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A Body of Nostalgia: Pasolini's Self-Portrait in the Film Project Saint Paul

Armando Maggi

in The Resurrection of the Body: Pier Paolo Pasolini from Saint Paul to Sade

This chapter analyzes Pasolini's film Saint Paul. The film is a double biography, of Paul the apostle and of Pasolini the artist. Moreover, Pasolini contends that Paul is a divided figure, a figure ... More

This chapter analyzes Pasolini's film Saint Paul. The film is a double biography, of Paul the apostle and of Pasolini the artist. Moreover, Pasolini contends that Paul is a divided figure, a figure of internal oppositions. Paul is both a priest, the founder of a repressive institution (the Church), and a prophet who announces the apocalyptic end of that institution. For Pasolini, analogical is also the apostle and the poet's view of time and the sacred. In Pasolini's interpretation, the apostle lived in a historical era split between the past of Jesus' sacred time, and the present dominated by a longing for that original manifestation of the sacred. Pasolini also believes that in our present times Paul's statements have lost their sacredness because modernity cannot understand the longing that characterized the apostle's message. To yearn for the sacred today means to yearn for something that does not exist. Pasolini's longing for the sacred is defined as nostalgic in that nostalgia is the rejection of the present in favor of a past that the subject has never experienced and will never experience.Less

Pier Paolo Pasolini: Life as Oxymoron

Franco Cassano

in Southern Thought and Other Essays on the Mediterranean

In this chapter, the author, using author and filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini's life and writings as a point of departure, discusses his sexual diversity acts as a catalyst to question the centrality ... More

In this chapter, the author, using author and filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini's life and writings as a point of departure, discusses his sexual diversity acts as a catalyst to question the centrality of certain Western imperatives. He also accounts for Pasolini's evolving thoughts on politics, fatherhood, and the sacred. For Pasolini, to remain in the oxymoron means much more than to be tied to his diversity. It means instead to exalt and superimpose the many forms of antithesis and contradiction, to live a life far from those that found a home in it and judge the world from that vantage point, even when this home is the uncomfortable and painful one of “diversity.” The “Jewish” Franco Fortini looks suspiciously at Pasolini's “Catholic” psychology and at the “nexus populism–aristocratism,” the softness and the sweetness, the willingness to absolve oneself that lies in waiting behind every uncontrolled and public exhibition of his pain and guilt. The chapter also discusses the friction of passion and the distance of humor, paternity and institutions, and desacralization.Less

To Give Birth in Salò and Sade's The 120 Days of Sodom

Armando Maggi

in The Resurrection of the Body: Pier Paolo Pasolini from Saint Paul to Sade

Petrolio and Salò are premised on the same concept of giving birth to a form, where form means not only a new narrative form, but also the form of a schizophrenic space closed off from the world, and ... More

Petrolio and Salò are premised on the same concept of giving birth to a form, where form means not only a new narrative form, but also the form of a schizophrenic space closed off from the world, and the mute form of a stillborn fetus. Salò is the representation of the “diluted reel of film” projected in the schizophrenic's mind. A close reading of the film in the light of Sade's vast, unfinished novel, The 120 Days of Sodom, shows how Pasolini interprets and appropriates the Sadian obsession with nature and motherhood, which are seen as the libertine's two fiercest enemies. In particular, Pasolini focuses on two major characters of Sade's novel: Constance, the pregnant daughter of one of the four libertines, and Sophie, the victim whose mother died in the attempt to save her from the libertines. At the end of Sade's The 120 Days of Sodom, Constance is slaughtered, and her stillborn baby is extracted from her belly. Merging these two female figures, Pasolini creates the character of Renata, one of the female victims who stands out throughout the film as the symbolic representation of the mother (Constance) and the daughter. Salò differs from Pasolini's previous visual and verbal works centered on a nostalgia for the mother in that along with the dead mother the film evokes the image of her stillborn fetus, that inferior matter that the Sadian libertines equate with feces and sperm.Less

The Journey to Sodom and Gomorrah and Beyond: The Scenario Porn-Theo-Colossal

Armando Maggi

in The Resurrection of the Body: Pier Paolo Pasolini from Saint Paul to Sade

This chapter presents a close reading of a scenario that Pasolini intended to film after Salò. Using a new form of analogical transposition, similar to what he also did in Saint Paul, ... More

This chapter presents a close reading of a scenario that Pasolini intended to film after Salò. Using a new form of analogical transposition, similar to what he also did in Saint Paul, Porn-Theo-Colossal is the story of a decent, elderly, Neapolitan man who, accompanied by a young Roman servant, leaves his city at Christmas time to follow a comet that incites him to travel toward the Savior's birth place. The Magus's journey passes through Sodom (Rome), Gomorrah (Milan), Numanzia (Paris), and finally Ur, the Middle Eastern city of a universal origin. This chapter brings to the fore the important differences between Totò, the original protagonist of the hypothetical film, and Eduardo de Filippo, whom Pasolini chose to play the role of the Magus after Totò's death. It shows how Eduardo, a major Italian actor and also a superb playwright, lends Pasolini some key concepts of his poetics. Porn-Theo-Colossal works as a summation of Pasolini's apocalypticism: the sexual conformity supported by capitalism and the resurrection of the body as alienation, a form of surviving as one of the living dead somewhere outside of this world. The analysis of the different conclusions is essential to an understanding of Pasolini's complex and contradictory view of the apocalypse.Less

Salò and the School of Abuse: Salò Our Contemporary

Ramsey McGlazer

in Old Schools: Modernism, Education, and the Critique of Progress

This chapter revisits Pier Paolo Pasolini’s last film, Salò o le 120 giornate di Sodoma (1975), an adaptation of the Marquis de Sade set in the fascist Salò Republic. Challenging a critical tendency ... More

This chapter revisits Pier Paolo Pasolini’s last film, Salò o le 120 giornate di Sodoma (1975), an adaptation of the Marquis de Sade set in the fascist Salò Republic. Challenging a critical tendency to see the film as forward-looking or indeed “prophetic,” the chapter attends to Pasolini’s complex and abiding engagements with the past. These include, the chapter argues, engagements with the obsolete forms of what Giovanni Gentile disparaged as mere “instruction.” Salò redeploys these forms as it constructs and compels viewers to inhabit an old school. For Pasolini—whose film was, he said, “conceived as a rite”—the painful, ritual re-enactment of the past becomes a means of countering the collective forgetting of fascism and an alternative to fascism’s remaining “real.” Schooling spectators in what Ernesto De Martino calls the salience of the “bad past that returns,” Pasolini refuses the postwar imperative to disavow the fascist past, to render it a mere “parenthesis.” He draws not only on Sade’s “school for libertinage,” but also on the long-discounted techniques of “instruction” in order to insist that any move beyond fascism must proceed from reckoning with it, not denial. The capacity for this reckoning is what Salò seeks to impart.Less

“A Diluted Reel of Film in My Brain”: To Preach a New “Word of Abjuration” in Petrolio

Armando Maggi

in The Resurrection of the Body: Pier Paolo Pasolini from Saint Paul to Sade

This chapter analyzes the theme of form, which Pasolini identifies as the foundation of his novel, Petrolio. The author's initial claim that Petrolio is less about a plot than about the birth of a ... More

This chapter analyzes the theme of form, which Pasolini identifies as the foundation of his novel, Petrolio. The author's initial claim that Petrolio is less about a plot than about the birth of a form is usually not taken as the actual foundation of the novel; it is examined as a philosophical statement that is often independent of the events narrated in the text. Consistent with the apocalyptic themes studied in the previous chapters, it is argued that this context “to give birth to a form,” as Pasolini says, signifies a sequence of interrelated concepts: a new way of seeing reality, but also the form of a new reality and the form of a new organism—the fetus of a new humanity. In other words, Petrolio is about the formation of a new world and a new way of inhabiting it.Less

Tableaux Vivants 1: Painting, Film, Death and Passion Plays in Pasolini and Godard

Steven Jacobs

in Framing Pictures: Film and the Visual Arts

This chapter presents the fashion for tableaux vivants in nineteenth-century culture as a prefiguration of cinema. Apart from including literal representations of tableaux vivants performed on the ... More

This chapter presents the fashion for tableaux vivants in nineteenth-century culture as a prefiguration of cinema. Apart from including literal representations of tableaux vivants performed on the stage, the cinema of the early 1900s appropriated the aesthetics of tableaux vivants in its attempts to develop a new model of narrative cinema. Strikingly, these practices were revived in post-war European modernist cinema, which often included tableaux vivants in line with its interest in duration and stillness. By incorporating tableaux vivants into their films, modernist filmmakers attempted at determining the specificity of their medium – movement was juxtaposed to stasis, pictorial or sculptural space to cinematic space, iconic immediacy to filmic duration, and so forth. These issues are particularly dealt with in the context of a discussion of Pasolini's La Ricotta and Godard's Passion, which both are films about the making of a film. In both works, the self-referential aspect is thus explicit and, strikingly, both films-in-the-film consist of tableaux vivants based on famous paintings.Less

Canonicity

Pantelis Michelakis

in Greek Tragedy on Screen

This chapter presents a more systematic discussion of issues of accessibility and value. It begins by looking at cultural, institutional, and critical forces that shape the way in which certain films ... More

This chapter presents a more systematic discussion of issues of accessibility and value. It begins by looking at cultural, institutional, and critical forces that shape the way in which certain films or groups of films have come to be considered canonical when other films have been marginalized. It then takes a closer look at how two particular films — Michael Cacoyannis' Electra and Pier Paolo Pasolini's Oedipus the King — engage in debates around canonization and value formation processes, focusing on their use of realism, one of the most bedevilled but also multifaceted aspects of mainstream cinema.Less

Pier Paolo Pasolini and “The ‘Cinema of Poetry’”

P. Adams Sitney

in The Cinema of Poetry

The chapter recovers the context of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s critical and theoretical formulation of “free indirect point-of-view” and shows how that apparatus allowed Pasolini to break down the ... More

The chapter recovers the context of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s critical and theoretical formulation of “free indirect point-of-view” and shows how that apparatus allowed Pasolini to break down the conventional distinction between the self-conscious avant-garde cinema and the European realist cinema. The work of Michelangelo Antonioni, Bernardo Bertolucci and Jean-Luc Godard serve as crucial examples of this separation and provide firm ground for Pasolini’s evolving ideas on poetry and free indirect point of view.Less

Introduction: Sodom, Its Inhabitants, and Its Language in Pasolini's Final Works

Armando Maggi

in The Resurrection of the Body: Pier Paolo Pasolini from Saint Paul to Sade

This book shows how Sodom and its practice against nature dominate the last phase of Pier Paolo Pasolini's poetics. The screenplay Saint Paul, the scenario Porn-Theo-Colossal, the novel Petrolio, and ... More

This book shows how Sodom and its practice against nature dominate the last phase of Pier Paolo Pasolini's poetics. The screenplay Saint Paul, the scenario Porn-Theo-Colossal, the novel Petrolio, and the film Salò are carefully examined in the light of their multiple sources. The four works analyzed here are strictly connected to one another and obsessively revolve around the problem of sodomy and the sodomitical subject. An overview of the subsequent chapters is also presented.Less

Splitting Paul

Cavan W. Concannon

in Profaning Paul

This chapter looks at how Paul's archive can be redeemed by splitting the apostle in two: attending to his oppressive and liberative tendencies. The chapter uses the work of Pier Paolo Pasolini and ... More

This chapter looks at how Paul's archive can be redeemed by splitting the apostle in two: attending to his oppressive and liberative tendencies. The chapter uses the work of Pier Paolo Pasolini and Brian Blount as examples. The chapter also attends to how enslaved Africans in the antebellum South engaged with both the Bible and Paul's archive.Less

Epilogue: Neorealism, Cinema of Poetry, and Italian Contemporary Cinema

Silvia Carlorosi

in Global Neorealism: The Transnational History of a Film Style

This chapter looks at examples of neorealism in recent Italian cinema. It focuses on two films—Andrea and Antonio Frazzi’s Certi bambini (A Children’s Story, 2004), and Matteo Garrone’s Gomorra ... More

This chapter looks at examples of neorealism in recent Italian cinema. It focuses on two films—Andrea and Antonio Frazzi’s Certi bambini (A Children’s Story, 2004), and Matteo Garrone’s Gomorra (Gomorrah 2008)—which demonstrate how contemporary Italian cinema is dealing with its neorealist legacy, pushing it in the direction of what we can call, using Pier Paolo Pasolini’s intuition, a “cinema of poetry.” The chapter analyzes how the “cinema of poetry” of these films can be considered the contemporary legacy of neorealism, with its main interest in representing the real, even in its multifaceted expressions.Less

Conclusion: “A Schizophrenic Child Is a Tiny Dot, I Dreamed Once”: Metamorphosis in Mario Mieli and Pasolini

Armando Maggi

in The Resurrection of the Body: Pier Paolo Pasolini from Saint Paul to Sade

This chapter presents a close reading of Mario Mieli's Elementi di critica omosessuale (Elements of homosexual criticism). The book not only addresses some of Pasolini's central concerns, but also ... More

This chapter presents a close reading of Mario Mieli's Elementi di critica omosessuale (Elements of homosexual criticism). The book not only addresses some of Pasolini's central concerns, but also makes use of similar philosophical sources, primarily Norman O. Brown. Mieli, whose book appeared in 1977, only two years after Pasolini's death, comments on the significance of his murder and offers a new look at the poet's persona, that is, the public image he molded according to the ideological parameters expressed by his works.Less

Seizures of Chance: Paulinist Agencies in Neocapitalist Contexts

Ward Blanton

in A Materialism for the Masses: Saint Paul and the Philosophy of Undying Life

This chapter explores temporality and analogical potentials in Pier Paolo Pasolini's screenplay about Saint Paul. Focusinng on Pasolini's novel, Petrolio, it asks what codes eventally emerge into ... More

This chapter explores temporality and analogical potentials in Pier Paolo Pasolini's screenplay about Saint Paul. Focusinng on Pasolini's novel, Petrolio, it asks what codes eventally emerge into operativity making events narratable, temporalized. Petrolio, it argues, can be read as a repetition of the quest to approach the codes or schēmata of and in the very appearing of narrativity, a quest on which linear temporal flows and coherent narrations of cause and effect often enough flounder or are inverted. It also considers the Paulinism of Jacques Lacan, the singular aura or surplus value in relation to religion, and the inversion of an image of cinematic rebellion into a form of normalizing participation within a more diffuse and consumerist political economy. Finally, it links a free-floating surplus of production within the economy of power relations to both the ancient Paul and his return in late capitalism.Less

‘In remembrance of his persone’: transhistorical empathy and the Chaucerian face

Louise D’Arcens

in Contemporary Chaucer across the centuries

From the earliest manuscript images through to cinematic depictions, Chaucer’s ‘persone’, that is his face and body, has been a key focus in the pursuit of transhistorical intimacy with the author. ... More

From the earliest manuscript images through to cinematic depictions, Chaucer’s ‘persone’, that is his face and body, has been a key focus in the pursuit of transhistorical intimacy with the author. Chaucer’s physical self has been portrayed repeatedly across subsequent centuries in an array of media. Drawing upon the hermeneutic concept of Einfühlung (‘feeling into’) to examine the long ‘empathetic afterlife’ enjoyed by Chaucer’s ‘persone’, D’Arcens explores what Chaucer’s face and body have come to mean to post-medieval audiences; she traces how these differences intersect with the constantly changing nature of Chaucer’s legacy, especially as he and his work have been deemed to reflect national literary and comic traditions.Less

Seeing Time

in The Time of the Crime: Phenomenology, Psychoanalysis, Italian Film

This chapter examines the relationship between time and the subject of perception Pier Paolo Pasolini's film Oedipus Rex. It analyzes the shots marking the encounter between the protagonist and the ... More

This chapter examines the relationship between time and the subject of perception Pier Paolo Pasolini's film Oedipus Rex. It analyzes the shots marking the encounter between the protagonist and the scenes of his infancy and shows that the same landscape presents the viewers with the coexistence of multiple temporal layers. This chapter also suggests that Pasolini's cinema of poetry constitutes a site of both perceptual emergence and philosophical articulation and argues that the film defies the very investigative impetus it is expected to celebrate.Less

The Medean Presence: Violence Unmade and Remade

Juliette Cherbuliez

in In the Wake of Medea: Neoclassical Theater and the Arts of Destruction

The Medean presence is neither progressive nor genealogical; this chapter demonstrates this concept by tying Pier Paolo Pasolini to Ovid in a non-chronological consideration of literature as an art ... More

The Medean presence is neither progressive nor genealogical; this chapter demonstrates this concept by tying Pier Paolo Pasolini to Ovid in a non-chronological consideration of literature as an art of destruction. An analysis of Maria Callas’s performance in the titular role of Pasolini’s 1969 Medea offers structural connections to the Medea of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, connections that upend a traditional understanding of history, influence, and the constitution of character. Medea is an exception in this text generally studied and celebrated for its narratives of transformation, which are also considered as generative or explanatory origin stories. Medea is exceptional because her transformations are really nontransformative: they leave nothing behind but the story of their violence. Through this Medea story, Ovid constructs description as a “monument of destruction.” This chapter suggests a link between literature description and destruction, wherein violence is precisely beyond structural control.Less

Sound: The Politics of the Sonic Interstice and the Dissonance of the Neutral

Laura Rascaroli

in How the Essay Film Thinks

In embracing an understanding of essay film’s soundscape that does not stop at voiceover, but extends to all the elements of a complex environment made up of speech, music, sounds, noise, and ... More

In embracing an understanding of essay film’s soundscape that does not stop at voiceover, but extends to all the elements of a complex environment made up of speech, music, sounds, noise, and silence, this chapter moves beyond traditional logocentric and vococentric approaches to the essay film to explore the disjunctive interstice of Deleuze’s sound image. The complexly imbricated auditory space of Language Gulf in the Shouting Valley (2013) by Lawrence Abu Hamdan is considered in light of an essayistic use of voice and sound as political agents. Hypothesizing a genre of musical essay films, the chapter also examines sound in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s La rabbia (Rage, 1963), seen in comparison with Santiago Álvarez’s Now! (1964) and Erik Gandini’s Surplus: Terrorized into Being Consumers (2003). The Barthesian Neutral and ideas of dissonance form the basis of a discussion of musical queering as a form of protestation.Less