Film director and writer, born in Bologna, N Italy. He became a Marxist following World War 2, moved to Rome, and began to write sordid novels of slum life in the city. In the 1950s he also worked as a scriptwriter and actor. He made his debut as a director in 1961, and became known for controversial, bawdy literary adaptations such as Il Vangelo secondo Matteo (1964, The Gospel According to St Matthew), Il Decamerone (1971, The Decameron), and The Canterbury Tales (1973). He was murdered, probably as the result of a homosexual encounter. The investigation into his murder was reopened in Rome in 2005.
Pier Paolo Pasolini|
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| Born: |
March 5, 1922 Bologna, Italy |
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| Died: |
November 2, 1975 Ostia, Rome, Italy |
| Occupation(s): | novelist, poet, intellectual, film director, journalist, linguist, philosopher |
Pier Paolo Pasolini (March 5, 1922 - November 2, 1975) was an Italian poet, intellectual, film director, and writer.
Pasolini distinguished himself as a philosopher, linguist, novelist, playwright, filmmaker, newspaper and magazine columnist, actor, painter and political figure.
Biography
Early years
Pasolini was born in Bologna, traditionally the most leftist of Italian cities. In 1926, however, Pasolini's father was arrested for gambling debts, and his mother moved to her family's house in Casarsa, in the Friuli region.
Pasolini began writing poems at the age of seven, inspired by the natural beauty of Casarsa. Pasolini found it difficult to adapt to all these moves, though in the meantime he enlarged his poetry and literature readings (Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Shakespeare, Coleridge, Novalis) and left behind the religious fervor of his early years. The two met again in Bologna, where Pasolini spent seven years while completing the high school: here he cultivated new passions, including soccer. Pasolini always showed his friends a virile and strong exterior, totally hiding his interior travail: he even took part in the Fascist government's culture and sports competitions. Pasolini's poems of this period started to include fragments in Friulian language, which he had learnt at his mother's side.
First poetical works
After the summer in Casarsa, in 1941 Pasolini published at his own expense a collection of poems in Friulian, Versi a Casarsa. 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. These experiences led Pasolini to rethink his opinion about the cultural politics of Fascism, and to switch gradually to a Communist position. Here, for the first time, Pasolini had to face the erotic disquiet he had suppressed during his adoscelent years. Pasolini tried to remain apart from these events, teaching, along with his mother, those students whom war rendered unable to reach the schools in Pordenone or Udine. He experienced his first homosexual love for one of his students, just when a Slovenian schoolgirl, Pina Kalč, was falling in love with Pasolini himself. In the same year Pasolini joined also the Association for the Autonomy of Friuli, and graduated with a final thesis about Giovanni Pascoli's works.
In 1946 a small poetry collection of Pasolini's, I Diarii ("The Diaries") was published by The Academiuta.
Adhesion to the Italian Communist Party
On January 26, 1947, Pasolini wrote a controversial declaration for the frontpage of the newspaper Libertà: "In our opinion, we think that currently only Communism is able to provide a new culture".
He was also planning to extend the work of the Academiuta to other Romance language literatures and knew the exiled Catalan poet Carles Cardó.
In October of the same year, however, Pasolini was charged with the corruption of minors and obscene acts in public places. Living a difficult situation, in January 1950 Pasolini moved to Rome with his mother. Instead of asking for help from other writers, Pasolini preferred to go his own way.
In these years Pasolini transferred his Friulian 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 literature section of the Italian State radio, left his teaching job and moved to the Monteverde quarter and published La meglio gioventù, his first important collection of dialect poems. The work had great success, but was received negatively by the PCI establishment and, most importantly, by the Italian Government, which even promoted a lawsuit against Pasolini and his editor, Garzanti.
Though totally exculpated of any charge, Pasolini became a favourite victim of insinuations, especially by tabloid press.
In 1957, together with Sergio Citti, Pasolini collaborated on Federico Fellini's film Le Notti di Cabiria, writing dialogues for the Roman dialect parts.
His first film as director and screenwriter is Accattone ("Panhandler") of 1961, again set in Rome's marginal quarters. In 1963 the episode "La ricotta", included in the collective movie RoGoPaG, was sequestrated, and Pasolini tried for offence to the Italian state.
In this period Pasolini was frequently abroad: in 1961, with Elsa Morante and Alberto Moravia, to India (where he went again seven years later); Pasolini, though accepting the ideological motivations of the students, declared they were "anthropologically middle-class" and, subsequently, destined to fail in the revolutionary attempt. His film of 1968, Teorema, participated in the annual Venice Film Festival in a hot climate, as Pasolini had proclaimed for the Festival being self-managed by the directors themselves (see also Works section).
In 1970 Pasolini bought an old castle near Viterbo, several kilometers north to Rome, where he began to write his last and unfinished novel, Petrolio.
Death
Pasolini died on November 2, 1975 at the beach of Ostia, near Rome, in a location typical of his novels. Giuseppe Pelosi, a hustler, was arrested and confessed to murdering Pasolini. On May 7th, 2005, he retracted his confession, claiming that unidentified men had killed Pasolini (he spoke of three strangers, with a southern Italian accent, insulting Pasolini as a "filthy communist"). The investigation into Pasolini's death was reopened following Pelosi's recantation.
His murder is still not completely explained: some contradictions in the declarations of Pelosi, a strange intervention by Italian secret services during the investigations and some lack of coherence of related documents during the different parts of the judicial procedures brought some of Pasolini's friends (actress Laura Betti, a close friend, particularly) to suspect that his murder had been commissioned. An enquiry of Pasolini's friend Oriana Fallaci (on the "Europeo" magazine) brought up the inefficiency of the investigations; many clues indicate as unlikely that Pelosi killed Pasolini alone. It is true, indeed, that Pasolini, in the months just before his death, had seen many politicians, telling them that he was aware of certain crucial secrets.
Pasolini was buried in Casarsa, in his beloved Friuli. In the grave he wears the jersey of the Italian Showmen National Team, a benefaction soccer team founded by Pasolini among others.
New evidence this year (2005) points to Pasolini being murdered by an extortionist. Testimony by Pasolini's friend Sergio Citti indicates that some of the film rolls from Salò were stolen and Pasolini was going to meet with the thieves after a visit to Stockholm, November 2, 1975. On the thirtieth anniverary of his death, an technically innovative biographical cartoon was made, entitled Pasolini requiem (2005), animated and directed by Mario Verger, with passages drawn from Mamma Roma, Uccellacci Uccellini, La Terra vista dalla Luna, and at last with the description of the Ostia's murder.
Works
Pasolini's first novel, Ragazzi di vita (1955), dealt with the lumpen proletariat of Rome. While making the film, Pasolini vowed to direct it from the "believer's point of view," but later, upon viewing the completed work, realized that he had expressed his own beliefs instead.
In his 1966 film, Uccellacci e Uccellini (literally "Bad Birds and Little Birds", known as The Hawks and the Sparrows in the English version), a sort of picaresque - and at the same time mystic - fable, he wanted the great Italian comedian Totò to work with one of his preferred "naif" actors, Ninetto Davoli.
Significance
Pasolini, as a director, created a sort of second neorealism, which deeply and constantly touched picaresque tones, showing a sad reality — hidden, but real, concrete — which many social and political lobbies had no interest in seeing brought to light. The doubt that Pasolini often inserted in his works, that such realities are less distant from us than we imagine, is one of his major contributions to a change in the Italian psyche, and an unrepeated example of poetry applied to cruel realities.
The director also promoted the concept of "natural sacredness" in his works, the concept that the world is holy in and of itself, and does not need any spiritual essence or supernatural blessing to attain this state. Indeed, Pasolini was an avowed atheist. The contrast between public opinion and what Pasolini was able to show, focused on sexual moralism, was perhaps what made him encounter general disapproval. Pasolini's poetry, lesser known outside of Italy, often deals with his highly revered mother and his same-sex love interests, but this is not the main and only theme.
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.
Political views
In politics too, or better, in the social debate, Pasolini was able to create scandal and debate with some assertions that were as much unheard as, at the same time, true: during the disorders of 1969, when the autonomist university students were acting in a guerrilla-like fashion against the police in the streets of Rome, all the leftist forces declared their complete support for the students, and described the disorders as a civil fight of proletarians against the system. Pasolini, instead, alone among the communists, declared that he was with the police;
Pasolini was also an ardent critic of consumismo, i.e. 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. (1966)
"The mark which has dominated all my work is this longing for life, this sense of exclusion, which doesn't lessen but augments this love of life." (Interview in documentary, late 1960s)
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