan. 7. An exhibition of portraits by Pasolini is on view at Location One in SoHo through Jan 5. 

Evoking the feverish sprawl of Pasolini’s output, these events make the implicit case that it is difficult to consider any of his works in isolation. 

“It’s very hard to put one label on him,” said Jytte Jensen, the curator who organized the retrospective. “He had many essential roles in Italian society, and he was always searching, completely open to different ways of looking at things and not afraid to say he was mistaken.”

Pasolini’s early features “Accatone” (1961) and “Mamma Roma” (1962), shot in the shantytowns around Rome and starring nonprofessionals, followed the Italian neo-realists in deeming the lives of the downtrodden worthy of art. But the pictures went beyond gritty naturalism to incorporate aspects of the sacred and the erotic. (Pasolini’s empathy for his male subjects often encompassed an attraction to them.) 

Coming to film from literature, Pasolini viewed cinema as an expressive and flexible form, a language that, as he put it, “writes reality with reality.” Just as he wrote poetry and fiction in a variety of dialects, his movies cycled through a range of styles and tones. The reactions to them were often divided, rarely predictable. 

“The Gospel According to Matthew” (1964), a reverential portrait of a revolutionary Jesus, is a film both Christians and Marxists could love. The underappreciated “Porcile”(“Pigsty,” 1969), an allegory on the dead ends of ideology and a black comedy about cannibalism and bestiality, was out of step with the era’s fervent radicalism. It pleased almost no one, least of all the student activists Pasolini had denounced as elitists. (He sided with the working-class police.) 

Alongside his features, many of which were staples of art cinema’s golden age, the retrospective gives equal prominence to his shorts and documentaries, which often offer direct glimpses of his mind-set. In “Love Meetings” (1964) Pasolini, like an Italian Alfred Kinsey, travels through the country recording conversations with people of all ages and backgrounds about their sexual behavior and attitudes. “Notes for an African Oresteia” (1970) describes his plan to direct a movie of the Aeschylus myth in post-colonial Africa and captures his ideas (a wounded lioness to represent the Furies) as well as the skepticism of some young African men that presumably led to his decision not to make it. 

Changing course often meant repudiating his own work. Pasolini first classified his bawdy medieval adaptations — “The Decameron” (1971), “The Canterbury Tales” (1972) and “Arabian Nights” (1974), collectively called the “Trilogy of Life” and just released in a boxed set by Criterion — as apolitical works, then proclaimed them radical celebrations of carnal pleasure. But when their popularity spawned numerous soft-core imitations, he revised his opinion again and published an “abjuration” of the trilogy. 

The clearest thread running through Pasolini’s movies is his mounting disgust with the modern world. He saw Italy’s postwar boom as an irreversible blight, turning the masses into mindless consumers and erasing local cultures. (For Pasolini difference was always to be protected and flaunted.) 

His contempt for the Italian bourgeoisie — labeled “the most ignorant in all of Europe” in his 1963 short “La Ricotta” — manifested itself both as critique (in “Teorema” and “Porcile”) and as a retreat into antiquity and myth, with the past sometimes serving as a window onto the present. (Before the “Trilogy of Life” he went through a Greek-tragedy phrase, adapting “Oedipus Rex” and “Medea.”) 

Pasolini’s despair reaches its terminal point (in every sense) in “Salò,” which transposes Sade to Mussolini’s Italy, equates consumerism with fascism and strives to be what he called an “undigestible” film, one that utterly resists commodification. (It’s not hard to imagine how Pasolini would have reacted to the comic incongruity of his MoMA series listing Gucci as a supporter. ) 

While he has no equivalent in the contemporary landscape, Pasolini paved the way for many filmmakers, including Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Derek Jarman, Gus Van Sant and Abel Ferrara (who has been planning a Pasolini biopic for years). The potency of his ideas and the mystery of his murder (which some believe was politically motivated) have captured the imagination of countless writers and artists. There is a cottage industry of investigative books on his death, which has also been the subject of works ranging from Marco Tullio Giordana’s docudrama “Who Killed Pasolini?” to Elisabetta Benassi’s installation “Alfa Romeo GT Veloce 1975-2007,” which evokes the crime scene with a model of Pasolini’s car (and blinding headlights that echo a moment from “Accatone”). 

 As a postscript to the MoMA show UnionDocs in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, is showing on Jan. 13 two essay films on Pasolini’s death and legacy: the artist-architect Alfredo Jaar’s “Ashes of Pasolini” and the experimental filmmaker Cathy Lee Crane’s “Pasolini’s Last Words.”  

 At the Modern over the next two weeks every screening will begin with a clip of Pasolini discussing the film at hand. Ms. Jensen said these personal introductions were in keeping with the immediacy of his work. “When you’re sitting in a theater watching a Pasolini film,” she said, “you feel he’s speaking directly to you.” 

The Pasolini film retrospective runs through Jan. 5 at the Museum of Modern Art; moma.org. A Pasolini cinematic installation runs through Jan. 7 at MoMA PS1, 22-25 Jackson Avenue, Long Island City, Queens; momaps1.org. A show of portraits by Pasolini is on view through Jan. 5 at Location One, 26 Greene Street, near Grand Street, SoHo; location1.org.

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Pier Paolo Pasolini
Born	March 5, 1922 Bologna, Italy
Died	November 2, 1975 (aged 53) Ostia, Rome, Italy
Occupation	Film director, novelist, poet, intellectual, journalist, linguist, philosopher
Notable work(s)	Accattone Salò The Gospel According to St. Matthew
Influences[show]
Influenced[show]
Signature

Pier Paolo Pasolini (Italian pronunciation: [ˈpjɛr ˈpaolo pazoˈlini]; March 5, 1922 – November 2, 1975) was an Italian film director, poet, writer and intellectual. Pasolini distinguished himself as a poet, journalist, philosopher, linguist, novelist, playwright, filmmaker, newspaper and magazine columnist, actor, painter and political figure. He demonstrated a unique and extraordinary cultural versatility, becoming a highly controversial figure in the process. While his work remains controversial to this day, in the years since his death Pasolini has come to be valued by many as a visionary thinker and a major figure in Italian literature and art. Influential American literary critic Harold Bloom considers Pasolini to be a major European poet and a major voice in 20th-century poetry, including his works in his collection of the Western Canon.

Contents 1 Biography 1.1 Early life 1.2 Early poetry 1.3 Relationship with the Italian Communist Party 1.4 Success and charges 1.5 Death 2 Political views 3 Sexuality 4 Works 5 Legacy 6 Filmography 6.1 Feature films 6.2 Documentaries 6.3 Episodes in omnibus films 7 Bibliography 7.1 Narrative 7.2 Poetry 7.3 Essays 7.4 Theatre 8 Notes 9 References 10 External links

Biography

Early life

Pasolini was born in Bologna, traditionally one of the most leftist of Italian cities. He was the son of a lieutenant of the Italian Army, Carlo Alberto, who had become famous for saving Benito Mussolini's life during Anteo Zamboni's assassination attempt, and subsequently married an elementary school teacher, Susanna Colussi, in 1921. Pasolini was born in 1922 and was 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, and his mother took the children to her family's house in Casarsa della Delizia, in the Friuli region.
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);^[1] 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 moves, though in the meantime 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 while 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 travail. He took part in the Fascist government's culture and sports competitions. In 1941, together with Francesco Leonetti, Roberto Roversi and others, he attempted to publish a poetry magazine, but the attempt failed due to paper shortages. In his poems of this period, Pasolini started to include fragments in Friulan, which he had learned from his mother.

Early poetry

After the summer in Casarsa, in 1941 Pasolini published at his own expense a collection of poems in Friulan, Versi a Casarsa. The work was noted and appreciated by intellectuals and critics such as Gianfranco Contini, Alfonso Gatto and Antonio Russi. His pictures had also been well received. Pasolini was chief editor of the Il Setaccio ("The Sieve") magazine, but was fired after conflicts with the director, who was aligned with the Fascist regime. A trip to Germany helped him also to discover the "provincial" status of Italian culture in that era. These experiences led Pasolini to rethink 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 war, a decision common among Italian military families. Here, for the first time, Pasolini had to face the erotic disquiet he had suppressed during his adolescent years. He wrote: "A continuous perturbation without images or words beats at my temples and obscures me".^{[citation needed]}
In the weeks before the 8 September armistice, Pasolini was drafted. He was captured and imprisoned by the Germans. He managed to escape disguised as a peasant, and found his way to Casarsa. Here he joined a group of other young fans of the Friulan language 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 enrollments by the Italian Social Republic, as well as partisan activity.
Pasolini tried to remain apart from these events. He and his mother taught students unable to reach the schools in Pordenone or Udine. He experienced his first homosexual love for one of his students. At the same time, a Slovenian schoolgirl, Pina Kalč, was falling in love with Pasolini.^{[citation needed]} On 12 February 1945 his brother Guido was killed in an ambush. Six days later Pasolini and others founded the Friulan Language Academy (Academiuta di lenga furlana). In the same year Pasolini joined the Association for the Autonomy of Friuli. He graduated after completing a final thesis about Giovanni Pascoli's works.
In 1946 Pasolini published a small poetry collection, I Diarii ("The Diaries"), with the Academiuta. In October he travelled 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 26 January 1947 Pasolini wrote a controversial declaration for the front page of the newspaper Libertà: "In our opinion, we think that currently only Communism is able to provide a new culture." The controversy was partly due to the fact he was still not a member of the Italian Communist Party (PCI).
He was also planning to extend the work of the Academiuta to other Romance language literatures and knew the exiled Catalan poet, Carles Cardó. After his adherence to the PCI, he 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 create his first novel.
In October of the same year, Pasolini was charged with the corruption of minors and obscene acts in public places. As a result, he was expelled by the Udine section of the Communist Party and lost the teaching job he had obtained the previous year in Valvasone. Left in a difficult situation, in January 1950 Pasolini moved to Rome with his mother.
He later described this period of his life as very difficult. "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 found a job as a worker in the Cinecittà studios and sold his books in the 'bancarelle' ("sidewalk shops") of Rome. Finally, through the help of the Abruzzese-language poet Vittorio Clemente, he found a job as a teacher in Ciampino, a suburb of the capital.
In these years Pasolini transferred his Friulan countryside inspiration to Rome's suburbs, the infamous borgate where poor proletarian immigrants lived in often horrendous sanitary and social conditions.

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, publishing 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^[specify] against Pasolini and his editor, Garzanti. Though totally exonerated of any charge, Pasolini became a victim of insinuations, especially by the tabloid press.
In 1957, together with Sergio Citti, Pasolini collaborated on Federico Fellini's film Le notti di Cabiria, writing dialogue for the Roman dialect parts. In 1960 he made his debut as an actor in Il gobbo, and co-wrote Long Night in 1943.
His first film as director and screenwriter is Accattone of 1961, again set in Rome's marginal quarters. 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 offence to the Italian state.
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 travelled 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.^[2]
In 1967, in Venice, he met and interviewed the American poet Ezra Pound.^[3] They discussed about Italian movement neoavanguardia, arts in general and Pasolini read some verses from the Italian version of Pound's Pisan Cantos.^[3]
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 annual Venice Film Festival in a hot political climate. Pasolini had proclaimed that the Festival would be managed by the directors (see also Works section).
In 1970 Pasolini bought an old castle near Viterbo, several miles north of Rome, where he began to write his last novel, Petrolio, which was never finished. 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 critical essays, Scritti corsari ("Corsair Writings").

Death

Pasolini was murdered by being run over several times with his own car, dying on 2 November 1975 on the beach at Ostia, near Rome. Pasolini was buried in Casarsa, in his beloved Friuli.
Giuseppe Pelosi, a seventeen-year-old hustler, was arrested and confessed to murdering Pasolini. Thirty years later, on 7 May 2005, he retracted his confession, which he said was 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".^[4]
Other evidence uncovered in 2005 pointed to Pasolini's 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, November 2, 1975.^[5][6][7][8] Despite the Roman police's reopening of the murder case following Pelosi's statement of May 2005, the judges charged with investigating it determined the new elements insufficient for them to continue the inquiry.

Political views

Pasolini generated heated public discussion with controversial analyses of public affairs. For instance, during the disorders of 1969, 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 daddys' boys). This statement, however, did not stop him from contributing to the autonomist Lotta continua movement.
Pasolini was also an ardent critic of consumismo, i.e. consumerism, which he felt had rapidly destroyed Italian society in the late 1960s/early 1970s. 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. He often described consumeristic culture as "unreal", as it had been imposed by economic power and had replaced Italy's traditional peasant culture, something that not even fascism had been able to do. 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."
He was angered by economic globalization and cultural domination of the North of Italy (around Milan) over other regions, especially the South.^{[citation needed]} He felt this was accomplished through the power of TV. He opposed the gradual disappearance of Italian dialects by writing some of his poetry in Friulan, the regional language of his childhood. Despite his left-wing views, Pasolini opposed the liberalization of abortion laws.^[9]

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. The subject is featured prominently in Teorema (1968), where Terence Stamp's mysterious God-like visitor seduces the son and father of an upper-middle-class family; passingly in Arabian Nights (1974), in an idyll between a king and a commoner that ends in death; and, most darkly of all, in Salò (1975), his infamous rendition of the Marquis de Sade's compendium of sexual horrors, The 120 Days of Sodom.^[10]

In 1963 he 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 his 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."^[11]

Works

Pasolini's first novel Ragazzi di vita (1955) dealt with the Roman lumpenproletariat. The resulting obscenity charges against him were the first of many instances where his art provoked legal problems. Accattone (1961), also about the Roman underworld, also provoked controversy with conservatives, who demanded stricter censorship.
He then directed the black-and-white The Gospel According to St. Matthew (1964). This film is a cinematic adaptation of the life of Jesus (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 instead 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, he hired 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 as well.
In Teorema (Theorem, 1968), starring Terence Stamp as a mysterious stranger, he depicted the sexual coming-apart of a bourgeois family (later repeated by François Ozon in Sitcom and Takashi Miike in Visitor Q).
Later movies centered on sex-laden folklore, such as Boccaccio's Decameron (1971) and Chaucer's 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.
His final work, Salò (Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom, 1975), exceeded what most viewers could then stomach in its explicit scenes of intensely sadistic violence. Based on the novel 120 Days of Sodom by the Marquis de Sade, it is considered his most controversial film. In May 2006, Time Out's Film Guide named it the Most Controversial Film of all time.

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 morality of those times. His works, with their unequaled poetry applied to cruel realities, showing that such realities are less distant from us than we imagine, made a major contribution to change in the Italian psyche.^{[citation needed][12]}
The director also promoted in his works the concept of "natural sacredness," the idea that the world is holy in and of itself. He suggested there was no need for spiritual essence or supernatural blessing to attain this state. Pasolini was an avowed atheist.
General disapproval of Pasolini's work was perhaps caused primarily by his frequent focus on sexual mores, and the contrast between what he presented and publicly sanctioned behavior. While Pasolini's poetry often dealt with his same-sex love interests, this was not the only, or even main, theme. His interest and approach to Italian dialects should also be noted. Much of the poetry was about his highly revered mother. As a sensitive and intelligent man, he depicted certain corners of the contemporary reality as few other poets could do. His poetry was not as well known as his films outside Italy.^{[citation needed][13]}
He had also developed a philosophy of the language mainly related with his studies on Cinema;^[14] this theorical and critical activity was another debated topic by the acclimated cultural background as the collected articles still available today show pretty clearly.^[12][15][16]
These studies can be considered as the foundation of his artistic point of view, as a matter of fact they basically point out two aspects: the language - as English, Italian, dialect or other - is a rigid system in which the human thought is trapped as well; the cinema is the written language of reality which, like any other written language, enable man to see things from the point of view of truth.^[14]
His films won awards at the Berlin 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.
Ebbo Demant directed the documentary Das Mitleid ist gestorben about Pasolini.
In 2005 Stefano Battaglia recorded Re: Pasolini in dedication to Pasolini.

Filmography

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, significant liberties were taken with original texts and titles do not credit anyone except Pasolini. The latter is also true in the case of St. Matthew.

Year	Original title	English title	Notes
1961	Accattone	Accattone!	Screenplay by Pier Paolo Pasolini based on his novel Una vita violenta. Additional dialogue by Sergio Citti.
1962	Mamma Roma	Mamma Roma	Screenplay by Pier Paolo Pasolini with additional dialogue by Sergio Citti.
1964	Il vangelo secondo Matteo	The Gospel According to Matthew	Silver Lion-Venice Film Festival
1966	Uccellacci e uccellini	The Hawks and the Sparrows
1967	Edipo re	Oedipus Rex
1968	Teorema	Theorem[17]	Pasolini's novel Teorema was also published in 1968.
1969	Porcile	Pigsty
1969	Medea	Medea
1971	Il Decameron	The Decameron	Based on The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio. Won the Silver Bear at the 21st Berlin International Film Festival.[18]
1972	I Racconti di Canterbury	The Canterbury Tales	Based on The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer. Won the Golden Bear at the 22nd Berlin International Film Festival.[19]
1974	Il fiore delle Mille e una Notte	A Thousand and One Nights (Arabian Nights)	Screenplay written in collaboration with Dacia Maraini. Won the Grand Prix Spécial Prize.[20]
1975	Salò o le 120 giornate di Sodoma	Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom	Based on Les 120 journées de Sodome ou l'école du libertinage by Marquis de Sade. Screenplay written in collaboration with Sergio Citti with extended quotes from Roland Barthes' Sade, Fourier, Loyola and Pierre Klossowski's Sade mon prochain.

Documentaries

• Sopralluoghi in Palestina per Il Vangelo secondo Matteo (1964)
• Comizi d'amore (Love Meetings, 1964)
• Appunti per un film sull'India (1969)
• Appunti per un romanzo dell'immondizia (1970)
• Le mura di Sana'a (1971)
• 12 Dicembre 1972 (long and short version) (1972)
• Pasolini e la forma della città (1975)
• Appunti per un'Orestiade Africana (Notes Towards an African Orestes, 1975)

Episodes in omnibus films

• La ricotta in RoGoPaG (1963)
• First segment of La rabbia (1963)
• La Terra vista dalla Luna in Le streghe (The Witches, 1967)
• Che cosa sono le nuvole? Capriccio all'Italiana (1968)
• La sequenza del fiore di carta in Amore e rabbia (1969)

Bibliography

Narrative

• Poems
• Ragazzi di vita (The Ragazzi, 1955)
• Una vita violenta (A Violent Life, 1959)
• Il sogno di una cosa (1962)
• Amado Mio - Atti Impuri (1982, originally composed in 1948)
• Alì dagli occhi azzurri (1965)
• Reality (The Poets' Encyclopedia, 1979)
• Petrolio (1992, incomplete)

Poetry

• La meglio gioventù (1954)
• Le ceneri di Gramsci (1957)
• L'usignolo della chiesa cattolica (1958)
• La religione del mio tempo (1961)
• Poesia in forma di rosa (1964)
• Trasumanar e organizzar (1971)
• La nuova gioventù (1975)
• Roman Poems. Pocket Poets #41 (1986)

Essays

• Passione e ideologia (1960)
• Canzoniere italiano, poesia popolare italiana (1960)
• Empirismo eretico (1972)
• Lettere luterane (1976)
• Le belle bandiere (1977)
• Descrizioni di descrizioni (1979)
• Il caos (1979)
• La pornografia è noiosa (1979)
• Scritti corsari (1975)
• Lettere (1940–1954) (Letters, 1940-54, 1986)

Theatre

• Orgia (1968)
• Porcile (1968)
• Calderón (1973)
• Affabulazione (1977)
• Pilade (1977)
• Bestia da stile (1977)

Notes

1. ^ http://www.rtvslo.si/kultura/drugo/ste-vedeli-da-je-pier-paolo-pasolini-v-otrostvu-nekaj-casa-zivel-v-idriji/294028
2. ^ "Berlinale 1966: Juries". berlinale.de. Retrieved 2010-02-22.
3. ^ ^{a b} http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jrwIbjwbT0o
4. ^ Cataldi, Benedetto (2005-05-05). "Pasolini death inquiry reopened". bbc.co.uk.
5. ^ "Asesinato de Pasolini, nueva investigación" (in Italian). La Razón. La Razón. Retrieved 4 July 2012.
6. ^ Héctor Rivera (28). "Pasolini de nuevo" (in Italian). Sentido contrario. Grupo Milenio. Retrieved 4 July 2012.
7. ^ "Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922 – 1975)" (in Italian). Cinematismo. Cinematismo. Retrieved 4 July 2012.
8. ^ http://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:ouU8zYEgmXMJ:rassegnastampa.mef.gov.it/mefinternazionale/PDF/2010/2010-04-02/2010040215372121.pdf+muerte+de+pasolini-+rollos+robados&hl=es&gl=co&pid=bl&srcid=ADGEESg_Hz3kNu-APpn4-A1D42JjsI01jWmCc2RU0zb8ji3iX5Me-8LlK1uyuIo3mo0-NebUSyoFpa3dPHTIiOtQfs1b07D-_EhM_NYQjqCIObthlxA86VQDWnhZ7wpjQmFbzWDkBQuy&sig=AHIEtbROrSJpidVdGjEyfEHWL7gELlXFTw
9. ^ Petri Liukkonen, Ari Pesonen (2008). "Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922-1975)". Books and Writers. Kuusankosken kaupunginkirjasto. Retrieved 4 July 2012.
10. ^ Ehrenstein, David (2005). Pasolini, Pier Paolo. glbtq: An Encyclopedia of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Culture.
11. ^ Ireland, Doug (2005-08-04). "Restoring Pasolini". LA Weekly (LA Weekly, LP). Retrieved 2010-08-29.
12. ^ ^{a b} Pasolini Pierr Paolo (1995) (in Italian). Il Caos (collected articles). Roma: Editori Riuniti.
13. ^ Pasolini Pier Paolo (1996). Collected Poems. Noonday Press. ISBN 0-374-52469-6, 9780374524692.
14. ^ ^{a b} Pasolini, Pier Paolo (1988-2005). Heretical empiricism. New Academia Publishing. ISBN 0-9767042-2-6, 9780976704225.
15. ^ A. Covi (1971) (in Italian). Dibattiti sui film. Padova: Gregoriana.
16. ^ A. Asor Rosa (1988) (in Italian). Scrittori e Popolo – il populismo nella letteratura italiana contemporanea. Torino: Gregoriana.
17. ^ The translated English title is used infrequently.
18. ^ "Berlinale 1972: Prize Winners". berlinale.de. Retrieved 2011-06-26.
19. ^ "Berlinale 1972: Prize Winners". berlinale.de. Retrieved 2010-03-16.
20. ^ "Festival de Cannes: Arabian Nights". festival-cannes.com. Retrieved 2011-06-26.

References

• Aichele, George. "Translation as De-canonization: Matthew's Gospel According to Pasolini - filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini - Critical Essay." Cross Currents (2002). FindArticles.
• Distefano, John. "Picturing Pasolini." Art Journal (1997).
• Eloit, Audrene. "Oedipus Rex by Pier Paolo Pasolini The Palimpsest: Rewriting and the Creation of Pasolini's Cinematic Language." Literature Film Quarterly (2004). FindArticles.
• Fabbro, Elena (ed.). Il mito greco nell'opera di Pasolini. Atti del Convegno Udine-Casarsa della Delizia, 24-26 ottobre 2002. Udine: Forum (2004). ISBN 88-8420-230-2
• Forni, Kathleen. "A "cinema of poetry": What Pasolini Did to Chancer's Canterbury Tales." Literature Film Quarterly (2002). FindArticles.
• Frisch, Anette. "Francesco Vezzolini: Pasolini Reloaded." Interview, Rutgers University Alexander Library, New Brunswick, NJ.
• Green, Martin. "The Dialectic Adaptation."
• Greene, Naomi. Pier Paolo Pasilini: Cinema as Heresy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1990.
• Meyer-Krahmer, Benjamin. "Transmediality and Pastiche as Techniques in Pasolini’s Art Production", in: P.P.P. - Pier Paolo Pasolini and death, eds. Bernhart Schwenk, Michael Semff, Ostfildern 2005, p. 109 - 118
• Passannanti, Erminia. The Sacred Transgressed. Pasolini, the Roman Catholic Church and Secularity in the short film "La ricotta", Brindin Press (2009).
• Passannanti, Erminia. Il Cristo dell'Eresia. Sacro e censura nel cinema di Pier Paolo Pasolini, Joker (2009).
• Passannanti, Erminia. Deconstruction and redefinition of the Italian Catholic Identity in Pier Paolo Pasolini's La ricotta, in Italy on Screen: National Identity and Italian Imaginary, Lucy Bolton and Christina Siggers Manson (eds.), Series New Studies in European Cinema series, Peter Lang (2010).
• Pugh, Tison. "Chaucerian Fabliaux, Cinematic Fabliau: Pier Paolo Pasolini's I racconti di Canterbury.", Literature Film Quarterly (2004). FindArticles.
• Restivo, Angelo. The Cinema of Economic Miracles: Visuality and Modernization in the Italian Art Film. London: Duke UP, 2002.
• Rohdie, Sam. The Passion of Pier Paolo Pasolini. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana UP, 1995.
• Rumble, Patrick A. Allegories of contamination: Pier Paolo Pasolini's Trilogy of life. Toronto: University of Toronto P, 1996.
• Schwartz, Barth D. Pasolini Requiem. 1st ed. New York: Pantheon Books, 1992.
• Siciliano, Enzo. Pasolini: A Biography. Trans. John Shepley. New York: Random House, 1982.
• Viano, Maurizio. A Certain Realism: Making Use of Pasolini's Film Theory and Practice. Berkeley: University of California P, 1993.
• Willimon, William H. "Faithful to the script", Christian Century (2004).

External links

• Pier Paolo Pasolini at the Internet Movie Database
• Pasolini on Filmgalerie451
• Piers Paolo Pasolini, Italian website with extensive commentary
• "Piers Paolo Pasolini", Senses of Cinema
• BBC News report on the reopening of the murder case
• Guy Flatley: "The Atheist Who Was Obsessed with God", MovieCrazed
• Doug Ireland, "Restoring Pasolini", ZMag
• Maria Callas in Pasolini's Medea
• Pasolini's own notes on Salo from 1974
• Pier Paolo Pasolini poems Original Italian text.
• Video (in Italian): Pasolini on the destructive impact of television (interrupted and half-censored by Enzo Biagi)
• Italian website dedicated to Pasolini
• Pasolini's second to last interview, long believed to have been lost
• "Pasolini’s Legacy: A Sprawl of Brutality", Dennis Lim, The New York Times, 26 December 2012

Who really killed Pier Paolo Pasolini?

A biopic by Abel Ferrara at the Venice biennale will reconstruct the last hours of the Italian film director, who was murdered in 1975

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• • Ed Vulliamy
  • The Observer, Sunday 24 August 2014
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The film of Pier Paolo Pasolini's last day is tipped to win the Golden Lion at the Venice biennale festival Photograph: Allstar Picture Library

"Want to go for a spin?" the poet and maestro of Italian cinema asked the rent boy, according to the latter's confession to the police. "Come ride with me, and I'll give you a present."

So began the events leading to the murder of Pier Paolo Pasolini, brilliant intellectual, director and homosexual whose political vision – based on a singular entwinement of Eros, Catholicism and Marxism – foresaw Italian history after his death, and the burgeoning of global consumerism. It was a murder that, four decades later, remains shrouded in the kind of mystery and opacity Italy specialises in – un giallo, a black thriller.

The encounter occurred in the miasma of hustling around Roma Termini railway station at 10.30pm on 1 November 1975. And it marks the point of departure for a film tipped to win the Golden Lion at the Venice biennalefestival this week – Pasolini, starring Willem Dafoe and directed by Abel Ferrara, Bronx-born of Italian descent. The film deals with the last day of an extraordinary life. Ferrara says: "I know who killed Pasolini," but will not give a name. But in an interview with Il Fatto Quotidiano, he adds: "Pasolini is my font of inspiration."

At 1.30am, three hours after the station rendezvous, a Carabinieri squad car stopped a speeding Alfa Romeo near the scrappy coastal promenade of Idroscalo at Ostia, near Rome. The driver, Giuseppe (Pino) Pelosi, 17, sought to run, and was arrested for theft of the car, identified as belonging to Pasolini. Two hours later, the director's body was discovered – beaten, bloodied and run over by the car, beside a football pitch. Splinters of bloodied wood lay around.

Pelosi confessed: he and Pasolini had set off, and he had eaten a meal at a restaurant the director knew, the Biondo Tevere near St Paul's basilica, where he was known. Pino ate spaghetti with oil and garlic, Pasolini drank a beer. At 11.30pm they drove towards Ostia, where Pasolini "asked something I did not want" – to sodomise the boy with a wooden stick. Pelosi refused, Pasolini struck; Pelosi ran, picked up two pieces of a table, seized the stick and battered Pasolini to death. As he escaped in the car, he ran over what he thought was a bump in the road. "I killed Pasolini," he told his cellmate, and the police.

Pelosi was convicted in 1976, with "unknown others". Forensic examination by Dr Faustino Durante concluded that "Pasolini was the victim of an attack carried out by more than one person".

On appeal, however, the "others" were written out of the verdict. Pelosi had acted alone and the master was dead in a squalid tryst gone wrong and best forgotten, perhaps even deserved. But fascination with Pasolini and his films (in Italy, his writing too) increased – as did that with mysteries that still hang over his last hours.

The renown of his work is manifestly on merit: New York's Moma mounted a retrospective in 2012, the BFI in 2013. In April this year the Vatican, which had once pursued Pasolini and helped secure a criminal conviction for blasphemy, declared his masterpiece, The Gospel According to St Matthew, "the best film ever made about Jesus Christ". This expression of Pasolini's radical faith portrays Jesus as a revolutionary "red Messiah", according to the Franciscan doctrine of holy poverty, which in part influences the current pontiff, Francis.

But the compulsion of his death is less explicable: in 2010 the former mayor of Rome and leader of the centre-left Democratic party, Walter Veltroni, demanded that the case be reopened on the basis of a convergence of strange, and politically charged, circumstances.

Pasolini was killed the day after his return from Stockholm, where he had met Ingmar Bergman and others in the Swedish cinematic avant-garde, and given an explosive interview to L'Espresso magazine. In it, he addressed his favourite theme: "I consider consumerism to be a worse form of fascism than the classic variety."

Pasolini's view of a new totalitarianism whereby hyper-materialism was destroying the culture of Italy can be seen now as brilliant foresight into what has happened to the world generally in an internet age. But his critique had been, for months before the murder, more specific. He had singled out television as an especially pernicious influence, predicting the rise and power of a type such as media-mogul-turned-prime minister Silvio Berlusconi long before time. More specific still, he had written a series of columns for Corriere della Sera denouncing the leadership of the ruling Christian Democratic party as riddled with Mafia influence, predicting the so-called Tangentopoli – "kickback city" – scandals 15 years later, whereby an entire political class was put under arrest during the early 1990s. In his columns, Pasolini declared that the Christian Democratic leadership should stand trial, not only for corruption but association with neo-fascist terrorism, such as the bombing of trains and a demonstration in Milan.

Again, a spine-chilling vindication: these were the so-called "years of lead" in Italy, culminating in the bombing of Bologna station five years after Pasolini's death by neo-fascists working with the secret services, killing 82 people.

I was a student in turbulent Florence in 1973, returning every year thereafter and affiliated to a radical organisation called Lotta Continua (Struggle Continues); and I well remember Lotta Continua's newspaper taking contributions from Pasolini, though his relationship to the radical movements spawned by 1968 was ambiguous. He had identified with police officers against student rioters because, he said, they were "sons of the poor" attacked by bourgeois "daddy's boys".

So it was that, in the wake of the murder in 1975, those close to Pasolini saw the hand of power behind his killing. It would not have been a first: prominent leftists were often attacked or killed; feminist Franca Rame, who would marry the anarchist playwright Dario Fo, was gang-raped by neo-fascists, urged by the Carabinieri.

Members of Pasolini's family and circle of friends, and the writers Oriana Fallaci and Enzo Siciliano raised possible political motives for the killing and produced evidence that contradicted Pelosi's confession, such as a green sweater found in the car that belonged neither to Pasolini nor Pelosi, and Pasolini's bloody handprint on its roof (there were barely any bloodstains on Pelosi). Motorcycle riders and another car had been seen following the Alfa Romeo.

In January 2001 an article appeared in La Stampa that turned conspiracy theory into a hard lead. It concerned the death in 1962, in a plane crash, of Enrico Mattei, head of the ENI energy giant, made into a famous film by Francesco Rosi, with whom Pasolini had worked.

The article's author, Filippo Ceccarelli – one of Italy's expert political journalists – cited inquiries by a judge, Vincenzo Calia, into political intrigue within ENI, which found the plane had been shot down. Judge Calia implicated the man who succeeded Mattei, Eugenio Cefis, in cahoots with political leaders. The report cited a journalist who had worked on The Mattei Affair film with Rosi, Mauro di Mauro, who was kidnapped and disappeared without trace.

Long before Calia's investigation, published in 2003, Pasolini had worked on the posthumously released book Petrolio, featuring barely disguised versions of Mattei and Cefis, and revealing knowledge of how the ENI scandal and murder went to the heart of power and the P2 Masonic lodge, of which Cefis was a founder member. "With 25 years' foresight," wrote Ceccarelli, "Pasolini the writer had been aware of the outcome of a long investigation."

Then, in 2005, the floodgates opened. Pelosi, interviewed on television, retracted his confession, saying that two brothers and another man had killed Pasolini, calling him a "queer" and "dirty communist" as they beat him to death. They frequented, he said, the Tiburtina branch of the MSI neo-fascist party. Three years later, Pelosi gave further names in an essay called "Deep Black", released by the radical publisher Chiarelettere, revealing connections to even more extreme fascist cells tied to the state secret services, saying he had not previously dared to speak, after threats to his family.

One of Pasolini's closest friends, assistant director Sergio Citti, then came to the fore to say that his own investigations had produced evidence entirely overlooked: bloodied pieces of the stick dumped close to the football pitch, and a witness ignored by the official investigation who had seen five men drag Pasolini from the car.

Citti introduced a new theme: the theft of spools from Pasolini's last film,Salò, the return of which he had tried to negotiate. The gang of thieves frequented, it emerged, the same billiard bar as Pelosi, and had called Pasolini on the last day of his life to organise a meeting. Another investigation by the writer Fulvio Abbate tied the killers to the famous Magliana criminal gang on the coastal outskirts of Rome.

Yet the case remains closed, and there are those within Pasolini's circle as well as in the political class who prefer it so. Author Edoardo Sanguineti calls the death "delegated suicide" by a sado-masochist bent on his own destruction. Pasolini's cousin Nico Naldini – also a homosexual poet – wrote in the ambiguously entitled Brief Life of Pasoliniabout the director's "fetishistic rituals" and "attraction for boys who made him lose his sense of danger".

Pasolini had died, so history insists, as though in a scene from one of his films. "It is only at the point of death," Pasolini had said in 1967, "that our life, to that point ambiguous, undecipherable, suspended – acquires a meaning."