Pier Paolo Pasolini

Pier Paolo Pasolini (Bologna, Emilia-Romagna, March 5, 1922-Ostia, Lazio, November 2, 1975) was an Italian writer and film director. A versatile man and controversial character, he was one of the most recognized artists of his generation, both as a poet and as a filmmaker. But he also distinguished himself as an actor, journalist, essayist, novelist, and political activist; to a lesser extent, as a playwright and painter. His murder caused shock in Italy and the rest of the world. The authorship and the circumstances of his murder remain the subject of debate.

Biography

His Early Years

He was the son of Carlo Alberto Pasolini, a lieutenant in the Italian army, and Susanna Colussi, an elementary school teacher. His parents married in 1921, and the following year Pier Paolo, named after a paternal uncle, was born in Bologna, a city with a leftist political tradition. His family moved to Conegliano in 1923 and to Belluno in 1925, both in the Veneto region, where another son named Guidalberto was born. As he said, he was the son of a representative family of Italian unity:

My father descends from an old noble family of Romagna; my mother, on the contrary, comes from a family of French peasants who reached the petty-bourgeois condition. My mother's mother was piamontesa, but with ties to Sicily and the region of Rome.

In 1926, Pasolini's father was arrested for gambling debts.^{[citation needed]} His mother moved with the children to her family home in Casarsa della Delizia, in the Friuli region. That same year, his father was the first to arrest and identify the young Anteo Zamboni, who had just tried to assassinate Benito Mussolini. In 1929 Pasolini began to write poems inspired by the natural beauty of Casarsa. One of his early influences was the work of Arthur Rimbaud ^{[citation needed]} .

In 1931 his father was posted to Idria (now Idrija, in Slovenia) in the Julian March. In 1933 they moved to Cremona in Lombardy and later to Scandiano and Reggio Emilia. Pasolini had a difficult time adapting to all these changes, using his free time to magnify his reading of poetry and literature (reading Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Shakespeare, Coleridge, Novalis), moving away from his religious fervor of his early years. At the Reggio Emilia school, he met his first true friend, Luciano Serra. The two were again in Bologna, where Pasolini spent seven years while finishing secondary education. Here he cultivated new passions, including soccer. With his, Ermes Parini, Franco Farolfi and Elio Meli formed a group dedicated to literary discussions. He first published at the age of 19, while studying at the University of Bologna. In 1939, Pasolini graduated and entered the College of Literature at the University of Bologna, discovering new subjects, such as philology and the aesthetic figures of the arts. He took part in the fascist government in sports and cultural competitions. His poems from that period include fragments in Friulian, a language he did not speak but which he could read, at the beginning of each poem: "I learn this as a mystical act of love, the best of felibrismo, similar to the Provencal poets."

Her initial poems

After the summer in Casarsa, in 1941 he published his first collection of poems in Friulan, Versi a Casarsa. The work was appreciated and noted by intellectuals and critics such as Gianfranco Contini, Alfonso Gatto and Antonio Russi. His paintings were also well received. Pasolini was editor-in-chief of the magazine II Setaccio (The Sieve), but ended up being fired due to conflicts with the editor, who was aligned with the fascist regime. A trip to Germany helped him, too, to perceive the "provincial" of Italian culture at that time. These experiences gave Pasolini new thoughts on his opinion about the political culture of fascism and gradually initiate his communist position.

In 1942, the family took refuge in Casarsa, considered a quieter place and await the conclusion of World War II, a very common decision among Italian military families. In the weeks after the armistice of September 8, Pasolini was conscripted, captured and held prisoner by the German Wehrmacht, but was able to escape disguised as a civilian, finding his way to Casarsa. Here he joined a group of young fans of the Friulian language, who wanted to give Casarsa equal status to Udine in their regional standard. From May 1944 they published a magazine entitled Stroligùt di cà da l'aga. Meanwhile, Casarsa suffered from Allied bombing and was forced to enlist in the Italian Social Republic, with similar partisan-type activity.

Pasolini tried to stay away from these events. He, his mother and other schoolboys taught students in the schools of Pordenone or Udine, beginning in October 1943. Others were also involved, but this educational work was considered illegal and was suspended in February 1944. It is said that he had his first homosexual experience with one of his students. His brother Guido, 19, joined the Action Party and the Ossopo-Freuli Brigade, taking over the bushes near Slovenia. On February 12, 1945, Guido was killed in an ambush by Tito's Yugoslav guerilla partisans. This fatal episode would be a harrowing tragedy for her mother and her son.

Six days later Pasolini and others founded the Friulian Language Academy (Academiuta di lenga furlana). Meanwhile, Pasolini's father, Carlo Alberto, who brought pets from Kenya to Italy, was arrested in November 1945 for Guido's death. He stayed in Casarsa, Susanna's hometown. Also in November Pier Paolo Pasolini graduated after presenting his final thesis on the works of Giovanni Pascoli.

In 1946, he published a small collection of poems, I Diarii (The Diary) with the Academy. In October she traveled to Rome. The following May, he called Quaderni Rossi, who was handwriting old exercise books in red covers. He completed a drama in Italian, II Cappellano; and his collection of poetry, I Pianti ( The Cries ) was also published by the Academy.

Relationship with the Italian Communist Party

On October 30, 1945, Pasolini joined the Patrie tal Friuli association, founded in Udine. The political statutes of the region were the subject of confrontation between the different political factions. Pasolini wanted a tradition based on Friuli, with which he attacked Christianity: his was an attempt at civic and social progress, in opposition to the autonomists who wanted to preserve their privileges based on "immobilism". He also criticized the Communist Party for its opposition to the revolution and its support for Italian centralism. He founded the Movimento Popolare Friulano party, but eventually resigned, convinced that it could be controlled and used by the Social Democratic Christian party, because it counted on the Yugoslavs who remained for long periods of time in the Friuli fringes.

On January 26, 1947, Pasolini wrote a statement on the front page of the newspaper Libertà: "In our opinion, we think that currently only the communists are capable of supplying a new culture." This generated partisan controversy due to the speed with which he had expressed himself without being a member of the Italian Communist Party.

He was planning to extend a work at the Academy for other literature in the Romance language and met the exiled Catalan poet, Carles Cardó. After joining the PCI, Pasolini took part in various demonstrations. In May 1949, he attended the Peace Congress, in Paris. Observing the works and the speakers, and seeing the clashes against the Italian police, he began to conceive his first novel. Pope Pius XII excommunicated communist sympathizers from the Church. During this period, while accepting a secondary school teaching position, Pasolini sat on a stool outside the local branch of the Communist Party as a skilled writer challenging the notion of communism as contrary to Christian values.

In October 1949 and after little more than two years of militancy, he was expelled from the Italian Communist Party "for moral indignity", due to his known homosexuality, since they considered it a "bourgeois degeneration".

Literary career

In 1957 he published the poems Le ceneri di Gramsci (Gramsci's Ashes, Viareggio Prize of 1957) and the following year L'usignolo della Chiesa cattolica (The Nightingale of the Catholic Church). In 1960 he gave to the printer the essays Passione e ideology , and in 1961 another book of verses, La religione del mio tempo .

The essays On dialectal poetry (1947), Italian popular poetry (1960) and Private writings (1975) stand out; the anthologies Dialectal Poetry of the 20th Century and Anthology of Popular Poetry (both 1955).

On the other hand, his poetic works are fundamental: The Best Youth (1954), Gramsci's Ashes (1957), The Religion of My Time (1961) and Poetry in the Shape of a Rose (1961–1964). Then one of his poems from The religion of my time:

If the sun comes back, if the evening goes down,
if the night has a taste of future nights,
If a rainy afternoon seems to come back
of times so loved and never fully possessed,
I am no longer happy to enjoy or suffer them:
I don't feel anymore, in front of me, all my life...
To be poets it takes a lot of time:
hours and hours of solitude are necessary
to form something that is strength, abandonment,
vice, freedom, to shape chaos.
I have little time left: because of death
that comes to meet me in my withering youth.
But also because of our human world
that takes away the bread from men, and the poets peace.

In post-war Italian literature, his novels Street Boys (1955), A Violent Life (1959) and Women of Rome also stand out. i> (1960), and the dramas Orgía (1969) and Calderón (1973). She regularly published articles in various Italian newspapers, such as Corriere della Sera.

His poetic work, like his essay and journalistic work, polemized with official Marxism and Catholicism, which he called "the two churches" and reproached them for not understanding the culture of their own proletarian and peasant bases. He also judged that the dominant cultural system, especially through television, created a unifying model that destroyed the most naive and valuable cultures of popular traditions.

Senator Marcello Dell'Utri of the Forza Italia party, announced on March 2, 2010 that he possessed the chapter of Petróleo, the posthumous book by Pasolini in which he investigates some murders committed in the 1970s. According to experts, the data offered in the book and especially in that missing chapter, would lead to the murderers of Enrico Mattei, president of the ENI oil company, who died in 1962 in a plane crash shrouded in mystery and that of Pasolini himself. Hence the title of Pasolini's research book, Petróleo, which was published in 1992 without that chapter.

Theater

• Orgy (1968)
• Porcile
• Calderón (1973)
• Pilade (1973)
• Affabulazione (1977, posthumous)
• Bestia da stile (1977, posthumous)

Poetry

• Poesie to CasarsaMario Landi, Bologna 1942.
• PoesieStamperia Primon, San Vito al Tagliamento 1945.
• DiariiPubblicazioni dell'Academiuta, Casarsa 1945.
• I piantiPubblicazioni dell'Academiuta, Casarsa 1946.
• Dov'è la mia, with 13 disgni di G. Zigaina, Edizioni dell'Academiuta, Casarsa 1949.
• Such còur di un frut, Edizioni di Lingua Friulana, Tricesimo 1953 (new edition, by Luigi Ciceri, Forum Julii, Údine 1974).
• Dal daily (1945-47), Sciascia, Caltanissetta 1954.
• Meglio gioventùSansoni, Florence 1954.
• Il canto popolareMeridiana, Milan 1954.
• Le ceneri di Gramsci, Garzanti, Milan 1957 Edition, translation and notes by Stéphanie Ameri and Juan Carlos Abril, Gramsci's ashes, Madrid: Visor, 2009, ISBN 978-84-9895-732-7.
• L'Usignolo della Chiesa CattolicaLonganesi, Milan 1958.
• Rome 1950. JournalAll'insegna del pesce d'oro (Scheiwiller), Milan 1960.
• Sonetto primaverile (1953), Scheiwiller, Milan 1960.
• The Religion of the Tempo MioGarzanti, Milan 1961.
• Poesia in forma di rosa (1961-1964), Garzanti, Milan 1964.
• Poesie dimenticateTo the care of Luigi Ciceri, Società phylologica Friulana, Údine 1965.
• Trasumanar and organizzarGarzanti, Milan 1971.
• The nuova gioventù. Poesie friulane 1941-1974, Einaudi, Turin 1975.
• Le poesie: Le ceneri di Gramsci, La religione del mio tempo, Poesia in forma di rosa, Trasumanar e organizzarGarzanti, Milan 1975.
• Bestemmia. Tutte le poesie, 2 vols., by Graziella Chiarcossi and Walter Siti, Garzanti, Milan 1993.
• Poesie scelte, edited by Nico Naldini and Francesco Zambon, TEA, Milan 1997.
• Tutte le poesie2 vols, by W. Siti, Mondadori, Milan 2003.

Narrative

• Ragazzi di vitaGarzanti, Milan 1955. A film was filmed freely based on the argument of the novel. He was tattooed. The night is heavy (I noticed it.), and was directed by Mauro Bolognini in 1959. The novel translated into Spanish with the title Chavales delbrook. He was a finalist in the edition of the Strega Prize that Giovanni Comisso won.
• A violent vitaGarzanti, Milan 1959.
• L'odore dell'IndiaLonganesi, Milan 1962.
• Il sogno di una cosaGarzanti, Milan 1962.
• Alì dagli occhi azzurriGarzanti, Milan 1965.
• Theorem, Garzanti, Milan 1968.
• The Divine MimesisEinaudi, Turin 1975.
• Beloved mineGarzanti, Milan 1982.
• PetrolioEinaudi, Turin 1992.
• A paese di temporali e di primule, Guanda, Parma 1993.
• Storie della città di Dio. Racconti e cronache romane (1950-1966)Einaudi, Turin 1995.

Essays

Pasolini in front of Antonio Gramsci's grave.

• Passione e ideologia (1948-1958), Garzanti, Milan 1960.
• ErealismGarzanti, Milan 1972.
• Scritti corsariGarzanti, Milan 1975. (Corsar writings), 2009.
• Volgar'eloquioed. by Antonio Piromalli and Domenico Scafoglio, Athena, Naples, 1976Vulgar tongue. Translation and prologue of Salvador Cobo. Madrid: Editions El Salmón, 2017)
• Lettere luteraneEinaudi, Turin, 1976.
• Descrizioni di descrizioni, by Graziella Chiarcossi, Einaudi, Turin 1979.
• Il Portico della Morte, by Cesare Segre, «Associazione Fondo Pier Paolo Pasolini», Garzanti, Milan 1988.
• I film degli altried. by Tullio Kezich, Guanda, Parma 1996.
• Dialettal poetry of the Novecented. by Mario Dell'Arco and Pier Paolo Pasolini, introd. Pasolini, Guanda, Parma 1952.
• Canzoniere Italian. Anthologia della poesia popolareed. by Pier Paolo Pasolini, Guanda, Parma 1955.
• Pier Paolo Pasolini e il setaccio 1942-1943ed. by Mario Ricci, Cappelli, Bologna 1977,
• Saggi sulla letteratura e sull'arte, 2 vols., ed. by Walter Siti and Silvia De Laude, Mondadori, Milan, 1999.
• Saggi sulla politica e sulla societàWalter Siti and Silvia De Laude, Mondadori, Milan 1999.

Cinema

He began in 1961 as a director, and soon after created a sort of second Neorealism, exploring aspects of everyday life, in a tone close to that of Commedia dell'arte, focusing his gaze on the marginal characters, crime and poverty that Italy has dragged on since the postwar period, and establishing a narrative and visual style in which pathos and irony prevail over the thick and sometimes sordid humor of his stories.

He made his debut in 1961 with a film with a neorealist key but that covered much more and surprised critics: Accattone, in which he began his personal and professional relationship with Franco Citti, one of his fetish actors, who along with his brother Sergio Citti, had been a student of Pasolini when he was a teacher. His second film, Mamma Roma (1962), is already a fully neorealist work that almost from its premiere became one of the pinnacles of 1960s Italian cinema, and which has one of the most most applauded by the memorable actress Anna Magnani. With The Gospel according to Saint Matthew (1964), Pasolini breaks with his previous career (remember that he was a recognized atheist, and that in 1963 he was sentenced to four months in prison for his anti-clerical positions in the film Ro.Go.Pa.G.), although he does not betray his personal obsessions or the constants of his cinema, by presenting the biblical passage in a Marxist reading (consistent with his left-wing ideology). Despite everything, the director of L'Osservatore Romano, Giovanni Maria Vian, will describe it as "one of the most beautiful films ever filmed on the life of Jesus".

Pajaritos y pajarracos (1966) is one of his best works (despite the already magnificent two previous ones). A political and humanistic parable, it immortalized the endearing comic actor Totó in an unforgettable creation, and it is a film where music takes center stage in a unique way. Oedipus Rex (1967), was the first film with a script by someone else, the famous play by Sophocles, made into a film that same year in an English version with less commercial impact than this one, which included among its cast with the wonderful Silvana Mangano and one of the director's favorite actors, Laurent Terzieff. Teorema, premiered in 1968, marks Pasolini's international consecration, endowing him with a prestige that even caught the majority public. In this one, the works of Terence Stamp and Laura Betti stand out, both framed in a sordid-sensual atmosphere that raised some blisters in its time. Pigsty (1969), was one of his crudest and most realistic works, highly controversial at the time, it was considered degrading, provocative and obscene, which did not prevent it from being quite successful in European cinemas. Medea (1969), with the diva Maria Callas among the cast, is his second and best update-revision-adaptation of a play from classical Greece —this time by Euripides.

The 1970s began with the so-called Life Trilogy (consisting of The Decameron, 1971; The Canterbury Tales, 1972 and The Thousand and One Nights, 1974). They went through the film festivals of Cannes, Berlin or Venice with critical-commercial success and defined the drift of the last Pasolini towards freer and less narcissistic proposals (despite the fact that this trilogy teaches practically the opposite for the viewer). In 1971, a curious film appeared with the title Pasolini's Tales, directed by Sergio Citti, which took advantage of the commercial pull of the Italian and Ninetto Davoli (his other fetish actor) at the box office. A little earlier, in 1970, another film had appeared that "copied" Pasolini's style and "adopted" some of its actors: Ostia, directed by Sergio Citti and scripted by Pasolini.

The filmmaker's career was cut short when, in 1975, a film was released in theaters that convulsed the entire Italian society and made the author the subject of many death threats and even political pressure: Salò or the 120 days of Sodom, in which Pier Paolo adopts a self-critical tone towards some passages of his previous work and in which he adapts the Marquis de Sade with all the crudeness and with the greatest freedom with which a creator can has ever endowed himself, blurring the conventional and cinematographic limits that enclose eroticism, pornography, expression, sadism, provocation and human degradation.

The night before he died, he gave an interview, now famous, to Stampa Sera, in which he recalls the danger of fascism.

Murder

After the premiere of his latest film, Saló or the 120 days of Sodom, and in circumstances that have not yet been fully clarified, Pasolini was assassinated. A carabinieri patrol stopped an Alfa Romeo car driving at high speed in the vicinity of Rome. The driver, Giuseppe (Pino) Pelosi, a 17-year-old con man, tried to flee when he was arrested for stealing the vehicle, owned by Pasolini. Two hours later, the body of the director was found, with evidence of having been murdered, after being run over several times by his car and he died on November 2, 1975 in the Ostia spa. He had multiple bone fractures and burst testicles due to what appeared to be a metal rod. His body was partially burned. The autopsy revealed that he had been burned with gasoline after he died. Based on these observations from the forensic service, the mob's own style of vengeful killing, it was almost impossible for just one person to have carried out the entire operation. Thus, during the first investigations, the statements of the alleged murderer that he had killed him because the director proposed to have sexual relations did not convince the Italian population, and rumors circulated that there were politicians of that time who wanted the director dead, mainly due to the criticisms present in his films, his books and his political speeches, while, on the day of his murder, unknown persons had called him to blackmail him and return rolls with unpublished scenes of Salò. He was buried. in Casarsa, in his beloved Friuli.

In subsequent interrogations, Pelosi confessed that Pasolini had invited him to eat at the Biondo Tevere restaurant, near the Basilica of Saint Paul Outside the Walls, and that the manager knew. He ate spaghetti with oil and garlic. Pasolini drank a beer. At 11:30 p.m. they headed for Ostia, where Pasolini "asked something I didn't understand" about the boy sodomizing him with a wooden stick to which Pelosi refused, and then Pasolini hit him. Pelosi then ran out, grabbed two pieces from a table, about the size of a club, and beat Pasolini to death. He escaped in the car in a hurry and hit a bump in the road. "I killed Pasolini," he told his cellmate and the police, along with "other unknowns." Pelosi was convicted in 1976.

Twenty-nine years later, on May 7, 2005, Pelosi retracted her confession, saying it had been under threats to harm her relatives. He mentioned that three young people "with a southern accent" had committed the murder, insulting Pasolini as a "dirty communist." These new elements caused a wide sector of the Italian political and cultural environment to request the reopening of the case to clarify the crime. Pino Pelosi died on July 20, 2017, also under suspicious circumstances, never having sufficiently clarified Pasolini's murder.

Other evidence discovered in 2005 pointed out that Pasolini had been murdered by an extortionist. The testimony of a friend of Pasolini's, Sergio Citti, says that some reels of the film Salo had been stolen and that Pasolini had gone to see the thieves after visiting Stockholm on November 2, 1975. Subsequently, the Rome police reopened the case of Pasolini's murder, in May 2005, but the judges in charge of the investigation determined that the new elements were insufficient to continue with the lawsuit.

After his death, various tributes and documentary films have been made that analyze his figure from different perceptions, both biographical in use and essays on his impact on an international scale, his echo in later cinema, the true dimension of his personal universe, etc.

Filmography

Works about Pasolini

• 1971 Pier Paolo Pasolini: A Film Maker's Life (cortometraje) (documentary), directed by Carlo Hayman-Chaffey
• 1973 The British Showbiz Awards (episode of the TV series: Monty Python's Flying Circus), directed by Ian MacNaughton
• 1991 Ostia (cortometraje), directed by Julian Cole
• 1993 A fiorive uomo: Pier Paolo Pasolini (documentary), directed by Enzo Lavagnini
• 1995 Pasolini, an Italian crimedirected by Marco Tullio Giordana
• 1996 Nerolio, directed by Aurelio Grimaldi
• 2002 A mondo d'amore, directed by Aurelio Grimaldi
• 2004 Vie et mort de Pier Paolo Pasolini (TV), directed by Cyril Legann and Antoine Soltys
• 2005 The Pasolini case. Chronicle of a MurderGianluca Maconi's graphic novel.
• 2006 Pasolini prossimo nostro, (documentary), directed by Giuseppe Bertolucci
• 2006 Life and death of Pier Paolo Pasolini, theatrical work of Michel Azama
• 2006 "Sacrosanto Pasolini", play by the Grupo CUATROTABLAS de Perú on its 35th anniversary. Director and Dramaturgia, maestro Carlos Riboty (Universitá di Palermo, Sicily, Italy), Dramatic supervision, teacher Mario Delgado, founder of the group. With the sponsorship of Istituto Italiano di Cultura di Lima, director Nadir Morosi.
• 2009 Pasolini in pink shapeTheatrical work by Pedro Víllora.
• 2009 Il Cristo dell'eresia. Sacro e censor nel cinema di Pier Paolo Pasolini", critical monograph by Erminia Passannanti.
• 2009 The ricotta. Il Sacro TrasgreditoErminia Passannanti's critical monograph.
• 2013 Consumers: Pasolini in our day, essay by Miguel Suárez del Cerro.
• 2014 Pasolini, (biographical drama), directed by Abel Ferrara and starring Willem Dafoe.
• 2016 The macchinazione, (biographical drama), directed by David Grieco and starring Massimo Ranieri.
• 2016 Cycle Invocations: Pasolini, Centro Cultural San Martín, Buenos Aires. Address: Matias Feldman.
• 2022 Miguel Dalmau: Pasolini. The last prophet, Barcelona, Tusquets, XXXIV Comillas Award.
• 2022 Wonderful and wonderful city. Roman Poems, Barcelona, Ultramarines Editorial, translation and glossary of María Bastianes and Andrés Catalán, accompanied by the essays of Francesco Careri and Franco Buffoni.

Awards and recognitions

Cannes International Film Festival

Venice International Film Festival