“The cinema is an explosion of my love for reality.”
TRQ: PierPaoloPasolini, Born March 5, 1922
Controversial Italian film director, poet and novelist Pier Paolo Pasolini was born in Bologna, Italy. He studied art history and literature at the University of Bologna. One of Italy’s most important cultural figures, He engaged in social criticism as a public intellectual in his poetry, plays, films, novels and literary critique.
An unorthodox Marxist, his first two novels were inspired by his life in 1950’s Rome. Ragazzi di Vita (The Ragazzi) and Una Vita Violenta (A Violent Life) depict brutally realistic poverty, squalor and crime. Similarly, his first film Accattone features thieves, prostitutes and other underworld characters.
Openly homosexual, Pasolini was often at the center of controversy. Charged with blasphemy, obscenity, and corruption of minors, Pasolini was brought to trial over thirty- three times. In his conflicts with the Italian Communist Party, the Christian establishment, bourgeois values and neocapitalism, Pasolini blends his interests in Italian pop culture, Renaissance art, Greek tragedy and Baroque music.
In 1963, Pasolini met Ninetto Davoli, a fifteen-year-old, and described him as “the great love of his life.” Pasolini became his mentor and friend, casting him in the 1966 film Uccellacci e Uccellini (Bad Birds and Little Birds, or The Hawks and the Sparrows).
Influenced by his Catholic upbringing, Pasolini often queers and politicizes religious themes and iconography in his work. Rejecting ideas of redemption and shame, Pasolini’s saints and sinners are seductive and profane. His 1964 film Il Vangelo Secondo Matteo (The Gospel According to Saint Matthew) presents the life of Christ as martyr, and was nominated for British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) award.
More radical, the films Teorema (Theorem) and Porcile (Pigsty) use eroticism, violence and depravity as political provocations that drew criticism from the Roman Catholic Church. Made in 1968, Teorama features a mysterious spiritual being seducing a middle-class father and son. In his 1974 film Arabian Nights, an affair between a king and a male commoner ends in death. He linked fascism of the Italian Social Republic to sadism in his notorious 1975 film, the 120 Days of Sodom. Widely regarded as his masterpiece, the film was extensively banned for its transgressions against religious decency and political orthodoxy.
Pasolini’s films have been nominated and won awards at Cannes Film Festival, Venice Film Festival, the International Catholic Film Office and New York Film Critics Circle. He was friends with actress and filmmaker Laura Betti, and opera singer Maria Callas. Callas who was so taken with Pasolini that she had hoped to convert and marry him.
On November 2, 1975, Pasolini was murdered by a young male prostitute. “Want to go for a spin?” Pasolini asked, according to rent boy’s confession. “Come ride with me, and I’ll give you a present,” Pasolini reportedly offered.
Though the prostitute was convicted of murder in 1976, the circumstances around the crime are still a mystery. In this, Pasolini’s life imitated art. As he himself said in 1967, “It is only at the point of death, that our life, to that point ambiguous, undecipherable, suspended – acquires a meaning.”
Pasolini’s unfinished novel, Petrolio, was published in 1992.
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