Pier Paolo Pasolini: Performing Authorship 9780231542708

Table of contents :
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Death
1. Theater
2. Dante
3. Celebrity
4. Self-Portrait
5. Acting
6. Voice
Epilogue: Body
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Pier Paolo Pasolini

Pier Paolo Pasolini Performing Authorship

Gian Maria Annovi

columbia university press

New York

columbia universit y press publishers since 1893 new york chichester , west sussex cup.columbia.edu Copyright © 2017 Columbia University Press All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Annovi, Gian Maria, author. Title: Pier Paolo Pasolini : performing authorship / Gian Maria Annovi. Description: New York : Columbia University Press, [2017] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016019912 (print) | LCCN 2016031339 (ebook) | ISBN 9780231180306 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780231542708 (e-book) Subjects: LCSH: Pasolini, Pier Paolo, 1922–1975—Criticism and interpretation. Classification: LCC PQ4835.A48 Z565 2017 (print) | LCC PQ4835.A48 (ebook) | DDC 858/.91409—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016019912

Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper. Printed in the United States of America Book & Cover Design: Chang Jae Lee Cover Image: Courtesy of Centro Studi Teatro Stabile di Torino—Teatro Nazionale

Contents

Acknowledgments

vii

Introduction: Death 1. Theater

19

2. Dante 49 3. Celebrity

71

4. Self-Portrait

105

5. Acting 125 6. Voice

147

Epilogue: Body Notes

191

Bibliography 231 Index

247

169

1

Acknowledgments

I t i s i r o n i c t h at a p r o j e c t o n a u t h o r s h i p m u s t begin by acknowledging that its author is in fact indebted to a multitude of wonderful people. They inspired, provoked, and supported me, so this book is the result of a sort of collaborative authorial performance based on a direct exchange of ideas—almost like Pasolini’s. Indeed, I originally conceived the core of this project during my years at Columbia University, when a fellowship in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences allowed me to complete my research at the Centro Studi—Fondo Pier Paolo Pasolini of the Cineteca di Bologna in Italy. For those crucial formative years, I am indebted to Paolo Valesio, Teodolinda Barolini, and all the faculty and students of the Department of Italian. As this manuscript developed, I was very fortunate to be able to share my early research with my colleagues at the University of Denver: Roberta Waldbaum, Rachel Walsh, and Angela Polidori, to whom I am especially thankful. My manuscript found its final form at the University of Southern California.

viii acknowledgments

I am grateful to my colleagues in the Department of French and Italian and to my chair, Sherry Velasco, for their unwavering commitment to collegiality. Special gratitude goes to Margaret Rosenthal and Natania Meeker, who provided extraordinary intellectual and emotional support to help me complete my manuscript. Some other colleagues deserve particular mention for offering their time and intelligence over the years to help me develop my ideas and for engaging me in conversations about Pasolini, literature, film, and theory. For contributing to this project, they have earned my heartfelt gratitude: Julián GutiérrezAlbilla, Stefano Albertini, Zygmunt Baranski, Marco Antonio Bazzocchi, Simona Bondavalli, Joseph Boone, Shane Butler, Luca Caminati, Laura Chiesa, Stefano Colangelo, Andrea Cortellessa, Derek Duncan, Mark Franco, Massimo Fusillo, Peter Gadol, Manuele Gragnolati, Giulio Iacoli, Niva Lorenzini, Armando Maggi, Ara H. Merjian, Davide Messina, Lucia Re, John David Rhodes, Sergio Rigoletto, and Pasquale Verdicchio. I am immensely grateful to Roberto Chiesi, director of Centro Studi— Fondo Pier Paolo Pasolini, for his generosity and help during and after my period of research in Bologna. Without him, it would have been very difficult to locate many of the copyright owners of some of the images featured in this book. For their prompt assistance in making these images available to me, I thank Graziella Chiarcossi, Gloria Mereghetti, and Ilaria Spadolini of the Gabinetto G. P. Vieusseux of Florence; Riccardo Costantini of Cinemazero; Pietro Crivellaro and Anna Peyron of the Fondazione del Teatro Stabile of Turin; as well as John Baldessari, Elisabetta Benassi, Massimo Listri, Stefano Masotti, and Sandra Mior. This project has been supported by my home institution, the University of Southern California. In particular, my gratitude goes to Peter Mancall, vice dean in the Dornsife College of Letters, Arts, and Sciences. The Dean’s Office helped immensely with the cost of the permission rights for the illustrations used here. In the fi nal stage of this project, I was helped enormously also by the insightful comments from the manuscript’s anonymous readers. For their editorial assistance, I am also indebted and grateful to Justin Evans, Jamie Richards, and my graduate student Zoe Kemp. Portions of this book were anticipated in earlier articulations in the following articles and essays: “Marilyn’s Ashes: Celebrity and Authorship in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s La rabbia,” Modern Language Notes 131 (2016): 214–34; “La sequenza del fiore di carta: Tra metalinguaggio e metastoria,” in Pier Paolo Pasolini: Pros-

acknowledgments

ix

pettive americane, edited by Fulvio Orsitto and Federico Pacchioni (Pesaro: Metauro Edizioni, 2015), 139–55; “Il ragazzo dal fiore in bocca: Pasolini tra vecchia e nuova gioventù,” in Fratello selvaggio: Pier Paolo Pasolini tra gioventù e nuova gioventù, edited by Gian Maria Annovi (Massa: Transeuropa, 2013), 65–80; and “Salò after Salò: Expanded Readings of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Last Film,” in Corpus XXX: Pasolini, Petrolio, Salò, edited by Davide Messina (Bologna: Clueb, 2012), 165–79. I am grateful to all the individuals who allowed me to test out part of my research during the composition of this book. My gratitude goes to everyone at Columbia University Press who has been involved in the publication of this book, most notably my editor, Philip Leventhal, for his enthusiasm in embracing my project. I also want to remember all the friends who have supported me in this project with their presence in my life, among them my loving family in the United States, Alessandra Nicifero and Peter Bearman; my brothers and partners in crime, Nicola Riva and Stefano Cocco; my Italian rocks, Alessandra Binini, Alessandra Ferrari, and Barbara Quinti; as well as Gabriella Bellorio, Mariana Fraga, Mariangela Guatteri, Luciano Kovacs, Laura Pugno, and Anna Santos. Finally, Joseph Keckler, for the love and dreams we shared. Above all, I must thank my family, for being the inspiring presence in my work and life. I dedicate this book to them.

Pier Paolo Pasolini

Introduction Death

I n a famous sequence from P ier Paol o Pa solini ’ s film Mamma Roma (1962), in which Anna Magnani plays a fierce prostitute who tries to start a new life with her teenage son, Ettore, she buys him a new motorbike to celebrate his first day of work as a waiter. Excited about the gift, Ettore takes his mother on a fast ride through the Roman outskirts. Mamma Roma— the eponymous nickname of Magnani’s character—holds tightly to his waist and voices her dreams about their future, which Ettore’s untimely death will eventually shatter (figure 0.1). In 2000, the Italian artist Elisabetta Benassi remade this iconic scene in a video entitled Timecode.1 Blurring the border between reality and fiction and playing with gender, Benassi takes on the role of Ettore. The second protagonist in Timecode is Pasolini, performed by a man bearing a striking resemblance to the dead author. The Pasolini look-alike is not simply a protective parental figure, like Magnani in the original scene, but rather a guide to the couple’s impossible ride through Rome and, extendedly, the present (figure 0.2). Timecode is thus a remake that also overlaps different

figure 0.1. Ettore and his mother riding a motorbike. Source: Image from Mamma Roma (Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1962). Courtesy of Arco Film.

figure 0.2. Elisabetta Benassi’s remake of the same scene. Source: Image from Elisabetta Benassi, Timecode (2000). Videotape Beta Video SP PAL Color Sound, transferred onto DVD, 3’37”. Courtesy of the artist and Magazzino, Rome.

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temporal dimensions, creating a paradoxical synchronicity between Italy’s past and present but also between Benassi’s and Pasolini’s work. The title of her video refers to the synchronization system used in digital editing to specify precise video and audio editing points. In establishing these time markers, Benassi makes no difference between Pasolini’s works and existence. She treats them as film material, which she combines through editing, establishing a symbolic continuity that defies temporal interruption and death so that Pasolini’s journey seems not yet concluded. Benassi thus reverses the opening statement of another Pasolini film, Uccellacci e uccellini (Hawks and Sparrows, 1966): “The walk begins, and the journey is over already.” Hawks and Sparrows chronicles two picaresque characters’ surreal trip through the sundrenched Roman outskirts, a father and son (played by Totò and Ninetto Davoli) in the company of a Marxist talking crow, which functions as Pasolini’s alter ego.2 Timecode’s soundtrack, which reproduces the crow’s querulous voice, enhances this idea. If in Hawks and Sparrows the bird’s pressing questions (“Where are you going, my friends?” “Can you tell me where you are going?”) problematize the destination of the protagonists’ journey and, symbolically, the humanity they represent, when synchronized to Timecode’s images they question the future of art and society. Benassi’s approach to Pasolini is not nostalgically celebratory; her work stresses instead the need to recognize Pasolini’s haunting power to interrogate the present. Like Benassi, I belong to the generation of those born after Pasolini’s death. However, I, too, grew up perceiving the ghostly presence of this artist and intellectual, who, as George Didi-Huberman writes, was able to disturb his time.3 Benassi suggests that Pasolini is still disturbing our present. The sentence that closes Pasolini’s short film La terra vista dalla luna (Earth Seen from the Moon, 1967), “To be alive or to be dead is the same thing,” offers thus a paradoxical truth when applied to his legacy. Like a specter, Pasolini seems to wander through the ruins of a present unrecognizable to him or to us.4 A homosexual, a Marxist, a vociferous critic of capitalism, colonialism, heteronormativity, and mass-media society, Pier Paolo Pasolini is one of the most important examples of radical subjectivity among postwar artists. As such, he is a point of reference not only for artists and intellectuals but also for anyone interested in understanding—as Benassi’s video implies—alternative routes to navigate reality in all its complexity and contradictions. However, Timecode and the other installation projects in which Benassi resuscitates Pasolini also comment on a different, counterintuitive aspect of Pasolini’s authorial figure: his desire to become a performative presence in his own

4 introduc tion: death

work. Although Mamma Roma and Hawks and Sparrows do not feature Pasolini, Benassi reimagines them in the light of the authorial poetics that Pasolini developed in the second part of his career. She imagines this poetics as direct subjective authorial interventions that oblige us to remember the author and to enter into direct contact with him. Benassi tells us that even if Pasolini’s body is not immediately visible, his authorship is an inescapable element of our experience of his body of work. Although dead, the author is nevertheless present. In an oft-quoted reflection on the cinema, Pasolini suggested that life can be compared to a long take that, in a process analogous to editing a fi lm, is given meaning only by the cut of death: “Until I am dead, no one can ever be guaranteed to truly know me—i.e., to give my actions a meaning, which, as a linguistic act, is scarcely decipherable. It is absolutely necessary to die, for as long as we are alive, we lack meaning, and the language of our life (the language we use to express ourselves and that we thus consider very important) is untranslatable, a chaos of possibilities, an uninterrupted search for relations and meanings. Death performs an instant montage of our life.”5 Pasolini’s long take was violently interrupted by his death, under mysterious circumstances, among the shacks near the Ostia beach on the night of November 1, 1975.6 Yet if we consider the sum of his life, it still seems impossible to imagine the montage that would give that life a definitive meaning (although numerous biographers and filmmakers have tried7). As intriguing as it seems, the notion of death as an instant editing of one’s life fails the reality test. There still seems to be a missing piece of footage. Because this book begins with Pasolini’s death, it would be natural to assume that I am among those who believe that he has become an artistic and intellectual icon solely due to the fascination with his murder, which continues to generate new but inconclusive theories and hypotheses.8 On the contrary, I consider Pasolini’s statement about death as montage from a point of view that has nothing to do with his assassination or the myth it created.9 I want to consider the multifaceted nature of his work as a writer, poet, director, playwright, provocateur, and painter. These aspects of his life allow us to see Pasolini as author, constructed through his own conception of his work, which he was still “editing” at the time of his death. From the early 1960s, Pasolini put the notion of the author at the center of his artistic and intellectual practice, as Benassi suggests in her video. His body of work allows for a substantive reevaluation of the critical discourse on authorship from his unique, revolutionary subject position. In this book, I

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address significant questions about Pasolini’s oeuvre that expand beyond the confines of Italian studies by asking how his understanding of authorship can be used for a critical theory of mass culture. How does Pasolini’s notion of authorship challenge conventional conceptions of authority, status, power, and sexuality? More broadly, what possibilities does Pasolini reveal for the author to intervene in and resist the culture industry’s hegemonic practices? Aldo Rossi argues that Pasolini’s body of work assumes “meaning and total comprehensibility once it is permanently detached from its author and exists as an autonomous object—in other words, when the author dies and can no longer introduce variations that would disrupt the unstable meaning of a work in progress.”10 However, contrary to Rossi’s argument, death did not produce an instant montage of Pasolini’s work. His death instead generated many conflicting readings and interpretations. As Walter Siti notes, Pasolini never completely detached himself from his work. By dying, he simply abandoned it.11 This idea, although evocative, contains a truth more poetic than theoretical. What does it mean to say that Pasolini’s work was abandoned by its author? Does it suggest that Pasolini’s work continued to expand after his death, with one unpublished piece after another often reigniting critical interest, sparking controversies, and even inspiring new theories regarding his death?12 In part, yes. Yet in a more salient manner it means affirming the complete interdependence of work and authorial figure. Paradoxically, although Pasolini saw in death (the death of an author) the possibility of establishing the definitive meaning of his work, we also have the image of an orphaned and lost oeuvre, bound to its creator. Pasolini’s death thus disavows the concept underlying another famous death, that of the author, which Roland Barthes announced in 1968. Barthes was an influential figure for Pasolini. They shared a passion for language and literature and for a constantly renewed engagement with the question of the relationship between the intellectual and society.13 Pasolini’s name recurs in Barthes’s writing, from his extremely harsh review of Salò, o le 120 giornate di Sodoma (Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom, 1975) to his discussion of La trilogia della vita (The Trilogy of Life, 1971–1974) and the poem “Una disperata vitalità” (A desperate vitality) in Leçon and The Neutral, respectively.14 Pasolini often used Barthes’s work—at times naively—in his writings on the cinema and cinematic language. The fact that he never mentioned Barthes’s famous obituary of the author is a significant, intentional omission. In fact, I believe that the intellectual exchange he imagined having with Barthes cannot be separated from the latter’s theory of the author.

6 introduc tion: death

Although “The Death of the Author” has now been widely assimilated by critical and literary studies, it was an undoubtedly provocative and stimulating text when first published in 1968 amid the tumult of student uprisings.15 In it, Barthes called for the abandonment of the empirical author in favor of a model of literature in which the subject is eclipsed. “The author enters into his own death,” Barthes writes, “[when] writing begins.”16 His reflections emerged from the antiauthoritarian political situation of the late 1960s,17 but his thought also had its roots in a specific cultural context: the antisubjectivism of Russian formalism and New Criticism, which emphasized the irrelevance of the author’s intention for interpreting the text. If these movements just wanted to put the subject in brackets, Barthes—along with the other structuralists—claimed that the subject had to be destroyed to leave space for an impersonal, infinite writing. As Seàn Burke argues in his book The Death and Return of the Author, Barthes promoted a kind of writing (écriture) based on the concept of “textual dispossession, the power of language to organize and orchestrate itself without any subjective intervention whatsoever, [and] the notion of the intertextualising of all literature.”18 Readers, Barthes argued, must liberate themselves from the tyranny of the author’s authority over textual meaning. According to Carla Benedetti, Barthes’s article over time came to justify criticism interested only in textuality and its structural functioning as well as hostile to any reference to an author’s biography. Benedetti states that Barthes’s argument for the death of the author represents a great denial of a de facto ineff aceable figure and of the modern aesthetics of authorialism. The modern author is nothing but “the required element or hypostasis to which is attributed that artistic intention without which there is no work of art.”19 In The Empty Cage: Inquiry Into the Mysterious Disappearance of the Author, Benedetti emphasizes the concept of artistic work and considers the author as one of its functions. Both the work and the author are constructed through attributions (artistic intention, choices, poetics, conception of art, style) that do not exclude the importance of biographical information. Likewise, in Pasolini’s work, authorial subjectivity does not disappear; on the contrary, it is an integral part of what Pasolini wants to communicate through creation. It is impossible to experience his work “as a self-sufficient work, without referring to the real author”20 because Pasolini makes it impossible. He distributes his authorial figure throughout his oeuvre in carefully constructed doubles and masks and creates a connection between his works and his biography—a biography fashioned to match a strategically constructed authorial perfor-

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mance. However, Pasolini is careful not to affirm an authoritarian position for the author. He instead associates his authorship with a radically antagonistic stance toward all forms of artistic, social, and intellectual conformity, identifying conformism with social and cultural oppression. In this sense, Pasolini’s emphasis on the author’s presence is a rebuttal to the poststructuralist approach to authorship, particularly to the Barthesian death of the author. The totality of Pasolini’s work should be understood as a macrostructure with Pasolini at its center, which does not impose a “Ptolemaic” authorial point of view but asks the audience to participate in the creation of the author’s performance.21 Over the past five decades, others have written obituaries for the author, with varying emphases.22 Yet this intriguing figure has never been more alive. The author matters today and not simply from the culture industry’s commercial point of view. The author matters, more importantly, for those in nondominant positions—feminists and queer and antiracist activists, among others—who engage with creative practices in which the discourse of authorship may have positive political effects. After years of prohibitions and suspicions, it seems we are finally ready to accept what Benjamin Widiss calls the author’s “obscure invitation.”23 It is an invitation to consider the author not as a limit but as a constitutive element of the process of reading, experiencing, and understanding a body of work, whether solely literary or, as in Pasolini’s case, multidisciplinary. Questions of authorial self-representation and self-projection are connected to Pasolini’s attempt to undermine his audience’s assumptions and to criticize the conformist practices that the culture industry and mass society impose on the author. Pasolini reveals the critical potential of his authorship by using his corporeal or vocal performance to address issues of sexuality and identity.

A Living P rotest Even the title of Michel Foucault’s essay “What Is an Author?” (1969) reveals that Barthes’s obituary, far from causing a definitive turn against the discourse of the author, brought renewed attention to the authorial figure (“what is,” not “what was”).24 Foucault shifted the focus from the subject to the discourse, using his archaeological method to describe the “author-function,” or that “set of beliefs or assumptions governing the production, circulation, classification and consumption of texts within a given society.”25 Compared to

8 introduc tion: death

Barthes’s notion of the author, Foucault’s has two merits: first, it is more widely relevant because discourse is not necessarily bound to writing or literature, and, second, it suggests that the author has an active role and a carefully constructed position within discourse. The Foucauldian author-function helps define Pasolini’s particular understanding of authorship. In Pasolini’s work, authorship not only acts to guarantee the coherence of his project—the glue that binds his poetry, film, prose, theater, and even journalism—but also becomes a performance that provokes a specific reaction from his audience. The emphasis Pasolini puts on his own authorial performance guides and regulates the consumption of his work, asking the readers or spectators to take a position in this system of knowledge in which they find themselves represented. An unpublished radio interview of Pasolini by Achille Millo on September 20, 1967, exemplifies Pasolini’s approach. When the interviewer asked Pasolini if he considered fi lm an extension of his work as a poet, Pasolini’s response leaves no doubt as to his real concern: “It is very, very complicated to answer that question. Now I don’t know, but who are the listeners of this program?”26 This response shows not just the author’s desire to adapt his own performance to a particular context, demonstrating an extraordinary awareness of the value of the medium in the society of communication, but also his attention to the audience and his intention to address a specific type of listener directly, in the right code: Pasolini : At this moment, who is listening to us? At the moment when the program is being transmitted, exactly, not recorded, but transmitted, at what time is it? Millo : You’re asking me a very dangerous question because one never knows in Italy what time they send it out; it would be in the morning, almost certainly. Pasolini : Ah, in the morning, not afternoon. . . . All right, let’s say that right now a housewife is listening to us, she’s bustling about, she’s turned on the radio . . .

In this interview, Pasolini imagined the listener whom he was addressing; he would do the same years later when he created Gennariello, the young Neapolitan for whom he writes a sort of pedagogical treatise in the daily newspaper Il Corriere della Sera. Pasolini describes Gennariello in the first lines of the treatise: “Since you are the one to whom my little instructional treatise is

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addressed, it is as well for me to describe you as I imagine you. It is very important because it is always necessary to talk and act in concrete terms.”27 The author is fully aware that the recipient—as he stated in the context of another interview—has a relevant weight in a work of art.28 Similarly, in his essays, Pasolini feels the need to address the reader, not merely to provide information. Pasolini’s authorship is the product of a careful and thorough construction that results from an equally thoughtful authorial performance. Performance describes a conception of identity as fluid and unfinished and offers another set of terms to understand Pasolini’s aesthetic choices. His impulse to push the borders of the self, the narrative, and the filmic frame establishes a direct relationship with his audience, an intellectual dialogue aimed at producing new forms of knowledge and agency. Through Pasolini’s oeuvre, we may consider the author not as a limit but as a constitutive element of the process of reading, experiencing, and understanding works of art. In addition, Pasolini offers a distinct approach to the intersection of creativity, sociopolitical commitment, and subjectivity. In “The Unpopular Cinema,” a remarkably dense essay that Pasolini wrote in 1970 for a filmmakers’ conference on the theme “freedom of the author and liberation of the spectators,” he offers a disorienting yet illuminating definition of the author: “If a maker of verses, of novels, of films, finds a conspiracy of silence, connivance, or understanding in the society in which he operates, he is not an author. An author can only be [a stranger in a foreign land]; in fact, he inhabits death rather than life, and the feeling he elicits is a more or less strong feeling of racial hatred.”29 Concentrated in these few lines are some of the key concepts of the Pasolinian idea of the author. First of all, authorship is a transdisciplinary concept (“a creator of verses, of novels, of films”). For Pasolini, the author is not simply in the text, à la Barthes, but in the interwoven and inextricable texture of his interdisciplinary body of work. He is the matrix of the work. “The Unpopular Cinema” also shows that being an author means taking a radically antagonistic stance toward society. For Pasolini, someone who is understood or passes unnoticed is not an author; he becomes an author only when he elicits rejection and generates hostility or “racial hatred.” The author, in short, is a countercultural figure, characterized by his profound difference to the social body. In short, the author is the other, the antibody: “Does an existential revolt—that is, a revolt made through one’s body, not only as a ‘theophany,’ an apparition in the present but also as a continuity in time (thus a revolt realized through one’s actual and bodily existence)—happen at the

10 introduc tion: death

level of structure or superstructure? A black person who shows his ‘face’— nothing but his face, that is, his essential blackness . . .  commits an act of revolt. With his mere ‘being,’ with his ‘being a black.’ So, the work of an author is like the face of a black. It is with its mere existence, with its ‘being,’ that it is revolutionary.”30 In Poesia in forma di rosa (Poem in the Shape of a Rose, 1964), Pasolini writes that he identifies not only with blacks but also with Jews, Gypsies, and “every banned humanity.”31 In separating himself from what he perceived as the stifl ing Italian society of his time, Pasolini challenged the dominant values of bourgeois culture, which he rejected entirely, even though he was himself a member of the petit bourgeoisie. The author, Pasolini believed, must aim to scandalize, in the sense of the term used by apostles Peter and Paul (Romans 9:33; 1 Peter 2:8). It is no coincidence that the expression “stranger in a foreign land” comes from Peter’s First Epistle. Pasolini uses it to create a parallel between the persecution of the author and that of the early Christians, whom the apostle asked to make themselves a “rock of scandal.” The final salient element in “The Unpopular Cinema” is the association between the author and death. What does it mean that the author “inhabits death rather than life”? For Pasolini, the relationship between authorship and death is not the radical choice between the birth of writing and the eclipse of the subject. It is, rather, a relationship mediated by desire. Indeed, the author is the one who exposes “in one way or another, the ‘desire for death’ ” by expressing a masochistic pleasure: “In every author, in the act of invention, freedom presents itself as an exhibition of the masochistic loss of something certain. In the necessarily scandalous act of invention he exposes himself, literally, to others; precisely to scandal, to ridicule, to reproach, to the feeling of difference, and—why not?—to admiration, even if somewhat questionable. There is, in short, the ‘pleasure’ that one has in every fulfillment of the desire for pain and death.”32 If living, as Pasolini writes, is an obligation set by man’s natural instinct for preservation, freedom cannot be anything more than the freedom to choose death. The freedom of the act of invention thus reflects the author’s “exhibition of a self-destructive act”: a scandalous, masochistic manifestation that expresses “an unknown and unconfessed instinct for death, by definition against preservation (conservazione).”33 Pasolini draws on the full semantic range of the term conservazione, including its sociopolitical component (conservative): the author must thus be a revolutionary subject. For a work to be original, in short, it must violate norms, the conventions of its discipline, and frustrate audience expectations. Pasolini’s ideas refer back to the need of avant-garde aesthetics to defy institutions and transgress established

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norms. However, Pasolini knows that all transgressive acts, whether linguistic or formal, will in turn become normalized. He therefore says we must “compel ourselves not to go too far forward, halting the victorious rush toward martyrdom, and continuously turn back, toward the line of fire.”34 It is this continual return (“continuamente ritornare”) that gives meaning to the author’s act of violating the code and that keeps the work from becoming institutionalized, caught in the discourse of power. The adverb continuously hints at the importance of Pasolini’s constant and obsessive revising of his own work, which significantly began in the late 1960s.35 The performative aspect of Pasolini’s authorship is especially evident when he defines the author as “una protesta vivente,” a living protest: “An author, when he is disinterested and impassioned, is always a living protest. As soon as he opens his mouth, he contests something, conformism, whatever is official, national, of the state, what is good for all. No sooner than he opens his mouth, an artist is by definition committed because his opening of his mouth is always scandalous.”36 Living protest, as Pasolini understands it, must be continuous (and thus be rooted in the unfolding of time and life, in living). “What is important,” he writes toward the end of “The Unpopular Cinema,” “is not the moment of the realization of invention, but the moment of invention. Permanent invention; continuous struggle.”37 The author’s desire for death is thus a constant antagonistic stance toward society. Pasolini developed these positions in an interesting way after he visited New York in 1966. There he encountered intellectuals from the American New Left and members of the black liberation and black power movements. In his article “Guerra civile” (Civil war), published in Paese Sera in 1966, Pasolini explained—referencing a line from a civil rights movement song—that in a new form of engagement, genuine and not moralistic, “we must throw ourselves body and soul into the struggle”—that is, embody the desperate force of resistance.38 The desire for death and the sense of difference that mark Pasolini’s idea of the author as a “living protest” is related to his homosexuality, which is an indispensable aspect of his concept of the author and can also be read as a manifestation of a queer subject’s drives. My claim for a queer reading of Pasolini is motivated by his clear refusal to be used to ground an identitarian “homosexual” politics, despite the late appropriation of his myth by the Italian gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender movement. As I mentioned earlier, Pasolini identified with a variety of subjects in nondominant positions because he wanted to remain essentially unrecognizable to power: “Against all of this you must not do anything else (I believe) than simply

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continue to be yourselves: this means to be continually unrecognizable. Forget the great successes right away, and continue—unafraid, obstinate, eternally contrary—to insist upon and desire an identification with the different; to scandalize; to curse.”39 As Patrick Rumble writes, this refusal to assume a recognizable identity “led Pasolini consistently to refuse to endorse the gay movement or to identify with its programs.” 40 It is thus the nonidentitarian notion of queer that best expresses Pasolini’s “paradoxical identity” 41 and his use of a transgressive aesthetic to subvert dominant categories. To be queer is, as Donald Hall writes, indeed “to abrade the classifications, to sit athwart conventional categories or traverse several” with a continuing movement (Pasolini stresses once again that one must be “continually unrecognizable”).42 Therefore, it should not be a surprise that Pasolini’s “living protest” resonates with later queer theory in a very different context. For example, in the Queer Nation Manifesto, distributed by the ACT UP contingent at the New York Gay Pride Parade in 1990, we find the provocative claim that queer identity is a living contestation of conservative social values: “How can I tell you. How can I convince you, brother, sister, that your life is in danger: That every day you wake up alive, relatively happy, and a functioning human being, you are committing a rebellious act. You as an alive and functioning queer are a revolutionary.” 43 As in Pasolini’s description of the author, the queer subject is always a “living protest.” The mere fact of existing in a society incapable of assimilating the queer subject’s potential for contestation de facto exposes him or her to a deadly violence. Leo Bersani, in his canonical essay “Is the Rectum a Grave?” (1987), identifies male homosexuality with the death drive and masochism.44 Specifically, he argues that the death drive is what gives homosexuality its primary negative value as a disturbance and a disruption of society because on entering the sexual sphere, the subject returns to the state of passivity experienced as an infant child.45 For Bersani, phallocentrism and homophobic discourse cannot accept the existence of a death drive that produces a passive pleasure, a jouissance that derives from the symbolic dissolution of identity (“self-shattering”), from impotence, and from humiliation.46 For Pasolini, however, the masochistic pleasure of the author, who thrives despite the humiliation inflicted on him by society, also has a counterpart in the homosexual masochism that he describes explicitly throughout his poetry and prose. This connection is visible, for example, in the opening lines of the poem “My Ex-Life,” included in L’usignolo della Chiesa cattolica (The Nightingale of the Catholic Church, 1958), his collection of poems written between 1943 and 1949:

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Amidst a faint stench of butchery, I see an image of my body: half-naked, forgotten, near death. Such was how I wished to be crucified —in a flash of heartrending horror— as a child, already my love’s automaton.47 Here, masochistic desire is represented by the oxymoronic rhyming of “tenero orrore” (heartrending or tender horror) with “amore” (love). The poet is brought back to his childhood and imagines himself one with the crucified body of Christ—one of the recurring images in Pasolini’s poetry, dating back to the Friulian poems collected in 1954 in La meglio gioventù (The best of youth).48 Masochism shows up in the later poems, too—for example, “The Beautiful Flags” in the collection Poem in the Shape of a Rose (1964). Pasolini explicates the nature of this desire: loves of pure sensuality, copied in the holy valleys of libido. Sadistic, masochistic.49 The expression of a “pure” sexuality—one that is nonreproductive and outside the heteronormativity that Pasolini forcefully condemns in his 1960s essays on cultural conformism—still doesn’t produce that “artistic sublimation” that Bersani sees as a transposition of the essence of desire within the text. Yet, as Manuele Gragnolati has noted in a compelling reading of Pasolini’s hard-to-define work La divina mimesis (Divine Mimesis, 1975) and his unfinished novel Petrolio (Oil, published posthumously in 1992), this sublimation can be located in the unfinished form of those two texts from the 1970s.50 This book is structured according to two organizing principles. First, it focuses mainly on Pasolini’s late works from the early 1960s to 1975, the time of his death. This time frame allows me to explore how Pasolini responded, directly or obliquely, to the debates about the concept of the author that developed at that time. Second, the book’s broad thematic units emphasize the different modes of the author’s performance. Within each chapter, I explore different media and genres, highlighting the interpretative and conceptual significance of Pasolini’s interdisciplinary and intertextual attitude toward

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his oeuvre. I view his authorship as performative—the iteration of complex, self-citing interdisciplinary processes. At the same time, I offer a new account of Pasolini’s late artistic production, which builds on the concepts of failure, provisionality, and repetition. I show how these concepts contribute to Pasolini’s deliberate construction of an antiauthoritarian authorial identity. Chapter 1 explores Pasolini’s theater and theatricality as a specific performance of authorship. It focuses particularly on his essay “Manifesto per un nuovo teatro” (“Manifesto for a New Theater”) and his play Calderón. The latter was inspired by Pedro Calderón de la Barca’s drama Life Is a Dream (1635) and partially set inside Diego Velázquez’s painting Las meninas (1656). With its rich, interdisciplinary network of references, Calderón represents a staging of the type of author and metalinguistic work that Pasolini sought to produce. In particular, in Pasolini’s theater the author occupies a double position. He is the external creator but also a character in the text, engaged in a direct dialogue with the audience. This chapter also discusses the short film Che cosa sono le nuvole? (What Are the Clouds? 1967), a theater exercise within cinema that reveals how the multimedial tension that characterizes the second phase of Pasolini’s work is an essential element of his authorial performance. In What Are the Clouds? Velázquez’s Las meninas, with its focus on authorial self-inscription, functions as a visual metaphor for the specular relationship among spectator, work, and author—a metaphor that extends all the way to Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom. In chapter 2, I examine the thematization of authorial performance in Divine Mimesis. Composed over the course of several years, Divine Mimesis is Pasolini’s attempt to write his own version of Dante’s Divine Comedy and comprises draft s, working notes, tentative paratexts, and photographs. In it, Dante emerges as one of the most persistent and complex Pasolinian authorial personae, a model not only for Pasolini’s early realism but also for his use of autobiography. Previous criticism of Divine Mimesis has considered it a literary failure or, at best, a metaphor for the shattering of authorial subjectivity. I argue, however, that it is a pivotal work within Pasolini’s oeuvre, skillfully reinforcing the idea of an author in control of his work and even its reception. Divine Mimesis introduces us to an interpretative system in which authorship and the performance of an author who fails to produce a cohesive text become central and explicit, developing a conception of identity as fluid, unfinished, in the making. Chapter 3 discusses the conditions for the strategic branding of Pasolini’s authorship in the Italian media during the 1960s and his attitude to celebrity

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culture. In this chapter, I consider the idea of performing authorship in the terms of self-fictionalization and masquerade. In particular, in his short film La ricotta (The Ricotta, 1964), which represents the first example of the spectacularization of Pasolini’s authorship, he projects his authorial self onto the figure of the famous American director Orson Welles. An outsider to the studio system, Welles furnishes Pasolini with a model for an auteur who persistently seeks out a performative mode, putting himself in play as the author alongside the other characters. At the same time, through the figure of this famous director, Pasolini also expresses his uncompromising attitude toward celebrity culture and culture industry. In La rabbia (The Anger, 1963)—created through montages of unused film footage from a film archive—Pasolini uses another international star, Marilyn Monroe, to stage his ambivalence toward the role of his own representation in the media. For Pasolini, Monroe’s death becomes a tragic, symbolic form of subjective resistance and a protest against the conformist system of celebrity that they both confronted. Pasolini’s less well-studied paintings and drawings, in particular his selfportraits, are the subject of chapter 4. I provide new critical and theoretical perspectives on his visual work and follow its development in parallel with his other creative endeavors, interpreting them as one way of delineating a public authorial performance. I analyze one drawing in particular as wounded self-portrait—that is, the graphic manifestation of a torn self-image produced by the violent clash with society. In chapter 4, I also look at Pasolini’s relationship to abstract art, focusing on the parallels between his cinema and his experimentation with materials and forms in painting. Challenging the common notion of Pasolini’s hatred for modern art, I argue that in his portraits and self-portraits he used abstraction to deform or disfigure the self as a result of the pressure applied by history and society. Finally, in this chapter I consider some of Pasolini’s photographic portraits as a part of his authorial selffashioning and as a necessary component of his multimedia practice and his authorial performance during the last phase of his career. Chapter 5 is devoted to films that feature Pasolini in roles that evoke or directly address his authorial function. This is the case for his self-projections onto character-authors such as Chaucer in I racconti di Canterbury (The Canterbury Tales, 1972) and Giotto’s pupil in Il Decameron (The Decameron, 1971). The director’s on-screen performances contribute to the composition of the selfportrait of a multimedia author and at the same time affi rm the intimate bond between work and authorial corporeality. In The Trilogy of Life, which includes The Decameron, The Canterbury Tales, and Il fiore delle mille e una notte

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(A Thousand and One Nights or Arabian Nights, 1974), Pasolini presents authorship as a corporeal, material element in the film, not a mere abstract function. In doing so, he also develops a discourse of cinematic spectatorship based on the spectator’s recognition of the film’s author. According to the original screenplay of Arabian Nights, this recognition would have also included the open representation of Pasolini’s homosexuality and his sexual encounter with three young Arab men. This explicit on-screen queer performance was ultimately not included in the filmed version of Arabian Nights, but even if the author’s body is not on the screen, through the mise-en-scène of his queer gaze and the explicit depiction of the male body, Pasolini obliges the spectator to participate in the dynamics of homosexual desire, thus challenging the allegedly tolerant society of the 1970s. Chapter 6 discusses the effects produced by Pasolini’s vocal performance in his films. Pasolini’s voice changes according to the function attributed to his authorial presence. It is his real voice when he presents himself as the author, as in film experiments such as Appunti per un’Orestiade Africana (Notes Toward an African Orestes, 1970) and Comizi d’amore (Love Meetings, 1963), but when he plays a character in a fictional narrative, as in The Trilogy of Life, a dub for his voice is used. In this chapter, I examine the difference between these two kinds of voice, showing that dubbing and voice-over are also elements of the performance of Pasolini’s authorship. I focus in particular on dubbing in Edipo re (Oedipus Rex, 1967), where Pasolini plays the apparently marginal role of the high priest. His use of his actual voice, as in the case of the voice-over in La sequenza del fiore di carta (The Sequence of the Paper Flower, 1969) and La ricotta, shows the author’s epistemic authority and control over the interpretation of his work. He emphasizes in particular the importance of his vocal performance in Love Meetings, a cinéma vérité experiment in which he interviews Italian people of all kinds on issues concerning sexuality. However, when the questions turn to homosexuality, Pasolini silences his own voice (and authority) in order to reveal unfiltered the homophobic violence of 1960s Italian society. Pasolini’s silence thus produces a subtle and subversive homopolitical intervention that anticipates the more militant and strategic use of homosexual desire in The Trilogy of Life. The epilogue explores the idea of the author’s corporeal performance in Pasolini’s unfinished novel Petrolio. This book is an example of the metalinguistic interdisciplinary work that Pasolini was experimenting with in the last phase of his career. Through endless reworking and rewriting, Pasolini creates a close-knit web of intertextual and transtextual references. In partic-

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ular, I examine the construction of what Pasolini describes as an “in the flesh” character-author. I also provide a performative reading of Dino Pedriali’s portraits of a nude Pasolini, which were produced for Petrolio but ultimately not included in it. In Pedriali’s photographs, Pasolini performs his authorship as a Barthesian erotic encounter with the reader, in which he fictitiously assumes a passive role, a queer position that perverts the conventional notion of the author as the powerful, male principle that controls the making of text. A different exposition of the author’s body to his audience is analyzed through Fabio Mauri’s performance piece Intellettuale (Intellectual). In 1974, Mauri projected Pasolini’s film Il vangelo secondo Matteo (The Gospel According to Saint Matthew, 1964) directly onto the director’s body, who sat at the end of a dark room. By turning himself into a corporeal screen, Pasolini used Mauri’s work to affirm the centrality of the author in our experience of his own work, revealing at the same time, just as Elisabetta Benassi suggests, that his authorship is ultimately the result of a poetics of performance.

1 Theater

I n “ the unpopul ar cinema , ” Pa solini presents some important elements for understanding his authorial performance as he was conceiving of it in the late 1960s. This period saw a radical shift in his intellectual trajectory, marked by his rejection of the poststructuralist “death of the author,” which had established itself on the critical scene. For Pasolini, the authorial figure, far from dying off, was an antagonist who would challenge all forms of conformism merely by existing. Also, in the decade preceding Pasolini’s sudden death, his increasing attention on the authorial figure was directly proportional to the emphasis he put on the “ideal audience.” This ideal audience had to be willing to confront an intentionally “unpopular” work, characterized by significant conceptual complexity and by what Pasolini called “explicit metalinguistic awareness.”1 As Pasolini would have it, when it comes to the work of an auteur, one must consider the relationship between author and recipient not as a relationship between an individual and an indifferent mass but as “a dramatic relationship between democratically

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equal individuals.”2 Highlighting the constant interdisciplinary tapestry of his oeuvre, the clearest expression of this idea is found not in Pasolini’s films but in his dramatic works. Although these works are less well known, they play a crucial role in the definition of his poetics and mark the social space of the author’s performance. Pasolini’s theatrical production puts the author in the spotlight not simply in metaphorical terms but by making him an unavoidable filter for the reception of his work. After outlining the salient characteristics of Pasolini’s theater, I focus in particular on the drama Calderón. With its rich interdisciplinary network of references, Calderón stages the internal and external author and the self-reflexive work that Pasolini sought to create. I also discuss Calderón in conjunction with his films What Are the Clouds? (1967) and Salò or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975) because both of the latter works problematize the relationship between reality and representation through the theater.

M anifesto In April 1966, with the same youthful impetuousness with which he jumped into directing, Pasolini began working on six plays written in verse. Each play revolves around a specific controversial theme, such as sadomasochism in Orgia (Orgy), self-immolation in Bestia da stile (Style beast), homosexual incest in Affabulazione (Affabulation), zoophilia in Porcile (Pigsty). However, the underlining issue tackled in Pasolini’s plays—particularly in Pilade (Pylades) and Calderón—is always power and its manifestation.3 Theater was not a late discovery for Pasolini but was part of his intellectual development from a young age.4 Although he ventured into drama in the 1940s, writing the one-act play I Turcs tal Friul (The Turks in Friuli), it is only in translating Aeschylus’s Oresteia in 1960 and then Plautus’s Miles gloriosus (performed in 1963 under the title Il vantone, or The Braggart) that Pasolini began to refine his own theatrical language. He even decided to return to the short play Storia interiore (Inner history), which he composed in Friuli in 1946, and put it on stage in 1965 as Nel ’46! (In ’46!), although without much success. Pasolini wrote this early work before he had developed his understanding of the theater, and it in fact remains stylistically unresolved. Only with his six full plays did he theorize the possibilities available for the intellectual to intervene in the ideological crisis brought about by the advent of Italian neocapitalism. At the same time, his dramatic works allowed him to perform his own authorship center stage.

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In 1968, as he was preparing to direct Orgia—his first and last attempt at theatrical direction—Pasolini published “Manifesto per un nuovo teatro” (“Manifesto for a New Theater”) in the journal Nuovi Argomenti, which he edited with Alberto Moravia. Pasolini’s renewed interest in dramaturgy at this time should be placed within the context of a more general rediscovery of the theater by a significant number of Italian writers. This resurgence of interest in the theater was ignited by the controversial first Italian tour of the Living Theatre in 1964 and by the publication of an important survey about the relationship between Italian writers and dramaturgy in the May 1965 issue of the journal Sipario.5 In “Manifesto for a New Theater,” Pasolini does not use the term manifesto in support of a collective plan, as in the case of the historical avant-garde. In fact, he undermines the very function of the manifesto as a genre. His manifesto doesn’t try to persuade others to join a common aesthetic cause; it is simply a manifestation of his individual poetics. Similarly, his adoption of the expression “nuovo teatro,” at the time commonly used to describe the Italian avant-garde theater, was not meant to define any existing phenomenon. On the contrary, “Manifesto for a New Theater” outlines the project of an author who has set himself the goal not only to introduce a completely new way to make theater but also (with Pasolini’s typically overconfident attitude) to call into question theater itself.6 Theater, he writes, “should become what theater is not,”7 putting forth a radical project to revolutionize the theatrical medium based on authorial individuality. In the manifesto, Pasolini calls his new theater the “Teatro di Parola,” or Word Theater, to distinguish it from what he considers the two opposing types of Italian theater: the Teatro della Chiacchiera, or Chat Theater (a name inspired by an article published by Alberto Moravia in 1967 8), and the Teatro del Gesto o dell’Urlo, Gesture or Scream Theater. Pasolini argues that these two types, although different in their aesthetics, share a bourgeois audience; the former aims to entertain, the latter to shock. More importantly, they also share a hatred of the word—that is, language. Pasolini demands a theater in which poetic language holds absolute primacy, a theater understood as “oral poetry.” On the one hand, Gesture or Scream Theater, he claims, desecrates and destroys language in favor of pure physical presence, offering the examples of Artaud, the Living Theatre, Jerzy Grotowski, and Carmelo Bene.9 This theater must therefore be overcome. In Chat Theater, on the other hand, chatter takes the place of speech. This traditional or academic theater empties words of their significance by using a purely conventional and neutral theatrical language. But Pasolini’s example

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of the fall from word to chatter tells another story, referring directly to the theory of authorship he developed two years later in “The Unpopular Cinema.” In Chat Theater, Pasolini writes, “rather than saying—without humor, sense of the ridiculous, or good manners—‘I wish to die’ a character will say, bitterly, ‘Good evening.’ ”10 Because Pasolini’s is not a theater of the absurd, one wonders why, of all the possible expressions, he chose here the expression “I wish to die” to represent the falseness of Chat Theater. For Pasolini, an author is someone who expresses a masochistic “death wish,” which is the metaphor for a freedom that leads the author to turn away from conventions of style and consequently social norms. In other words, Pasolini’s example of what the theater should not be isn’t random. It suggests that the word of his theater is always the word of a radical author—one who wants to express through his metaphorical death wish his total rejection of any conservative impulse for the preservation of bourgeois existence and its conventions. It is through the theatrical medium that Pasolini experiences the possibility of taking the floor directly as the author, who speaks in the language of poetry through his characters. Pasolini is also concerned with defining the spectators of the new theater, which will necessarily be an “unpopular” and difficult medium. In fact, this new theater is written not to provoke or entertain a mass audience but to confront the advanced elements of the bourgeoisie, who “are in every sense peers of the author of the text.”11 The ideal audience for Pasolini’s theater, therefore, is intellectuals. The manifesto echoes the idea of the relationship between democratically equal individuals described in “The Unpopular Cinema,” where Pasolini writes that, “for the author, the spectator is merely another author” or, put otherwise, his specular double.12 Pasolini’s elaboration of this poetics of theater in his manifesto should not be considered an isolated event, limited to the period from 1966 to 1969, as is often claimed.13 The ideas in “Manifesto” also influenced his reflections on the cinema and literature. His subsequent writings on fi lm theory attest to this connection, but so does the fact that the composition of plays such as Porcile, Calderón, and Bestia da stile continued without interruption until 1974, despite the controversial staging of Orgia. Orgia resulted in failure—but not in the terms of public or critical success as each is typically understood, rather, because Pasolini conceived of his theater as one that actually seeks failure. Nor was this “failure” a result of the supposed impossibility of performing his plays due to their antitheatrical characteristics, which include the unorthodox use of the monolog and

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figure 1.1. Pasolini and the audience of Orgia. Source: Image from Orgia (Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1968–1969). Courtesy of Centro Studi Teatro Stabile di Torino—Teatro Nazionale.

lack of a solid narrative structure. To the contrary, his theatrical pieces have been staged with increasing success, even beyond Italian borders, since his death.14 Pasolini did not consider his theater to be unrepresentable; he simply gave up on success as it is conventionally defined. He writes about the need for the author to be unrecognizable in order to escape power and mass culture, so that he must “forget the great successes right away, and continue— unafraid, obstinate, eternally contrary.”15 Basically, he would not try to reach a mass audience or to meet the critics’ expectations. As he argued in a public discussion with the audience for the performance of Orgia on November 29, 1968, his aim was not to attain mass appeal but to create a dialogue with the public (figure 1.1). Shortly afterward, however, in an article published in Il Giorno on December 8, 1968, he expressed his disappointment over not being able to attract his ideal audience to the show: It may seem strange to the reader of Il Giorno, the fact that I persist in such a punctilious and naive manner to concern myself with the audiences who

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come to see my work night after night. But, for me, what’s really new about the theater is just that. A “personal” relationship with the spectator. . . . Both I and the viewers, the moment we find ourselves facing one another, are the protagonists of an event that stands apart, scandalously, from every other typical form of relation in mass culture. The “direct,” “personal,” even “corporeal” relationship, I’d say, between a text mediated by flesh-andblood actors and recipients.16

Pasolini’s emphasis on the corporeal aspect of his relationship with the audience substitutes for the essentialist conception of the author the idea of an embodied, performative author engaged in a real, personal, and almost physical relationship with the viewers. Pasolini assigns value to the embodied subjects to separate them from the faceless crowd and replaces mere cultural consumption with significant human relations. It is likely that he derived this idea from the participatory aesthetics of the Living Theatre. However, the latter stressed the importance of collective creation, whereas in Pasolini’s theater everything is the result of the author’s creative process. Significantly, in 1967, when a group of University of Parma students presented a theatrical adaptation of Pasolini’s film Hawks and Sparrows (1966) at the Venice Biennal, during the press conference he declined to be acknowledged as the author of the work. As he saw it, no external consciousness should come between the author and his work. Thus, in his theater Pasolini abolishes stage action and almost totally does without mise-en-scène (lighting, sets, costumes, etc.). He also replaces the idea of an actor who acts with that of an actor who comprehends the text. His Word Theater is a cultural ritual, “meaning a theater that is first of all debate, exchange of ideas, literary and political struggle.”17 Pasolini’s idea of the theater as a cultural ritual with a transformative social potential anticipates some of the key principles of performance theory— “cultural performance,” for example, as well as the analogy between ritual activities and the act of performing and dramatizing. In Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice, Catherine Bell argues that in the context of performance theory “ritual comes to be seen as a performance in the sense of symbolic acts specifically meant to have an impact on an audience and entreat their interpretative appropriation.”18 Her definition draws from the seminal work of scholars such as Victor Turner and Richard Schechner, for whom ritual affects both social realities and the perceptions of these realities. Turner, in particular, conceives of the ritual as a transformative dialectic of structure and antistructure or society and communitas—that is, the “even communion of equal individuals

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who submit together to the general authority of the ritual elders” in the liminal period of the ritual.19 In Pasolini’s theater, the author occupies the ritual elder’s position. He is the one who organizes the liminal ritual space of performance so that an intellectual communitas of equal individuals can form. The staging of Orgia in 1968 is an interesting example of the cultural ritual that Pasolini theorizes in his manifesto. The play recounts a bourgeois couple’s masochistic relationship and ends with their death. It was produced by Turin’s Teatro Stabile in the unconventional space of Deposito d’Arte Presente and featured actors Laura Betti, Luigi Mezzanotte, and Nelide Gianmarco as well as music by Ennio Morricone. The play had a minimalist set designed by “arte povera” artist Mario Ceroli: a raised white box that became a theater within the theater, in which the action took place almost as if on a marionette stage. The audience sat on very uncomfortable benches to prevent them from relaxing (or sleeping). Pasolini directed the performance, but, to emphasize the importance of his poetics of authorship, his name did not appear in the original playbill, which simply reads “Directed by the AUTHOR.” The playbill’s introduction to the show states Pasolini’s intention to guide the reception of his play through the explicit intervention of the authorial voice. The introduction is written in the first person and is titled “Prologue.” This seemingly irrelevant detail has a notable effect on the way the public must consider the text. If a prologue is an introductory scene aimed at presenting the drama’s theme, Pasolini made reading the program an integral part of the play. The audience became a participant in the discursive authorial performance before the show even started. The surrounding environment reinforced this idea. On the performance space’s walls, Pasolini hung thirtyeight posters that included summaries of his manifesto. The following examples from the first seven posters give an idea of their general tenor: • • • • • •

The theatrical space is in our heads. Here spectators do not exist: the theater is ONE. After we have spoken to you, applauding or cheering is useless: talk to us. The actor is a critic. The director is a critic. The author is critical subject and object.20

The posters stressed the idea that, in Pasolini’s view, the theater is a transformative space, a communal critical site in which the spectators’ conventional passive attitude is transformed into critically active participation (“talk to

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us”). With them, Pasolini reactivated the shared etymology of “spectator” and “speculation,” turning the receptive action of watching (in Latin spectare) into a productive theoretical practice. At the same time, the idea of an author who is both subject and object of criticism defines the authorial poetics of Pasolini’s theater, in which the role of the author is both emphasized and scrutinized. The cultural ritual of such a theater is an intellectual performance, whose space he describes in neither emotional nor naturalistic terms but rather in concepts (“in our heads”). At the same time, through the “Prologue” and the use of posters in the staging of Orgia, Pasolini created an immersive environment. It was a liminal ritual space saturated with the author’s critical thought and ideology. Within this liminal space, Pasolini sought to achieve a particular form of reflection by staging his own contradictions before an audience of bourgeois intellectuals so that they could see their own contradictions reflected there as well. In this way, he occupied a position that was at once inside and outside a work that also reflected back on itself. Diego Velázquez’s work Las meninas (1656), perhaps the most celebrated painting of the Spanish Golden Age and surely one of the most critically scrutinized, functions as a visual metaphor for this kind of relationship between spectator, work, and author seen in Pasolini’s work. Michel Foucault famously opens Les mots et les choses (The Order of Things), which was translated into Italian in 1967,21 with a detailed analysis of Las meninas and its complex system of lines of sight. This analysis surely contributed to the painting’s appeal for Pasolini. As many scholars have pointed out, it is no surprise that between 1967 and 1968 he created two works that take Las meninas as a model for the problem of representation and authorial presence: the tragedy Calderón (1967–1973) and the short film What Are the Clouds? Among the aspects of Velázquez’s canvas that likely sparked Pasolini’s imagination are its strong metalinguistic component—that is, the presence of an (unfinished) work in the work as well as the centrality of the authorial figure and the dialectic between author and viewer.22 Regarding this dialectic, Foucault wrote that “as soon as they place the spectator in the field of their gaze, the painter’s eyes seize hold of him, force him to enter the picture.”23 Foucault refers to the fact that the hidden subject of representation placed en abyme in Velázquez’s painting is actually outside of it. The only thing we can see is the backside of the canvas, the tall brown rectangle occupying the foreground of the left side of the scene. The subject of the representation can be seen only in reflection in the mirror hanging on the back wall behind Velázquez: the Spanish royal couple, Philip IV and Mariana of Austria, whom

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the infanta and her court of dwarves and maids of honor (meninas) are observing while they pose. The painter’s eyes are directed at us only because we find ourselves in the place of his subject, but that is enough to ensure that our gaze, not that of the royal couple (who represent institutional power), enjoys the freedom to organize the representation around ourselves. This is the same freedom enjoyed by the author. The position of the king and his wife is in fact the same as that of the artist who painted Las meninas and that of the viewer observing it. Whether Pasolini was interested in the epistemological conclusions of Foucault’s essay or not, it is evident that his close reading in The Order of Things fueled his imagination, particularly for the centrality it assigns to the representation of the author. Indeed, Las meninas is above all an authorial selfportrait that alludes to the point that is necessarily invisible: the gaze of the author who arranges it. And yet in presenting himself as one object among others in the painting, the author necessarily refers back to his subjectivity. He is the critical subject as well as the object of representation.

Calderón The first draft of Calderón was finished in 1967, the year that The Order of Things was published in Italian, but the play was not published until 1973, after a long gestation period with several stops and starts. In a poem entitled “Esibizione di vitalità” (Display of vitality), which was excluded from the collection Trasumanar e organizzar (Transhumanize and organize, 1971), Pasolini recounts coming up with the idea of “doing Calderón in a field” outside Arezzo that he saw from a train. In the subsequent lines, he explains his reasoning: “with everyone in that field / the actors and I are almost realistically participating in the text.”24 The image of this open-air theatrical space is virtually the opposite of the claustrophobic space Pasolini envisioned for Orgia as a kind of externalization of the author’s mental space. Yet the idea of staging Calderón outdoors functions in a similar way. It renders the author visible within the representation by removing all possible “physical” divisions in the theatrical space. The latter becomes, literally, an open field on which actors, author, and audience meet face to face and “look each other in the eyes.”25 The Pasolinian theater aspires to be a space of transparency in which the direct, personal, corporeal relationship between author and audience becomes fully visible. Despite the poetic minimalism of this bucolic set design and the rejection of mise-en-scène expressed in “Manifesto,” Pasolini chose to stage the second

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part of Calderón inside Velázquez’s Las meninas, which, with its baroque play of gazes and reflections, is far from the simplicity of a Tuscan meadow. In Calderón, Velázquez’s painting gains yet another metalinguistic level: it is not only a representation encompassing a representation but a metarepresentation around a representation—the theater inside the painting that itself represents the painting being made. This metarepresentation is a visual metaphor for the highly intellectualized aesthetic objects Pasolini wanted to create.26 Calderón is named for the great Spanish playwright Pedro Calderón de la Barca, whose masterpiece La vida es sueño (Life Is a Dream, 1635) is another model for Pasolini’s drama. As the young Pasolini stated in a letter to friend Franco Farolfi in 1940, he considered de la Barca’s work an example of “surprising modernity.”27 He first placed the names “Calderón” and “Velázquez” side by side in an article he wrote in 1942 about a trip to Weimar for a gathering of university students from fascist countries—at the time he was actively involved in the Fascist youth movement. He wrote that “on the fabulous Weimar streets with young Spanish camerati, conversing with them, I could go back to Calderón and Cervantes or Velázquez, through García Lorca or Picasso.”28 It is remarkable that thirty-five years later he would turn not to the modernists García Lorca and Picasso but to de la Barca’s La vida es sueño and Velázquez’s Las meninas as a way to face a present in which Franco still dominated Spain and Italy was under the spell of neocapitalism and mass culture. Pasolini’s perspective on La vida es sueño is as decentered as Velázquez’s is on the room in Las meninas. In Calderón, Pasolini shifts the focus from the original protagonist, Prince Segismundo, to a secondary character, Rosaura.29 In de la Barca’s drama, the prince is locked up in a tower by his father, King Basilio, because of an Oedipus-like prophecy. Basilio sedates Segismundo and temporarily brings him back to the palace. When the boy loses his wits—he no longer knows whether he is experiencing reality or a dream—the king returns him to his cell, only further heightening Segismundo’s sense of indeterminacy. In one of the numerous metatextual reflections in Pasolini’s version, this plot is recounted to Rosaura by a secondary character, also called Segismundo. The gender shift from a male to a female protagonist is central to the meaning of Calderón, which Pasolini considered a tragedy about power. As a female protagonist, Rosaura allows Pasolini to address power in terms of class as well as gender subordination within the family and the state. In Pasolini’s play, Rosaura wakes up three different times without recognizing the world in which she finds herself. She wakes up the first time as a

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member of a rich bourgeois Francoist family and the second time as a subproletariat, a condition to which she gradually adjusts. She wakes up the third time as a member of a petit bourgeois family in the consumerist age; she has difficulty adapting to this world and develops a neurotic form of aphasia. She later witnesses a real change in the nature of power when she sees the students and workers’ protests of 1968 as a new type of opposition. Finally, she dreams of the dawning of a new century in which class division is nothing but a dream. Like a later brushstroke on the dark background of a seventeenthcentury canvas, Rosaura’s story clearly conjures up a landscape of Pasolini’s obsessions and critical concerns (class, consumerism, alienation, protest), but at the same time it is a portrait of the female subject that embodies a criticism of the oppression of women by patriarchal power in 1960s Italy. By choosing a woman as the protagonist of his play and by assigning to her an unstable social identity in contemporary Spain, Pasolini queers de la Barca’s original drama, turning it into a space for questioning classifications that assert timelessness and fi xity. The idea of an oppressive female genealogy that fi xes the subject in a timeless condition based on the allegedly positive value of tradition is discussed at the beginning of the play, when Rosaura wakes up in the stately Madrid home of her Francoist family. Her sister mentions Las meninas while describing a ring that represents Rosaura’s social standing and female role: from mother to mother, Doña to Doña, we could go back all the way to Velázquez. Of this ring, in fact, you can see an exemplar at the Prado: in the painting Las meninas, for example.30 Despite this explicit reference to the painting, it is only in the third scene that the action becomes “as if set inside Velázquez’s painting Las meninas.”31 Like the royal couple in the canvas, Rosaura’s parents appear in a mirror. In their dialogue, they describe the painting in which they themselves are represented by the author. The dialogue combines poetic language with the precision of the art historian, a mixture that evokes the style of Roberto Longhi, one of Pasolini’s professors at the University of Bologna and among the most influential art historians of the time. Here the identification between the character of Infanta Margaret Theresa and Rosaura becomes explicit:

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Turn, and look at the grand space behind you. The hall of the Prince! . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Don’t you see, just as the sunlight breaking in discreetly from the door (which a gentleman blocks with his silent profile), the difference made by the wealth of the house where the afternoon sun spreads? . . . Ask the girl Doña María Agostina Sarniento who offers you a small bottle, whose holy pink is like a lobster’s shadow, in which red slowly extinguishes itself; . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ask the Guardadamas, Doña Marcela de Ulloa; ask the chamberlain, a relative of the painter, José María Velázquez: and ask Diego Rodríguez Velázquez himself!32 Through the voice of Rosaura’s parents, Pasolini provides a detailed description of Velázquez’s canvas. In doing so, he transforms the painting into a performative environment in which Rosaura must take on an active role. She is invited to turn and look around so that rather than being an object of the spectator’s gaze she becomes a gazing subject. Most importantly, Rosaura is asked to use her own voice to question the other characters in the painting, including the artist, Velázquez. This scene offers a performative metaphor for the agency that Pasolini’s new theater aims to encourage in its audience. Like Rosaura, the audience is invited to become critically active, to abandon its traditional position as mere observer, and to take on a performative role within the cultural rite of the theater. This invitation entails a demand to engage in dialogue with the author, who is present inside the play, just as Velázquez is present inside his painting. Pasolini’s focus on the mirror in Las meninas confirms that he is borrowing from Foucault’s essay. However, in one of the most rigorous readings of Calderón, Armando Maggi argues that Pasolini’s play contradicts the French thinker’s approach to Velázquez’s painting. For Foucault, the core of Velázquez’s painting is a void, “the necessary disappearance of that which is its foundation—of the person it resembles and the person in whose eyes it is only a resemblance.”33 Maggi suggests that Pasolini takes Foucault’s void and uses it to manifest a presence, that of the father, who in Calderón (as in La vida es sueño) is named Basilio and alternates between the roles of king, father, and husband of Rosaura.34 This figure is a clear manifestation of the power

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that the subject—and, I would add, a gendered subject—comes up against. Maggi, situating his reading within Norman O. Brown’s perspective in Love’s Body (1966), concentrates on the metaphor of the father, which is undeniably central to Pasolini’s intellectual and psychological universe. As Maggi argues, the gaze of the father, which is found in the mirror in Las meninas, coincides with the gaze of the spectator, so that it comes to occupy the visual field completely. This is where my reading diverges from Maggi’s, though only to complement it. In Calderón, it is not only the father who is in the mirror but also the author. Basilio himself states as much in scene 10: Here I am, alone, reflected in the mirror. Perhaps also reflected with me is the author.35 Pasolini’s analysis of the painting, then, does not move far away from Foucault’s. Both join the gaze of the author and spectator to power. For Foucault, the mirror “creates, in its sagittal dimension, an oscillation between the interior and the exterior.”36 It is thus especially significant that Pasolini decided to bring the author onto the stage in that particular specular position. In his theater and in all of his late work, the position occupied by the authorial figure is always both inside and outside the work at the same time. In Calderón, the author’s double position is signaled by the queen in the second scene: yes, ask the author, as he too is involved in our world of riches and though looking from outside the frame is within.37 That it is the author and not only the father who determines the spectator’s gaze is also suggested by the play’s title. For the most part, critics have discussed only the metonymy of Pasolini’s title, taking “Calderón” as a reference to La vida es sueño or to de la Barca himself. I maintain instead that the title first and foremost declares the centrality of the author in Pasolini’s play and presents artistic appropriation as part of the author’s performance. The authorial presence in the play is further reinforced by the three stasima. In Greek tragedy, the stasimon is a moment in which the action pauses and the chorus enters to comment on and analyze the situation. In Calderón, the chorus is replaced by the individual, disembodied voice of a “Speaker,” whom the author has delegated to addresses the audience. Through the

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Speaker, Pasolini provides explanations, offers apologies for his choices (which often directly contradict the principles of his own theater), and guides the spectator’s reception of the play, as he did directly in the prologue to Orgia. The Speaker explains, for instance, the author’s use of Velázquez’s canvas, a use that clearly violates Pasolini’s rejection of mise-en-scène in his manifesto. This contradiction, as the author tells us ventriloquistically, is not naive but a “conscious contradiction” meant to communicate his ideology. Pasolini “utilizes the old theater, mixed with painting, as an expressive element with uncertain meaning.”38 The idea of a work that has an uncertain or indeterminate meaning and actively provokes the audience comes from Roland Barthes. Segismundo, who displays several biographical affinities with Pasolini, confirms Barthes’s influence when he states that “the meaning is suspended” in the work the spectators are watching, “according to my friend Barthes’s apt interpretation.”39 The Italian expression “canone sospeso” (suspended meaning), which Pasolini uses in the third paragraph of “Manifesto for a New Theater,” is a tendentious translation of Barthes’s concept of “signification suspendue,” but the play’s reference to the concept is not accidental. Pasolini first encountered the concept in an interview with Barthes originally published in Cahiers du Cinéma in 1963, in which the French critic discusses Bertolt Brecht. Barthes claimed that in Brecht’s political theater there is always a meaning that appears to the spectator in the form of a question.40 The political meaning of Brecht’s work is a “suspended signification” because it is fulfilled only by the audience’s participatory response. Pasolini cited this interview in an important essay in the July–December 1966 issue of Nuovi Argomenti, “La fine dell’avanguardia” (The end of the avant-garde). He highlighted in particular Barthes’s idea that “meaning is such a fatality for man, that art, as freedom, seems to be used, especially today, not to make meaning but, on the contrary, to suspend it; not to construct meanings but to not fill them precisely.” For Pasolini, the idea of suspending meaning seems like “a stupendous epigraph to what could be a new description of political commitment, of the mandate of the writer.”41 As Hervè Joubert-Laurencin and Davide Luglio have shown, the enthusiasm with which Pasolini transforms the suspension of meaning proposed by Barthes into one of the programmatic elements of his poetics represents a tricky matter because Pasolini and Barthes differ in their interpretation of Brecht.42 Whereas Barthes elevates Brecht as a model for political realism and the possibility of a common language, Pasolini rejects him at the beginning

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of “Manifesto” (“one thing is certain: the era of Brecht is over for good” 43). For Pasolini, Brecht’s theater attempts to reconcile the contradictions of the real and expose them to an ideal proletarian audience—conceived as the class of the future—for merely didactic purposes. In short, Brecht is the type of Communist intellectual who sees himself, à la Gramsci, as a mediator between the party and the mass. Pasolini had argued for the validity of this model— albeit with the reservations expressed in his poem Le ceneri di Gramsci (Gramsci’s Ashes)—but abandoned it at the end of the 1950s, when the Russian invasions of Hungary provoked an ideological crisis for many left ist intellectuals. Pasolini’s “unpopular” turn was also caused by his perception of a paradigm shift in the making: the birth of a new type of neocapitalist power that imposes a single model and destroys the differences between the peasantry and proletarian, so that the latter aspire to become petit bourgeois. As the crow-intellectual who tries (unsuccessfully) to awaken the consciousness of the father and son in Hawks and Sparrows declares, the era of Brecht and Rossellini is gone. The intellectual can no longer aspire to represent a party and address the masses or to share an ideology with them. This awareness is an important component of Pasolini’s authorial and subjective turn in the 1960s. He believed that his theater could challenge mass culture by addressing not the masses but an audience of intellectuals. He would present works of indeterminate meaning that would call the intellectuals’ convictions into question and unite them in a transformative cultural communitas. Despite his intended audience, Pasolini’s theatrical project is not merely elitist, as some have claimed. It is still eminently political. His authorial performance must be considered an act of resistance to the demands that intellectuals and cultural producers conform to the practices of the mass-culture industry. Pasolini’s “unpopular” theater rejects the conventional ideals of entertainment and success and fosters instead transformative intellectual practices. An example of his unconventional authorship can be found in an article he published on November 18, 1973, the eve of the print publication of Calderón. The article is de facto a review of Calderón, but unlike Walt Whitman, who reviewed Leaves of Grass anonymously, Pasolini wrote as the author of his own work, claiming the legitimacy of such an act, so that even self-reviewing becomes one of the cogs in his complex authorial performance rather than merely an instance of self-promotion. The review provided questionable stylistic judgments (“I’m certain that Calderón is one of my surest formal successes”) and precise exegetic suggestions, but it was primarily a pointed response to Adriano Sofri, leader of the far-left extraparliamentary organization

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Lotta Continua. In an interview, Sofri had declared Calderón to have no political relevance. Pasolini was notoriously bad at taking criticism, but his response to Sofri—a young Marxist ideologue—was not the result of his touchiness. It was instead part of the intellectual debate that his theater was designed to provoke. As Antonio Tricomi has noted, Pasolini’s article did not just interpret Calderón but also contained a summary of Pasolini’s critical attitude toward the ’68 Movement, which he represented in the play through the character Pablo, a young homosexual student who makes Rosaura aware of her own exclusion.44 In his article, Pasolini accused the politically committed youth in the movement of having a conventional, vague—and thus mythical and irrational—idea of power. He maintained that they identified power with a system on which they could pin all responsibility, as if it were a subject, which made them unable to understand their personal involvement in it.45 Pasolini’s conception of power is here strikingly close to Foucault’s. Foucault, who did not speak about the events of May 1968, argued that power is not an institution and not a structure but a transformative capacity, coterminous with social change. Individuals’ ability to create social change is power. In “Two Lectures on Power,” he insists that individuals “are always in the position of simultaneously undergoing and exercising . . . power. They are not only its inert and consenting target, they are always also the elements of its articulations.”46 Foucault’s position, like Pasolini’s, is an overt critique of conventional social theory, in particular traditional Marxism, which reifies power and hides the essentially contingent and nonsubjective nature of its exercise. In short, for Pasolini and Foucault, power is “a machine in which everyone is caught.” 47 Individuals are all equally captured in a system of power relations that is beyond their complete control, as the character of Rosaura exemplifies in Calderón. We can thus understand the importance of the author’s presence in the mirror along with Basilio (which Pasolini also pointed out in his article). Rosaura’s awakenings and Basilio’s transformations show how power has become absolute and omnipresent so that it is everywhere, although not equally distributed: Power has availed itself of those who have criticized it to understand uncertainly, first. Then it availed itself of those who rebelled to the extreme, to have total self-awareness. Its change in nature is born of its own nature: Power, which has always

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created its own like, this time has created something different.48 In Pasolini’s terms, the transformative capacity of power does not spare those who seek to criticize it. Placing the author, the spectators, and the symbol of power on the same level in Calderón thus symbolizes the dialogic relationship between author and spectators described in “Manifesto” and at the same time represents Pasolini’s awareness of the author’s involuntary implication within the system of power relations. His goal is to complicate this contradiction by presenting the image of an author who masochistically produces highly complex, metalinguistic works that fail to meet the expectations of the culture industry and the mass audience.

What Are the Clouds? The years in which Pasolini actively devoted himself to the theater were some of the most frenetic in his intellectual and artistic career. His interest in the theater did not appease his desire to make films but rather enriched and contaminated it; Pasolini would never produce as many films as he did in the second half of the 1960s. The new “unpopular” phase of his cinema, inaugurated by Hawks and Sparrows in 1966, included the creation of six full-length and four short films in just five years. This is an incredible accomplishment if one realizes that at the same time he wrote six plays and several essays on film semiotics. Aside from the film Porcile (Pigsty, 1969), whose second half is an adaptation of the play of the same title, the interaction between Pasolini’s film and his theater is especially evident in the short film he made in 1967, What Are the Clouds?. It is the most brilliant episode in the otherwise modest portmanteau film Capriccio all’italiana (Caprice Italian Style, 1968), a comedy collectively directed by Mario Monicelli, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Mauro Bolognini, Steno, Pino Zac, and Franco Rossi. What Are the Clouds? touches on many of the same ideas found in Calderón and “Manifesto for a New Theater,” which was written at almost the same time the film was being shot. Thus, in many ways Pasolini conceived of the film as a cinematic test for his new theory of theater. The film is set in a theater, a poor and unadorned one, with a decidedly “popular” audience, composed of men, old ladies, and urchins gathered to watch a puppet-show version of Shakespeare’s Othello. The life-size puppets are played by flesh-and-blood

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actors, including several actors from popular cinema: Totò, widely considered one of the greatest Italian comedians, but also the slapstick duo Franco Franchi (Cassius) and Ciccio Ingrassia (Roderigo). Othello is played by Pasolini’s longtime younger lover, Ninetto Davoli, in brown makeup, whereas Totò plays his trusted adviser, Iago, with an expressionistically green face. Because of this duo, What Are the Clouds? forms an ideal trilogy with Hawks and Sparrows and the short film La terra vista dalla luna (Earth Seen from the Moon, 1967), in which Totò and Davoli had already appeared.49 However, the protagonists are far from the model of the intellectual actor theorized in “Manifesto.” Othello in particular doesn’t even understand the rules of theatrical fiction: “Why do I have to be so different than I thought I was?” he complains. “Why do I believe Iago? Why am I so dumb?”50 Because he was born a  character, Othello has no choice but to play a part—which is the same thing as his life—without being aware of it. Nonetheless, Othello is not a Pirandellian character in search of an author. In direct contrast to the principles of Pasolini’s “Manifesto,” he has no knowledge of the author who is making him speak. When he follows his fate and leaps upon Desdemona to kill her, the audience revolts. Rushing the stage, they “kill” Iago and Othello by ripping them from their strings. The “bodies” are taken to the dump by the trash man, played by star singer and songwriter Domenico Modugno.51 All of this is the opposite of the cultural ritual of debate and the sharing of ideas at the core of Pasolini’s theater manifesto. In short, What Are the Clouds? gives us a perfect example of what Pasolini’s unpopular new theater proposes not to be. Although scholars have often used the term contamination in characterizing Pasolini’s use of multiple media, as if combining various media were something viral and uncontrolled, a short film such as What Are the Clouds? demonstrates how the multimedia tension that characterizes the second phase of Pasolini’s career is part of a very precise authorial performance. A metafilm about theater such as What are the Clouds? stages an image of an author who wants to establish specific reading paths between the various media environments in his work. Yet the fact that Pasolini reflects on the theater through a puppet show, a popular or entertainment-oriented genre, generates a series of questions, beginning with the origin of his interest in this art form. Such an interest most likely goes back to 1965, when he conceived an adaptation of Bertold Brecht’s play Saint Joan of the Stockyards before refusing its ideological premises. Laura Betti (who plays Desdemona in What Are the Clouds?) was to play the principal role, while all the other characters were to be life-size puppets. According to Maurizio Viano, a possible

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model for the idea of the puppet show within a film can be found in Roberto Rossellini’s fi lm Paisà (Paisan, 1946), one of the masterpieces of Italian neorealism.52 Specifically, Pasolini seems to have had in mind the Naples episode in Rossellini’s fi lm, when a drunk African American soldier, accompanied by a street urchin, finds himself watching a puppet show based on the battle between Roland and the “Saracens.” The soldier, upset by the idea of finding himself among the excluded on returning to his homeland, identifies with the Moor—who is the enemy in the show. Unable to distinguish between reality and representation, just like the crowd in What Are the Clouds?, he interrupts the show and starts a fight among the audience.53 But if Pasolini’s choice to represent Othello was influenced by Rossellini’s masterpiece, What Are the Clouds? can be understood only as a parody that defines Pasolini’s new cinematographic poetics. In the Naples episode of Paisà, Rossellini highlights the ambiguous relationship between illusion and reality in cinematic realism, with a clear sociopolitical agenda that includes the concept of race. He does so by revealing the audience’s epistemological error through the American soldier’s reaction to the puppet theater: he confuses representation with reality. Whereas Rossellini’s scene stands for his anxious neorealism, characterized by a lack of trust in representation and thus in the cinema, Pasolini’s is an open sacrifice of all pretense of objectivity or realism. For Pasolini, in fact, reality is always already representation, “a living natural cinema,”54 just as the puppets in What Are the Clouds? form a living natural theater. Even the film’s title can be read as a veiled critique of neorealism in its reference to the acclaimed volume What Is Cinema? (1958–1962) by André Bazin, one of the most prominent figures in the international reception of the Italian fi lm movement. Pasolini had even wanted to use the title of Bazin’s study for an episodic film that would include What Are the Clouds?: “I’d had in mind for a long time a big film divided into episodes, some long, some short, all comedy. It was supposed to be called What Is Cinema, even, or, more modestly, Smandolinate. And [Dino] De Laurentiis offered me the actual possibility of making two of these comic episodes: first Earth Seen from the Moon, and now What Are the Clouds?.”55 Pasolini, of course, was proposing an idea of cinema that was radically opposed to Bazin’s, who firmly believed in the possibility of reproducing reality through cinema in an unmediated fashion, to the extent that he advocated eliminating the concept of the author. On the contrary, in What Are the Clouds? Pasolini makes a case for the relevance of authorship by mimicking Rossellini’s scene. In Paisà, the puppet show has no author; it is based on the Sicilian tradition of

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anonymous  cantastorî (singers of tales). In his short film, just as in Calderón, Pasolini emphasizes the importance of the author of the play he is appropriating. When the crowd interrupts the show in What Are the Clouds?, they do not simply prevent the characters from fulfilling their destiny; they preclude the full expression of Shakespeare’s authorial intention. They do not interrogate the author or debate with him; on the contrary, they violently dismiss and silence him. The puppet show is thus a negative example of theater as cultural ritual, in which, instead of a reasoning communitas, the audience becomes an irrational and dangerous multiplicity. In Calderón, the theater is a discursive medium, and in What Are the Clouds? it is a metarepresentation within the cinematic medium. Further references confirm the bond between the two works. For example, when Othello asks Iago why he should accept the rules of representation—that is, play the role he has been assigned by the author—Iago responds with a quotation from de la Barca’s play La vida es sueño (“we are a dream within a dream”). The most important connection between the two works, however, is once again Velázquez. Right after the creation of the Othello puppet, the director shows us the outside of the theater. 56 The camera lingers on posters for four different plays, whose titles are pasted over reproductions of Velázquez’s paintings. The portrait The Jester Don Diego de Acedo is labeled “YESTERDAY” and advertises Earth Seen from the Moon, Pasolini’s short from 1967. A reproduction of Las meninas is labeled “TODAY” (figure 1.2), along with the title What Are the Clouds? and Pasolini’s name (literally inscribed in the work). The other two paintings, Portrait of Prince Balthasar Charles with an Attendant Dwarf and the portrait Philip IV, are respectively labeled with the titles of two of Pasolini’s film projects: Mandolini (Mandolins), accompanied by the word “SOON,” and Le avventure del re magio randagio e il suo schiavetto Schiaffo (The Adventures of the Vagabond Wise King and His Servant Schiaffo), with the word “TOMORROW.” Mandolini or, according to other versions of this title provided by Pasolini, Smandolinate, is a fi lm that he never made.57 As Alberto Marchesini has argued, of the four posters, only the connection between What Are the Clouds? and Las meninas seems immediately legible; the reasons for pairing Pasolini’s other films and the three other paintings by the Spanish artist are obscure. However, we need only note that Pasolini is addressing his ongoing authorial performance and staging his own oeuvre: one work that has already been made (Earth Seen from the Moon), one being produced in front of our eyes (What Are the Clouds?), and two to come in the future (The Adventures of the Vagabond Wise Man and Smandolinate). The individual film, in short, not only contains references to other works by Pasolini and

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figure 1.2. The appearence of Las meninas in Che cosa sono le nuvole? Source: Image from Che cosa sono le nuvole? (Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1967). Courtesy of Castori Film s.r.l.—Ital-noleggio Cinematografico, Italy.

metacinematic and critical citations but also envisions a body of work made into a spectacle, as in the poem “Progetto di opere future” (Plans for future works), published in Poem in the Shape of a Rose (1964). There Pasolini lists eight projects, “in a semiprivate viewing” to his audience (the Dantesque “tiny group / that wants to know”).58 The projects include poetry, prose, criticism, and theater in a mix of apparently “incompatible / materials, unmixable magmas.”59 Among the works named are the poetry collection Bestemmia (Curse) and the pseudonovel La divina mimesis (Divine mimesis), which was the only one of these projected works that Pasolini completed, as I show in the next chapter. With this presentation of future projects, both realized and unrealizable, Pasolini is not only showing off the frenzy of his own creative omnipotence but also exposing his laboratory, making his own performance appear in his work. Just as Velazquez does in Las meninas, Pasolini shows himself at work within the work that he is creating. In a folder labeled “Note appunti articoli interviste ecc. (1967–68)” (Notes, articles, interviews, etc. [1967–68]) housed at the Fondo Pier Paolo Pasolini in Florence, there is a typed manuscript entitled “Idee di opere” (Ideas for works), where in December 1965 the writer imagined “a book made entirely of stories that spring one from the other, one inside the other, like that Russian toy made of several little dolls nested inside one another.” 60 This idea was partially realized in notes 97–103 of the unfinished novel Petrolio, especially in the “Storia di mille e un personaggio” (Story of a thousand and one characters), as discussed in the epilogue.

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This idea of a metawork can be used to understand the entire Pasolinian project, in which each individual work, like Russian nesting dolls, gives rise to or lies within another: Calderón is in What Are the Clouds?, just as its characters are a dream within a dream. Yet it is the title Pasolini chose for this unrealized metacollection of stories—Io re (I, king)—that reveals what is really at stake in this overall metaproject. The key to this project is the centrality of the authorial subject, the “I” that Pasolini interrogates, observes, examines, and dissects by exposing himself and revealing his own laboratory. The performing author is also represented by the figure of the puppet master in What Are the Clouds?. The puppet master literally holds the threads of the narrative and interjects by responding to his puppets’ questions. The poet Francesco Leonetti, who gave his voice to the crow in Hawks and Sparrows, played this role. This intertextual link suggests that he is also a double for or a mask of Pasolini. Just as with the earlier film’s crow, Othello calls the puppeteer, with lighthearted deference, “Sor mae’” (“signor maestro” or master), to indicate the puppeteer’s intellectual superiority. The fact that Iago is also addressed with the same phrase suggests that he, too, is a reflection of the author-puppetmaster’s performance, owing to his brazen manipulative intent as a Shakespearean character on the stage and his didactic attitude as a Pasolinian character behind the scenes.61 Finally, Pasolini guides our reading of the film by controlling our view of the events and making us feel at once both inside and outside the representation. It is this total mise-en-scène of the gaze that Pasolini takes from Las meninas. Spectator and author share the same point of view. Through the elaborate work of shot reverse shot, the director forces us to observe the puppet show as well as what happens behind the scenes. We viewers of the film do not have merely a frontal view of the audience sitting in the theater. We see time and again through the characters’ eyes, but we also in turn observe the drama from the wings; we identify with the cinematic apparatus: the director’s and the author’s gaze.

The Vel á zquez E ffec t In Pasolini’s work, a reference to Las meninas always functions as a signal of the self-reflexive nature of the work. This “Velázquez effect” also happens where one might least expect it—for instance, in his loose adaptation of the Marquis de Sade’s novel 120 Days of Sodom (1785), Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom. Pasolini set

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his film in a villa outside a town on Lake Garda in northern Italy, where Mussolini’s Nazi puppet state, the Italian Social Republic—often called the Salò Republic—was based during the last two years of World War II. Salò, like Calderón, explicitly confronts the concept of power. For this reason, its connection to Velázquez’s painting is particularly meaningful. In the “Circle of the Manias,” which inaugurates the infernal journey through the villa where four libertine fascists are forcing sixteen young men and women to perform all manner of sexual deeds, the libertines are gathered with the guards and their victims to listen to Mrs. Vaccari’s graphic tales. She is one of the four Sadean “lecturers” who are tasked with entertaining and stimulating the libertines’ sexual appetite and at the same time with educating the young victims. The visual composition of this extended scene reveals numerous points of contact with Las meninas and suggests that the specter of Velázquez entered Pasolini’s cinematic gaze (figures 1.3–4). Salò is not only a transposition of Sade’s work to the days leading up to the fall of fascism in Italy but also a reflection on the cinematic medium, just like Calderón and What Are the Clouds?. The scene shares with Las meninas a room with an extremely high ceiling; paintings—a constant throughout Salò—covering the walls; a central female figure, with blond hair and full white gown; and a door leading to a staircase in the background. Obviously, as with everything in this fi lm, the scene is a deeply perverted version of the Spanish painter’s work. Here the innocent infanta is replaced by an aging prostitute, smugly recounting the abuses she went through during her own childhood. The other characters never gaze beyond the frame but fixate on Mrs. Vaccari, the central figure—just as the court in the original painting (except for the dwarf ) all intently observe the infanta. This restriction of gaze creates a seemingly closed space. The perversion of the painting, in short, leads to a perversion of Pasolini’s Velázquez effect. The spectators do not feel called upon to participate in the composition (and therefore in the work) and can thus maintain a psychological distance from the deeds taking place in front of them. The scene lacks the famous mirror of Velázquez’s painting, but mirrors nonetheless play a central role in Salò. In the previous scene, which is often overlooked, we see Mrs. Vaccari getting ready in her room. As she briefly disappears behind a mirrored wardrobe door, viewers are faced with a specular void, the essence of the baroque image: the multiple reflections of a mirror within a mirror, which instantly and completely elides the human presence (figure 1.5). This void becomes for just a second the only subject of the

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figure 1.3. Diego Velázquez, Las meninas o La familia de Felipe IV (1656). Source: © Museo Nacional del Prado.

representation. One could say that we see the Lacanian pure gaze, the point in the image, to put it in Slavoj Žižek’s terms, “that eludes my eye’s grasp.” 62 We are made aware of the presence of the camera, but we cannot see it, nor can we see ourselves reflected, as if we, too, were standing behind a two-way mirror. For Žižek, this point “functions like a stain, a spot in the picture disturbing its transparent visibility and introducing an irreducible split in

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figure 1.4. The “Velázquez effect” in Salò. Source: Image from Salò, o le 120 giornate di Sodoma (Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1975). Courtesy of United Artists.

figure 1.5. Multiple reflections eliding the human presence. Source: Image from Salò, o le 120 giornate di Sodoma (Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1975). Courtesy of United Artists.

my relation to the picture.” 63 Žižek’s astute conclusion is that I can never see the picture from the point from which it is gazing at me. Through the mirror, the gaze that the object-film directs toward us produces an effect that is the exact opposite of that seen in Velázquez’s painting: instead of drawing us into the work, the mirrors in Mrs. Vaccari’s room exclude us from the

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representation.64 The author-director carefully calculates this subversion of the Velázquez effect. It traps us, making our forced momentary identification with the gaze of the libertines and the cinematic apparatus at the end of the fi lm even more traumatic, violent, and brutal—an identification produced (as many have noted) through the play of shot reverse shots in the fi nal scene, when the four libertines take turns observing from a window, through a set of binoculars, the torture and execution of the victims in a courtyard that evokes a concentration camp (figures 1.6 and 1.7). From the cinematic point of view, this final scene, which is unbearable for many viewers, represents one of the most metalinguistically sophisticated moments of Pasolini’s entire cinematic career. Pasolini was acutely aware of the effect produced by the shot reverse shot, which “provides the spectator the illusion that he is in the middle of the film. An impression so automatic, instinctive, physiological, if you will, . . . it makes it so that the spectator is sucked into the screen.” 65 It is in this final scene that the author, previously only perceptible as a shaky figure in the imperfect shots taken with a handheld camera, asserts his presence within and his total control over the representation. Like him, we are sucked into the image and are therefore equally complicit in the reduction of the body to a pure object, of which Salò is intended to be a harrowing and provocative testimony. As in Calderón, by making us participate in the work, the author reminds us that we are implicated in power. One last example of Pasolini’s desire to reveal his authorial presence in Salò —and thus further solidify its bond with Las meninas—can be found in an unedited sequence that was originally intended to be the film’s conclusion and final credit sequence.66 All that remains of it are some photographs by Deborah Beer from the set. The footage was probably lost after the theft of the original film reel a few months before the director’s death.67 The members of the troupe, the various workers, the actors who play the victims and the libertines, and Pasolini himself are dancing cheerfully in pairs, dressed in their regular clothes (figure 1.8). The scene, which takes place in a room covered in red flags borrowed from a local Communist Party office, had been elaborately and extensively planned. Pasolini had even arranged for dance lessons for everyone involved in the film. In this final sequence, the director would not only physically enter his own work but—exactly as in the case of Las Meninas— would also show the work’s reverse side, here represented by the cast in usual clothes, the cameramen, the director, and so on, as well as by the ideological opposite to the fascists in the film.

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figures 1.6. and 1.7. Shot reverse shots in the final scene of Salò. Source: Image from Salò, o le 120 giornate di Sodoma (Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1975). Courtesy of United Artists.

All this speculation on a lost scene would seem preposterous if it were not that the sequence also has numerous thematic points of contact with the ending of Calderón. In the last scene of Calderón, Rosaura recounts a dream in which she finds herself in a concentration camp, which points to the concluding “Circle of Blood” scene in Salò. Rosaura mentions a “large hall,” where the Nazi SS, just like the libertines in the last scene of the film, “are listening to gramophones.” 68 Even the description that the girl gives of herself and the other prisoners emphasizes the connection between the two works: “they are

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figure 1.8. Image from the lost alternate last scene of Salò. Pasolini (back right) dances with the cast and crew. Source: Photograph by Deborah Beer. © Cinemazero, Pordenone—Italy.

no longer men; we no longer have even the wild life of an animal; we are only things that others can dispose of.” 69 The reference to the reification of the body staged in Salò is explicit, as is the parallel between the excluded dance scene and the image of workers, “red flags in their fists, with the hammer and sickle,” coming to free the prisoners.70 Pasolini completed the final scene of Calderón as he was shooting Salò, so, as Maggi has suggested, it is not surprising to find thematic consistencies between the two works.71 Even excluding the Velazquez effect, the author undeniably emphasizes the self-reflexive and intertextual nature of Salò, particularly in the scene in which two of the four Sadean narrators, played by French actresses Hélène Surgère (Mrs. Vaccari) and Sonia Saviange (the Pianist), reenact a short scene from French director Paul Vecchiali’s masterpiece fi lm Femmes femmes (Women Women, 1974) for the amusement of both the libertines and the victims. Pasolini had seen Vecchiali’s film at the Venice Biennal film festival in the year he was preparing to shoot Salò. He was so mesmerized by it that he immediately cast its two leading actresses in Salò. Here is their short dialogue in French, performed in an overtly theatrical way:

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—Alors, monsieur Loyal, vous avez été payer le loyer? —Mais bien sûr, monsier Gugusse. —Est-ce-que vous avez pensé qu’il faudrait aussi payer mon loyer? —Et pourquoi donc, monsieur Gugusse? —Parce que deux et deux font quatre et que je n’ai plus d’argent. —Il faut en gagner, monsieur Gugusse. —Et commes fait-on pour un en gagner? —On fait en travaillant de vos mains. —Mais je ne sais pas. —Alors . . . il faut jouer la comédie. —Ou la la, c’est difficile! —Bien, alors . . . vous n’avez qu’à écrire . . . n’importe quoi, alors. (So, Mr. Loyal, did you go to pay the rent? —Certainly, Mr. Gugusse. —Did you consider that you need also pay my rent? —And why is that, Mr. Gugusse? —Because two plus two makes four and I have no more money. —You need to earn some, Mr. Gugusse. —And how does one go about doing that? —Working with one’s hands. —I don’t know how to do that. —Then . . . you’ll have to go into theater. —Ooh la la, that’s tough! —Well then . . . all you need to do is write . . . it doesn’t matter what.)

On the one hand, the use of French adds to the scene’s defamiliarizing effect, but it has also kept scholars from considering it as something more than a simple absurdist or Dadaist exercise. On the contrary, this is one of the key scenes for understanding Salò’s complexity. By directly quoting a contemporary film, Pasolini breaks with the chronotope of the villa and turns it into a space of otherness, which is neither here nor there. The fictionalized past suddenly includes and is contaminated by the contemporary, suggesting that the film we are watching is actually a metaphor for the present and not a mere association between fascism and sexual perversion. If the neoclassical villa resembles a historical site of persecution and elimination, a death camp, then by superimposing past and present Pasolini points to the idea that in the contemporary world, as was later explicitly theorized by Giorgio Agamben in Homo Sacer, the camp is the “nomos” of the modern.72 At the same time, the fi lm within the fi lm strongly confirms that Salò is not only a reflection on power but also a self-reflexive critique of the cinematic medium itself. Before the dialogue in French in Salò, Surgère and Saviange name Vecchiali’s film, thus stressing the apparent metacinematic function of their performance.

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And yet they are not just reciting a quotation from another film. The baroque complexity of Las meninas and Calderón is here taken to the extreme in that the two French actresses act out a film scene of a theatrical dialogue about theater, specifically about the necessity of writing theatrical works. The film within the film is thus also theater within the cinema. In a review of Vecchiali’s film, Pasolini praised Femmes femmes as an “extraordinary film on cinema” in which a “ménage a trois of ‘reality,’ ‘cinema,’ and ‘theater’ is performed.”73 This erotic encounter between reality and two forms of representation is a perfect description of the metalinguistic quality of Salò; it also describes the complex relationship between media and genres in Pasolini’s work.

2 Dante

The odd lit tle volume L a divina mimesis ( Divine Mimesis ), perhaps Pasolini’s most atypical work, was approved for print by its author right before his death and published posthumously in 1975. Whereas some critics such as Rinaldo Rinaldi viewed it—an attempt to rewrite Dante’s Divine Comedy—as one of the most beautiful and intense of Pasolini’s works written in the 1960s, others saw it as just an overambitious failure.1 I do not intend to address this unusual book as an aesthetic object; rather, I discuss Divine Mimesis as a theoretical object entrusted with a specific metaexegetic function: to introduce Pasolini’s audience to an interpretative system in which authoriality takes on an explicit, central role through the declaration of its own failure. Divine Mimesis is a mechanism in Pasolini’s more complex authorial performance and the work in which authorship explicitly assumes its full centrality to Pasolini’s late poetics. Divine Mimesis had a particularly tormented genesis and development that we can divide into three rough phases: the first period, 1963–1965; the second,

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1966–1967; and then in 1975 the last, radical revision of it with an eye to publication. After his initial enthusiasm for the idea of a modern adaptation of Dante’s Inferno—recorded in “Progetto di opere future” (Plan for future works) in Poem in the Shape of a Rose (1964)—Pasolini quickly found himself with only a few completed pages and a series of notes and sketches that had not cohered into a convincing project. They remained locked in his desk drawer for some time. Pasolini recalled this in an interview by Lorenzo Mondo in January 1975, only a few days before his murder: “[Divine Mimesis is] an idea that goes back to 1963, but until now I wasn’t able to find the right approach. I wanted to do something seething and magmatic; something poetic came out like Gramsci’s Ashes, though it’s in prose.”2 During the long period Pasolini was writing Divine Mimesis, he was subject to the same “terror of not having said and never being able to say the last and definitive word, or at least the right one”3 that he describes on the book jacket of La nuova gioventù (The new youth), a revised collection of his early poems in Friulian dialect published in 1974.4 The text fits Pasolini’s poetics of endless rewriting for more than one reason: it is a partial attempt to rewrite Dante’s work, but it is also a continual rewriting of a project of rewriting. And finally, in a more subtle manner, it features a reinscription of the author’s performance within the text. As for the project being a rewriting of rewriting, it should be stressed that Pasolini’s idea dates back to 1959, the year he composed the novel fragment La mortaccia (The ugly death), which draws on Dante’s Inferno. In 1965, he published La mortaccia in Alì dagli occhi azzurri (Blue-eyed Alì), a heterogeneous volume that collects stories, film sketches, prosimetra, revised scripts, and various other chronologically organized narrative fragments dating back to the 1950s. Pasolini continued to work on the Mortaccia project until 1963.5 He mentions the “first aborted embryo”6 of Divine Mimesis in an interview by Adolfo Chiesa in 1960: “It is a vision analogous to Dante’s, modeled after his. Instead of Dante, the protagonist is a prostitute who, when she was alive, read a comics version of the Comedy and was particularly struck by it; for his part, in ‘La mortaccia’ Dante is transformed into a new Virgil who talks like Gioacchino Belli and is Marxist. So in hell the prostitute finds her father, mother, relatives, pimps, coworkers, queers, on the one hand, and on the other, she finds the most famous figures from contemporary politics and current affairs.”7 In Pasolini’s intentions, La mortaccia was to follow in the tradition of his Roman novels from the 1950s, such as Ragazzi di vita (The Ragazzi, 1955) and Una vita violenta (A Violent Life, 1959), which are bound to a kind of realism based on

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the mimesis of the speakers.8 That Pasolini used Dante filtered through Marxism as a model in the 1950s is reflected in the dominant style of the Roman novels: free indirect discourse, with an abundance of vernacular expressions, which Pasolini claimed he had rediscovered in Dante’s Comedy. Dante’s free indirect discourse, as Pasolini explains in his essay “La volontà di Dante a essere poeta” (Dante’s will to be a poet), must be interpreted in a symbolic or metaphorical sense as Dante’s sociological consciousness, his capacity for mimicking his characters’ speech. It is no coincidence that the second part of The Ragazzi opens with two tercets from the Inferno in which the demon Malacoda tells the other guardians to guide Dante and Virgil to the next bolgias (21.118–23). Pasolini’s citation can be read on many levels. It might be a reference to Rome and its slums (borgate) as a Dantean “città dolente” (city of pain), a contemporary subproletarian inferno.9 However, it also suggests something else: that the young men in the Roman borgate at the heart of the novel, who spend their days filching and swaggering, are immoral devils, guardians of the lake of pitch that is their futureless life. At the end of the chapter, one of them, Piattoletta, is play-burned at the stake, recalling the challenge of the grafter Ciampolo and the devil Alichino, who lead two of the demons to fall “nel mezzo del bogliente stagno” (“into the boiling pool” [Inferno 22.141]).10 In his essay “Dante e i poeti contemporanei” (Dante and the contemporary poets), Pasolini explicitly identifies the Dante of the Inferno as his authorial model—the auctoritas—for his project of plurilingual realism during that period: “In the 1950s, within a group of very engaged experts in the field, in the wake of a now-famous essay by Contini, there was a sort of assumption of Dante to symbol. His plurilingualism [and] his poetic and narrative techniques were forms of a realism that was opposed, once again, to Literature. So I, in my work during those years, had Dante in mind as a kind of guide.”11 Gianfranco Contini (1912–1990), one of the most prominent Italian philologists of his time, was the first critic to hail Pasolini as an important poet in a review of Poesie a Casarsa (Poems in Casarsa) in 1943, which he called “the first accession of ‘dialectal’ literature into the atmosphere of contemporary literature.”12 The importance of Contini’s approval for Pasolini’s Dantean selfprojection is hard to deny, especially if we consider that among the images included in the final version of Divine Mimesis, Pasolini paired a picture of Contini with a reproduction of Piero Della Francesca’s Baptism of Christ (c. 1448–1450). Contini was also the author of seminal studies on Dante’s poetry, so with this pairing Pasolini suggests that his encounter with the critic was a sort of Dantean christening.

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The Contini essay that Pasolini mentions in his own Dante essay is “Preliminari alla lingua del Petrarca” (Preliminaries to the language of Petrarch) from 1951. It includes fundamental definitions of Petrarchan monolingualism and Dantean plurilingualism. The latter concept—along with Erich Auerbach’s landmark reading of Dante’s realism in his book Mimesis (1946)13— informed Pasolini’s interpretation of the Comedy. Even the quotations from Dante that one can find in the screenplays for Pasolini’s first two films, Accattone (1961) and Mamma Roma (1962),14 confirm that the poet is indeed the guide leading Pasolini through the “forest” of the 1960s. The foundation for the mimetic poetics of Pasolini’s Roman novels is Dante’s immersion in the psychology and social habits of his characters; significantly, Dante himself guides the prostitute Teresa in La mortaccia. But in 1963, with a surprising change in perspective, Pasolini abandoned the Mortaccia project and started to make notes for the work that he indicated in “Progetto di opere future” as “if ever there was any / to be done.”15 Pasolini’s abandonment of his project of representing hell from the point of view of a prostitute lost in the Roman borgate coincides with a profound personal crisis. The author, by that point definitively lost in the mutated landscape of Italian neocapitalism, replaced Teresa with himself (“first it had to be a woman from my world, the ‘mortaccia,’ going down to hell and seeing it from her point of view. Now I am making the trip myself”16). The result is a first-person, highly Pasolinian rewriting of Dante’s first canto, punctuated by footnotes detailing the author’s compositional journey: “Somewhere around forty, (1) I realized I had reached a very dark time in my life. Whatever I did, in the ‘Forest’ (2) of the reality of 1963, the year I had come to, absurdly unprepared for that exclusion from the life of others which is the repetition of one’s own, there was a sense of darkness. I wouldn’t call it nausea (3) or angst: (4) actually, to tell the truth, in that darkness, there was something terribly bright: the light of the old truth, if you like, the one before which there is nothing left to say.”17 I would argue that Divine Mimesis, usually read by critics as the symptom of a personal crisis, is at the same time an act of self-construction and authorial affirmation. Pasolini stops taking Dante, the ultimate example of the author in the Italian literary canon, as a simple working model and turns him into a projected figure of the self, a persona he could assume in order to create and support his own authorial performance. Taking on the role of the pilgrim, Pasolini becomes a character as well as an author. This is a conceptual mimesis of the process that Dante used in his poem, in which, as Contini had shown in his essay “Dante come personaggio-poeta della ‘Commedia’ ” (Dante as

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poet-character in the Comedy), the poet assumes the double figure of both agens and auctor.18 Contini’s essay is essential for understanding Pasolini’s work, which at first is a process not so much of imitating Dante (an idea in which Divine Mimesis can be understood as an “imitation of the Commedia”19) but of identifying with Dante, who becomes a Pasolinian persona, the backbone, as Walter Siti has argued,20 that upholds Pasolini’s autobiographical impulse and his ambitious model of authoriality. Contini’s essay, to which Pasolini is clearly indebted, begins by drawing a new parallel between Dante and Marcel Proust. The French novelist is an essential reference point for the young Pasolini’s autobiographical experiments, one of his early authorial models. This connection is demonstrated, for example, by the autobiographical novella La recherche sacilese (Sacile is the village in Friuli where Pasolini spent part of his youth from 1929 to 1932), which was later added to the infrequently studied Operetta marina (Marine operetta), published posthumously in 1994 by his cousin Nico Naldini, who describes it as a descent into the ravines of memory.21 La recherche sacilese had already been deemed “a refined Proustian tale” by the jury of the Taranto Prize, for which Pasolini was nominated in 1951.22 But that same year, according to Walter Siti, who wrote a well-documented study of the relationship between Proust and the early Pasolini, the latter abandoned the idea of writing an autobiographical novel and shifted from a “deep Proustianism” to a view of Proust as merely one among his many cultural references.23 The fact that Contini would use the French novelist to access the Dantean authorial world likely struck Pasolini, who, having abandoned the autobiographical model of his youth, fi nds in Dante another, more complex model for his authorial self-projective performance. Contini locates the ambiguity that constitutes the essence of the Proustian question: Can the character indicated as “Marcel” only twice in the Recherche du temps perdu be identified with the author?24 The Proustian “I” is, in fact, in neither an oppositional nor a disjunctive manner the historical (individual) self and the transcendental self, a combination that represents the human adventure. Keeping in mind Dante’s reflections in the famous “Epistle to Cangrande,” Contini—a master model of authority for Pasolini—establishes the distinction between Dante agens and Dante auctor. The character in the Commedia is therefore a poet-personage, a man of letters. Although the categorial distinction between the real author and the speaker who is internal to the text has been the object of narratological studies since the beginning of the twentieth century, Contini suggests, in a rather forthright manner, that

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one might well confuse Dante agens and Dante auctor: “Thirteenth-century commentators already confuse agens and auctor, the subject of poetic creation. However, we ought to indulge the defective dialectic of these approximate readers. Their confusion rests on the trite circumstance that the ‘agens’ and ‘auctor’ are one and the same and thus on the fact that the Comedy is, after all, also the story—the autobiography, I was about to say—of a poet.”25 In Contini’s slip (“autobiography, I was about to say”)—though revealed almost with a wink—Pasolini surely found a justification for the sort of full autobiographical projection he employed in Divine Mimesis. In his most important critical contribution to Dante scholarship, the essay “La volontà di Dante a essere poeta,” written for the seven hundredth anniversary of Dante Alighieri’s birth in 1965 and published in the journal Paragone,26 Pasolini writes that what most strikes him in the Comedy is the impartiality the author shows toward the world, even its basest aspects, as well as toward his own feelings. Pasolini notes how the sentiments expressed in the text are always those of Dante the character and never those of Dante the author. This would have been impossible had Dante not incorporated himself into the material and made himself the protagonist of his poem. Drawing on this authorial incorporation, Pasolini takes to extremes his attempt at mimesis of Dante’s strategy, assuming not only the role of the pilgrim but also the role of the guide, Virgil. Pasolini’s authorial figure comes to occupy the entire textual field, complicating the relationship between the author outside the text and the figures within it. So in the first two cantos of Divine Mimesis, written between 1963 and 1965, we find a split between a Dante-Pasolini figure lost in the neocapitalist forest of 1963 (“at this point already void of poetic authority” [2:1081]) and a VirgilPasolini, the “little civic poet of the 1950s” (2:1084), also devoid of the “consolatory impotence of those who represent authority” (2:1083).27 By looking at the guide’s self-presentation, we can see that Pasolini wants to suggest a biographical coincidence between the real author and the two characters based on Dante’s depiction of Virgil: “I’m from the North: my mother was born in Friuli, my father in Romagna; I lived in Bologna for a long time, in other cities and towns in the Po Valley, as is written on those book jackets from the 1950s, which are yellowing along with me” (2:1082).28 The series of points presented here doesn’t merely represent where Pasolini lived; it explicitly associates biography and bibliography, allowing the character to represent himself primarily as an author or, rather, a man whose life is implicated in an artistic project (“as is written on those book jackets”).29 This reference to the book

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jackets, one of the thresholds of the text, also confirms the importance of the paratext as a platform from which Pasolini can guide the reception of his works. Dante himself had used this strategy of addressing the reader as an aid to the realism of his poem.30 Although Dante-Pasolini states that he would have preferred Gramsci, Rimbaud, or Chaplin’s Little Tramp as a guide, he accepts the “little civic poet,” who seems rather more like a “mountain guide”: “ ‘Ah, it’s you!’ so I said, ‘I recognize you, I recognize you! Eh—and I blushed to say it, not for confessing a vice, but for that fact that, once again, I was confessing to myself— I loved you a great deal. You always seemed to me, deep down, I must admit, the ‘greatest of the poets of our time, their true guide, in essence’ ” (2:1084). The irony of Dante-Pasolini looking on the greatness of Virgil-Pasolini—that is to say, on his self from the previous decade—obviously has no counterpart in the Comedy, where the pilgrim defines the Latin poet as “lo mio maestro e ’l mio autore” (my teacher and author) even though his account of the otherworldly journey is also meant as an unrelenting demonstration that Dante had indeed surpassed his master. Incorporating and multiplying himself in his work, Pasolini distances himself from his author-self of the 1950s. He looks on himself as if he were an other. At the same time, like Dante, he offers the reader an interpretation of his own previous work. Manuele Gragnolati, in his brilliant book Amor che move, establishes a parallel also between Divine Mimesis and Dante’s Vita nuova, which is, like Pasolini’s poem, a rewriting and critical assessment of the poet’s previous work and which Gragnolati aptly defines in terms of a “performance of the author.”31 It might be said that Divine Mimesis, just like Pasolini’s last and unfinished novel Petrolio, is a “poem of the obsession with identity, and, at the same time, its rupture.”32 On the one hand, there is the obsessive authorial identity (the subject, even when he is directly named by another character, remains “Pasolini,” never “Pier Paolo”). On the other, the author shows his continual fragmentation, his inability to be consistent or cohere. As Peter Kuon has argued, even if the narrative speaker makes autobiographical references to Pasolini the real author, there is no unity between author, narrator, and narrative figure.33 Divine Mimesis is not merely the sign of a cultural crisis but also the result of Pasolini’s own dark crisis of self-representation34—an aspect of his life that I discuss in chapter 4. It is not a coincidence that this crisis emerged in 1963, the year that the group film RoGoPaG was being made, to which Pasolini contributed The Ricotta (1964). This film is the first example of the spectacularization of Pasolini’s

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authorship and features a disillusioned film director, aware of his own power and limits, played by Orson Welles.35 In one sequence, the director is talking to an inexperienced journalist and recites some lines from a Pasolini poem, in which the writer calls himself “a force of the past.” This scene creates an interesting parallel between Pasolini’s double self-representation in Divine Mimesis—that is, between the author of 1963, in complete crisis, and the Pasolini of the 1950s. Pasolini revealed this crisis in a letter to the producer Alfredo Bini, written on May 12, 1963, when he was writing the first canto of Divine Mimesis and conceiving of his film Il vangelo secondo Matteo (The Gospel According to Saint Matthew, 1964): “Perhaps you know that, as a writer conceptually born out of the Resistance, as a Marxist, etc., throughout the entire 1950s my ideological work was oriented toward rationality, against the irrationalism of decadent literature (which I was educated on and loved so much). Yet the idea of doing a film on the Gospel, and its technical insight, I must confess, is the product of a violent irrational impulse. . . . All this dangerously puts my entire career as a writer on the line, I know.”36 It is impossible to read this private confession without seeing a key to understanding the shift in Divine Mimesis from an “iron ideology,” that of Virgil-Pasolini with the “step of a partisan heading into the mountains” (2:1093), to a form of aesthetic irrationalism, that of Dante-Pasolini, who speaks of a “dream beyond reason” (2:1078). Whatever the outcome of this irrationalism that seems to threaten Pasolini’s new poetics, it can be understood by looking at the textual form of Divine Mimesis. Following Dante’s example, it is through the form that Pasolini controls his readers and shapes their interpretations.

A P ro gressive Form of Realit y Between 1963 and 1965, Pasolini composed the first draft of Divine Mimesis, including the first and the second cantos, which are the only ones that can be considered finished, as well as notes and fragments for cantos 3, 4, and 7. He also wrote two working notes that comment on the text’s overall concept. This practice of self-commentary is another form of the division of the self, something that Pasolini found in the Dante of the Vita nuova.37 For Dante, self-glossing was not only a manifestation of the authorial presence in the work but also a sign of the author’s duplication and even—as in Divina Mimesis—triplication as author, protagonist, and commentator. Pasolini emphasizes his own authorial presence in the text by adopting the form of the

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self-commentary while also shedding light on his own personal intellectual crisis. For example, in “Note n. 1,” dated November 1, 1964, Pasolini explains how he intends to address the composition of the volume. This note is essential for understanding the final form of the text and his previous reference to irrationalism: The book should be written in layers, each new draft should be in the form of notes, and dated, so that the book seems almost like a diary. For example, all the material written up to now should be dated (about a year, a year and a half ago): it mustn’t be cut from the new draft, which must therefore consist of a new additional layer or long note. And the same for all subsequent drafts. In the end, the book should appear as a chronological stratification, a living formal process: where a new idea doesn’t erase the previous one but corrects it or even leaves it unchanged, conserving it formally as a documentation of the progression of thought. And since the book will be a mixture of things done and things to be done—of refined pages and draft pages or just plans—its temporal topography will be complete: it will have at once the magmatic and progressive form of reality (which erases nothing, where the past coexists with the present, etc.). (2:1117)

The idea of a book “written in layers,” with the “magmatic and progressive form of reality,” seems like a reference to the “magma without amalgams” in the poem “Progetto di opere future,” where the project of Divine Mimesis is mentioned for the first time. This connection is corroborated by the idea that “the book [should seem] almost like a diary,” a concept that Pasolini took up again in 1965 in a discussion with Ferdinando Camon about the collection Poem in the Shape of a Rose: The book has the internal, even if not external, form of the diary, and point by point it recounts the progression of my thoughts and my mood in those years. If I had tried to write a memoir, I would have tried to synthesize and level out the experiences that have formed my life. But by making a diary, I represented myself throughout, completely immersed in whatever thought or mood I found myself writing about. It is the diaristic form of the book that makes it so that the contradictions become extreme, never reconcilable, never blunted, if not at the end of the book.38

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If the reference to the author’s life were not sufficiently explicit in the reference to a “diary” in “Note n. 1” of Divine Mimesis, these reflections confirm that Pasolini’s project of total mimesis concerns not only the altered reality of the external world but also his own biography. It is precisely the diary form that allows the “irrationalist impulse” Pasolini mentioned in his letter to Bini to find a form of expression because the diary, an open form, does not call for the resolution of contradictions but represents another kind of Barthesian “signification suspendue.” However, one must be cautious in reading Pasolini’s diaristic impulse as the manifestation of a natural autobiographical tendency. What Divine Mimesis stages above all is the ontological rift that comes between the subject who writes and the subject who is written. The author of an autobiographical text can never be in a simple manner the subject of his own past, as the problematic figure of Virgil-Pasolini demonstrates. The form of the book, therefore, is mimetic not only with respect to the form of the reality of the world but also with respect to the reality of the figure of the author, a fragmented, living contradiction as irreconcilable as the layers of the text. In effect, the published version of Divine Mimesis in 1975 (fewer than a hundred pages with a rather large font) remained faithful to the idea of a superimposition of different, unamalgamated “layers.” However, the material is not presented in chronological, diaristic order, which contradicts “Note n. 1.” If the reference to Poem in the Shape of a Rose seemed natural to many scholars, it is curious that no one has yet thought to connect this note with a very similar passage in the novel Teorema (Theorem), which was published in 1967 and written while Pasolini was still conceptualizing Divine Mimesis as a vast prose work and not as the “opericciola” or “little work” that actually went into print.39 The close relationship between the two texts is evident by the reference to the “theory of the two Paradises” in the second canto and the fragments of the fourth of Divine Mimesis (“must I really go on with this Barbaric Work, in which the Two Paradises are nothing but a fanciful and infantile theory” [2:1089]; “Anyway Paradise is just a plan, and moreover, a double one” [2:1107]). The idea of constructing a double paradise, one neocapitalist and one Communist, was already present at the time of Teorema’s conception. In the text that Pasolini actually published, traces of the idea can be found in chapter 24, written as a short poem and entitled “Il primo paradiso, Odetta . . . ” (The first paradise, Odetta . . . ), but the text was published in a different form in 1966 in the journal Comma as “The Theory of the Two Paradises” and was presented as a preview of a work in progress by Francesco

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Leonetti. As Walter Siti has shown, the work in progress was, in fact, Divine Mimesis: the material in the folder entitled “Memorie barbariche—Frammenti infernali” (Barbaric memories—infernal fragments), the title that Pasolini initially conceived for the volume, proves it. The endless osmosis between Pasolini’s various works is one of the mechanisms that reinforces the sense of coherence within his body of work, which becomes almost a closed world, navigable only if one yields to the author’s instructions. The rhetorical structure of each work reveals an elaborate system of silent devices and mechanisms that orient the reader’s participation along preestablished routes. Pasolini’s work attempts to create an ideal reader, who is asked not just to submit to the author’s directives but to follow his entire creative trajectory and be able to maneuver within the inter- and transtextual references—like an actual critic. As I have already suggested, the birth of this reader-critic figure in Pasolini’s oeuvre corresponds to the shift from a conception of the work as national-popular, according to the parameters of Gramscian ideology, to a more problematic, complex concept as explicated in “Manifesto for a New Theater” and “The Unpopular Cinema.” This new concept makes the authorial figure central to the comprehension of the work. An interesting example of this centrality, among many others, comes from the film Hawks and Sparrows (1966), specifically the opening episode, “L’uomo bianco” (White man). Pasolini cut this episode from the version distributed in the cinemas at the insistence of producer Alfredo Bini, who explained his reasons in a conversation with the director: “We had a big argument over Hawks and Sparrows. When you wanted to put Totò in the circus turning into an eagle to make fun of that French critic, from Figaro, I think, I said: ‘Totò in the circus turning into an eagle? Amusing as an episode on its own. But how can we insert twenty minutes of film for your personal polemic with a French critic? The audience should know who that critic is, what he said, why he offended you, in order to understand anything.’ And in the end we cut it.”40 Bini unknowingly highlighted what was one of the principal components of Pasolini’s self-referential authorial performance, at least when his producer was not on watch. However, let us return to the idea of the work composed of layers, as expressed in “Note n. 1,” and its connection to Teorema. This novel tells the story of a high-bourgeois Milanese family: Paolo, an industrialist; his wife, Lucia; and their children, Pietro and Odetta. One day, announced beforehand only by telegram, a Visitor comes to their house. He turns out to be a handsome, silent young man toward whom each member of the family develops

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an irresistible sexual attraction. Pasolini identifies the Visitor with the sacred—that is, for him, with the direct, unfi ltered experience of reality rejected by the conformism of bourgeois values. When the Visitor, as suddenly as he arrived, leaves the household, the family members find themselves hopeless in the face of the newly revealed void and falsehood in their lives. Odetta goes into a psychiatric clinic; the mother starts to repeatedly proposition young men; the father gives away his factory to the workers and even gets rid of his clothes; and Pietro becomes a painter obsessed with the idea of representing the Visitor’s face. The only one to escape is Emilia, the housemaid, because her peasant origins connect her more directly to the experience of the sacred. She returns to her rural village, performs miracles, and becomes a saint. In the second part of the novel—in a chapter significantly entitled “Vocations and Techniques”—Pietro is described in his study, obsessed with trying new pictorial techniques, an obsession that we might attribute to the later Pasolini as well: One must invent new techniques that are unrecognizable, that don’t resemble any previous process. To thus avoid juvenility and ridiculousness. Build one’s own world, which has no possible comparisons. For which there exist no previous measures of judgment. The measures must be new, as must the technique. No one can understand that the author is worthless, that he is an abnormal, inferior being—that he writhes like a worm in order to survive. . . . Glass on glass because Pietro isn’t capable of correcting—but no one should be able to notice. A sign painted on glass corrects a sign painted before on another piece of glass without sullying it.41

Can we establish a relation between the pictorial technique of glass on glass described here, where one sign overlaps another, and the idea of the book written in layers, in which, as Pasolini puts it in Divine Mimesis, “a new idea doesn’t erase the previous one but corrects it, or even leaves it unchanged” (2:1117)? Pasolini’s authorial performance, like Pietro’s pictorial technique, tends toward the idea of transparency: it makes the dynamics of the compositional process visible and places the author not so much at the center of attention but at the center of the work itself—indeed, as indistinguishable from it. The transparency of the materials Pietro paints on produces the same effect. He is irrevocably embedded in his work by virtue of the technique he uses: “(and since the material is still transparent, one could see Pietro through the paint-

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ing he is working on). Having finished painting the first glass, in silence, Pietro places the second glass on the first, making the monochrome of the second painting appear through the first.” 42 Significantly, to describe Theorem, which originally began as a theatrical work and was transformed into a novel and a fi lm at the same time, Pasolini put himself in the shoes of a painter: “Teorema was born as if against a gold background, painted with my right hand while with the left I worked on a large fresco on the wall (the eponymous film).” 43 Theorem, which was presented at the Venice Film Festival on September 4, 1968, and then abruptly withdrawn from the market a week later because Pasolini was charged with obscenity, demonstrates even more clearly how having Pietro paint on transparent surfaces makes visible the idea of a work within which the author’s performance is incorporated, just as Dante’s performance is in the Comedy. Pasolini placed the plates of glass or plexiglass on which Pietro is painting between the video camera and Pietro himself. The boy’s figure is thus almost always filmed through the work in progress, first clearly and then, as he gradually adds the transparent layers, increasingly muddled, until his figure seems almost like one layer among the others. This layering makes the authorial figure and the surface of the work inextricable.44 In short, the performative author at the center of his work is also a sign among signs that cannot be ignored by the readerspectator (figure 2.1). It would be limiting to suggest, as Alberto Marchesini does, that in this scene Pasolini simply wants to represent Pietro as an abstract painter with no talent or that he is merely using him to criticize abstract art.45 Instead, it is possible to trace in Pietro’s painting the same sense of authorial crisis Pasolini was experiencing as he was writing Divine Mimesis. Pietro, after all, sees his life reduced to a “pile of rubble” and must look to new techniques “to become an author” while at the same time making “everyone aware of his powerlessness.” 46 Similarly, in Divine Mimesis Pasolini presents himself as an author without authority. He glimpses a solution to his crisis of representation in the accumulation and superimposition of imperfect materials— that is, in the idea of work as failure. All that remains of Pasolini’s initial idea of creating a total work that can encompass all of reality, according to the Dantean model, is the tendency toward mimesis. But the mimesis of what? With the failure of the ideological certainties that could have supported the project of a representation of reality, Pasolini realizes that he is fundamentally representing himself, but in a splintered and multiplied form.47 In

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figure 2.1. Pietro painting images on glass plates from the viewpoint of the camera. Source: Image from Teorema (Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1968). Courtesy of Aetos Produzioni Cinematografiche, EIA.

the same way, Pietro is obsessed with the idea of dissimulating the fact that the author is worthless or “inept” because he is faced with the failure of mimesis. His inability to represent the Visitor—that is, the sacred—reflects Pasolini’s own inability to represent reality, which he identifies with the sacred itself.48 Moreover, both Pietro and Pasolini are homosexual authors who attempt to obviate their own sense of artistic failure through technical and stylistic efforts that they eventually abandon. In short, their efforts could also be considered, in Jack Halberstam’s terms, a queer performance of failure, in which the subversive charge of their desire becomes recognizable in the formal incompleteness of their own works.49 As Gragnolati has shown, drawing on Halberstam’s theory, Divine Mimesis in its unfinished, incomplete state is also a provocative negation of the normative order of progress and production. Like Pasolini’s performance of authorship, Divine Mimesis challenges the values of the mass culture through its provocative, self-undermining form.50

The E ditor ’ s Note Between La mortaccia and the first version of Divina Mimesis, Pasolini moved from taking Dante’s authorial model as the justification for an autobiographical project to the awareness that such a model could not help him

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with his own crisis of authority. The second version of the project takes this awareness to extremes. Between 1966 and 1967, Pasolini returned to the manuscript, which at the time consisted of a “pile of sheets of typewriter paper cut in half . . . bound with five full-size folded sheets.”51 On the first folded sheet, he wrote the various titles he had thought of up to that point: Frammenti infernali (Infernal fragments), Memorie barbariche (Barbaric memories), La divina teoria (Divine theory), La divina realtà (Divine reality), and La divina mimesis. We can also read the physical description of the manuscript, which roughly corresponds to its present conditions,52 in a couple of pages entitled “Editor’s Note.” The note gives the volume a radical conceptual twist and further complicates the question of authorship. The note is written by an imaginary editor who has compiled the manuscript from the fragments of a text he found under unfortunate—and, from my point of view, symptomatic—circumstances: “This is not a critical edition. I am limiting myself to publishing everything the author has left. My only critical effort, which anyway, is very modest, is reconstructing the chronological sequence of these notes as precisely as possible. . . . A notebook was even found in his jacket pocket on his corpse (he died, clubbed to death, in Palermo last year)” (2:1119). A letter to Livio Garzanti from January 1967 confi rms that Pasolini had indeed decided not to complete his rewriting of Dante but to publish the manuscript in the form of fragments arranged in chronological order by  this imaginary editor: “FRAGMENTS (provisional title: PRACTICAL MEMORIES);[53] It would be the old reworking of the Inferno, which I THINK I won’t do but will collect as ‘editor,’ almost as if it were a found fragmentary text, completed with notes and outlines.”54 Pasolini was not concerned about mentioning the unusual device he would use: he left his own death, the death of the author, to a simple parenthetical in the imaginary “Editor’s Note.” The staged, sudden, and violent death of the author of the note for Divine Mimesis, which—it bears anticipating—was not included in the final edition in 1975, managed to provoke the imagination of critics and reviewers in the wake of Pasolini’s actual death. However, its main interest lies not in the mere coincidence between the note and the writer’s murder55 but in Pasolini’s conception of death through the lens of “self-construction”—to borrow Robert Gordon’s term56—that is, as a device to strengthen particularly his figure as a romantically tortured artiste maudit. Pasolini, to cite Apollinaire, wanted his audience to know that he was a poet not quite assassinated but

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assassinateable—a difficult, hated, unpopular figure; the definitive version of the volume was indeed dedicated “to my enemies” (2:1071). Many have read the “Editor’s Note” as a projection of Pasolini’s frustrations in those years. He felt like a “reject,” attacked on all fronts, especially by the exponents of the Italian neo-avant-garde. Many critics reduce the content of the note to the reference to the second gathering of the neo-avant-gardist Gruppo 63 in Palermo—that is, to the symbolic murder of Pasolini’s authority committed by the group’s members, who considered Pasolini one of their primary critical targets. Although reasonable, this literal reading is also reductive. Pasolini’s projects multiplied dizzyingly in 1966 and 1967. Confined to bed after a severe ulcer, he wrote six dramas; he also shot Hawks and Sparrows, Oedipus Rex, and the short films Earth Seen from the Moon and What Are the Clouds? He wrote the treatment for a fi lm on St. Paul and for Teorema in addition to most of the dense essays of Heretical Empiricism. It does not seem that Pasolini was inclined to accept his murder by his neo-avant-garde colleagues, no matter how metaphorical. Never, one might say, had he felt so alive as an author. In fact, in 1969, asked by Marco Blaser about his relationship with the neo-avant-garde, Pasolini explained: “I used to debate violently with neoavant-garde. Right now, I am the winner. The neo-avant-garde has disappeared from the horizon.”57 The reasons for his imaginary assassination must therefore be sought elsewhere. If one gives credence to the notes that compose the 1967 version of Divine Mimesis, we find an even more emphatic prismatization or splintering of authorial identity. The reader finds himself facing a real auctor (Pasolini in the guise of the editor), two Pasolini agens (respectively, the Dante-Pasolini and the Virgil-Pasolini, author-characters in turn), and an imaginary auctor Pasolini, present in the text in the unusual form of a corpse. Even the assassinated author, as the fictional author, becomes one of the characters within the story, yet paradoxically—because his appearance in the text passes through his disappearance—he is a still-born character and thus not agens but inert. One could also claim that he is the Pasolini of 1963–1965: the author still convinced of the potential of the project of mimetically rewriting Dante’s Comedy. The fact that this character is dead makes it clear that, for the Pasolini of 1967, the project of rewriting Dante had become secondary, a pretext in the more literal sense of the term. For him, the fundamental question was no longer the relationship with the figure and model of Dante but the definition of his own authorial figure. Death definitively interrupts and frustrates all possibility of realism and mimesis, making the literary fiction patent and almost

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grotesque and interrupting all possible mimesis between art and life: Pasolini alive, pretending to be an editor, writes that he is dead. It is as if Dante, instead of employing the device of the vision and descent into the underworld while alive, after the examples of Aeneas and St. Paul, had made the pilgrim’s journey begin with the declaration of his own passing. In doing so, Pasolini abandoned representation for simulation. Another significant effect of the author’s simulated death is the justification of the unfinished or interrupted nature of Divine Mimesis. Before Pasolini introduced the author’s death, the text presented a problematic polarity between terminability and interminability. As an initial (and intentional) mimesis of the Comedy, the text should have fallen within the classical order of the terminable. As a divine mimesis, however—or rather, an “omnivorous, mimetic undertaking of the entire latitude of reality”58—Divine Mimesis cannot but become an interminable project because, as Stefano Agosti explains, when life (and let us also say the real) coincides with a work, the collision gives rise to infinite additions, expansions, insertions, and the impossibility of ever considering the undertaking fi nished.59 Hence, the corollary of notes and comments that mark Pasolini’s project—a project attempted, reworked, and eventually abandoned. In his parallel between death and editing, by conceiving life as a potentially infinite sequence that only death can interrupt and in this way transform chaos into possible meaning, Pasolini seems to be in agreement with Agosti’s premise. Only death can terminate the work. It doesn’t seem to be a coincidence that Pasolini chooses to explain the significance of his montage–death theory not with a reference to natural death but with a reference to the assassination of JFK. “Kennedy, in dying,” Pasolini wrote in “Observations on the Sequence Shot,” “expressed himself with his final act.” It is only because of death that “our life can be used to express ourselves.” 60 Pasolini returned to the problem of death in his essay “I segni viventi e i poeti morti” (Living signs and dead poets): “Each of us (whether voluntarily or not) by living commits a moral action in which meaning is suspended. From this arises the reason for death. If we were immortal, we would be immoral because our example would never come to an end; therefore, it would be indecipherable, eternally suspended and ambiguous.” 61 For Pasolini, life, too, is a work “a canone sospeso”—in which the sense is suspended—and death, by eliminating the ambiguity of the meaning (the moral) of our actions, in a certain sense expresses us: “either express yourself and die or be unexpressed and immortal.” 62 If life is the constant striving for the perfection of

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expression, the death of the author seems the proper figure for discussing the renunciation of that project.

“ Yell owed I cono gr aphy ” Unexpectedly, in 1975, with the volume going into print, Pasolini discarded the idea of the fictitious editor and the idea of the author’s death. He included the “Editor’s Note” but with the title “For an ‘Editor’s Note’ ” in order to show how this text, too, constitutes one of the subsequently abandoned projects. However, even the most careful critics continue to skip over this detail, giving the impression that Divine Mimesis is a posthumous work, produced by the assassinated author in the fiction of the text. According to this tendency, Divine Mimesis “ends only because its author has died, ‘clubbed to death in Palermo’ ” (Carla Benedetti);63 it is “the unfinished work of a poet ‘clubbed to death in Palermo’ ” (Massimo Fusillo);64 it is a “book written by Pasolini in the form of a posthumous work” (Guido Santato);65 it is the “posthumous edition of a fragmentary work that the author (‘clubbed to death in Palermo’) didn’t put into order” (Marco Antonio Bazzocchi).66 I insist on emphasizing “clubbed to death” because in this idea of the assassinated author we fi nd concepts that demand clarification. The first of such concepts is the inability to grasp the scope of the discourse on death rather than the assassination of the author—that is, the difference between poetics and chronicle, between the idea of literature and of biography. A second—as the series of articles that came out immediately after the publication of Divine Mimesis and the release of Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975) demonstrates67—is the impossibility on the part of audiences and critics to separate Pasolini the author and Pasolini the character. The romantic myth of the damned and prophetic artist, to which Pasolini himself contributed, replaced reality, so that even the “Editor’s Note” became a prophecy of the author’s own end. On November 4, 1975, two days after Pasolini’s murder, even Italo Calvino added to this confusion: “[Pasolini] always tied general discourse to his own lived experience; and this mixture of life and work can be found in the facts about his death.”68 It is right and important to stress the mix of life and work, but the idea that Pasolini’s death is also mirrored in his work is simple romanticization and contributes to erroneous readings of texts such as Petrolio and Divine Mimesis.69 The latter is by no means posthumous, nor was it published in fragmentary form simply because of the author’s death. The

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fragmentariness is Pasolini’s strategic choice, an authorial performance. He confirmed this choice in September 1974 when he published “Il primo canto della Divina mimesis” (Canto 1 of Divine Mimesis) in the journal Il Mondo. He did so, however, using an added title: “Condannato a vivere” (Sentenced to keep living).70 The subject of this title is, without a doubt, Pasolini himself. It refers to the impossibility of staying faithful to the project of authorial death and the consequential need to return to the parallel between the life of the author and the work as “living formal process.” By 1974, the literary establishment had already widely discussed Barthes’s essay on the death of the author, so Pasolini’s added title sounds almost like a response to and a rebuttal of the French semiotician’s obituary. In those years, Barthes’s own work was unexpectedly returning to the author, who reappeared in Sade, Fourier, and Loyola in 1971—which Pasolini cited as a source for Salò. In 1975, Pasolini, who had already written the five hundred pages that we have of Petrolio, had in mind an idea of authorship entirely different from the one he had expressed in the first draft of Divine Mimesis. He was no longer interested in being simply an author within the work, even if in the form of sign or corpse. Now he wanted to be an author in flesh and blood—that is, an unmediated authorial presence, a bridge between outside and inside in a risky osmosis between work and life. So it is no coincidence that when putting the book into print, he packaged it with a series of devices that strongly suggest the identity of the real author, understood as creator and guarantor of the text. Although Emanuela Patti claims that Pasolini wanted to demystify the role of the author as transcendent figure,71 he actually contaminated the model of the powerful and central auctor—the traditional model of authorship represented by Dante— with that of a decentered author dispersed throughout the text in doubles, figures, and performative acts. The staging of the author’s failure in Divine Mimesis, coinciding with the publication of an unfinished, chaotic text, should be read as Pasolini’s creative way to resist the model of success in contemporary capitalist society, a queer performance of the kind that Halberstam discusses in The Queer Art of Failure and that I proposed as a model also for Pietro’s authorial performance in Teorema. However, this staging does not kill the author, as suggested by Gragnolati, who also sustains a convincing queer reading of Divine Mimesis.72 It instead emphasizes him in inverse relation to the operations of failure performed on the textual scene. Indeed, without a subject there can be no failure. Publishing a text that repeatedly fails, at least as many times as the abandoned

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projects of rewriting and expanding the Divine Comedy, is instead an expression of the resistant and provocative function of Pasolini’s authorial performance. The hostility the text produces in the puzzled reader confirms the existence of the author understood as a living protest, one who ably orchestrates its reception. Pasolini’s oeuvre as a whole is just like Divine Mimesis: neither coherent nor homogenous. Pasolini deploys his own figure precisely to create the effect of coherence or, better yet, to create the effect of work. The Divine Mimesis of 1975 maintains all the Pasolinian authorial figures that we have encountered up to this point (including that of the assassinated author). It also contradicts the chronological criterion of the invented editor and the false critical edition, manifesting a strong authorial strategy. The fragments are no longer organized chronologically but according to an apparent disorder within a series of textual thresholds and devices that make the authorial performance patent and potent.73 One of these devices is the preface, dated 1975 and appended to the slender volume. The preface, as Gerard Genette states, offers the author “the possibility of officially assuming (or rejecting) paternity of his own text”74—that is, of manifesting himself as author, of authorizing the text. For his own part, Pasolini’s comments: “Divine Mimesis: today I am sending to press these pages as a ‘document,’ but also to spite my ‘enemies’: in fact, by offering them another reason to scorn me, I give them another reason to go to hell. Yellowed Iconography: these pages want to have the logic, more than of an illustration, of an (albeit very readable) ‘visual poem’ ” (2:1771). It is important to highlight the definition that Pasolini provides for the pages that make up Divine Mimesis. It is not a “novel,” “poem,” or “book”; it is a “document.” But a document of what? Certainly of a provocatively fl aunted failure, just like the poems that make up his last poetry collection, Trasumanar e organizzar (Transhumanize and organize), published in 1971. It is no surprise that Pasolini had already used the term document in that collection’s flap copy. In that same description, he takes care to use a distinction that we can also use to analyze the preface to Divine Mimesis. According to the author, documents can be “either private (bearing witness to a life) or literary (bearing witness to a linguistic and intellectual evolution).”75 It seems evident that the dialectic of Pasolini’s infernal fragments lives in the oscillation between private and literary and that sometimes it is difficult to determine to which of the two elements Pasolini wanted to grant greater importance. However, Divine Mimesis is also, as Siti has acutely observed, an element of the autobiographical monument Pasolini attempted to create in the last phase of his career.76

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The preface also contains one more suggestion for understanding the text. It presents Divine Mimesis as a work divided into two parts: on the one hand, the pages of “documents,” on the other the “Yellowed Iconography”—that is, the “visual poem” or “photographic poem” made up of the twenty-five black-andwhite photos that conclude the volume. Although the criticism has always considered the “Yellowed Iconography” as a marginal appendix to the text, Pasolini stresses its importance from the very beginning. The photos, with a few exceptions, depict characters, events, and situations referred to in the text: the Communist martyrs Grimau and Lambrakis, the struggles in Reggio Emilia in 1960, a Communist rally, the youth of the 1950s and the Fascists of the early 1960s, young partisans, the Roman masses during the economic boom. In short, these photos are “illustrations” of the text, visual captions. This is not the case for the photographs that directly refer to the author Pier Paolo Pasolini and that constitute a sort of visual network of citations between work and biography: the portraits of author-masters and friends such as Gianfranco Contini, Sandro Penna, and Carlo Emilio Gadda—the latter shown with a young Pasolini, who is acknowledged only as “the author” in the caption—but also portraits of “enemies,” such as the members of Gruppo 63; Gramsci’s tomb in Testaccio, a clear reference to Pasolini’s collection of poetry from 1957; the book cover of Poem in the Shape of a Rose; a scene from The Gospel According to Matthew; a church in Casarsa, Pasolini’s birthplace; the Nymphaeum of the Villa Giulia, the headquarters of the Strega Award, on whose jury Pasolini had participated; and the faces of the young Africans in which the writer rediscovered the purity of the lost world of the Italian subproletariat. These photos, in short, do not just communicate, as Sandro Bernardi claims, the impossibility of reducing everything to a simple object of discourse77 or Pasolini’s newfound distrust in the verbal. On the contrary, they represent a phototextual dimension in which Pasolini emphasizes yet again the relationship between work and author. Using Andy Stafford’s categorizations, one could argue that the “Yellowed Iconography” is a “retrospective photo-essay” in which a writer essays photographic images from the past.78 It is, in short, a biography in images similar to that found, for example, in Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes (which coincidentally was published in the same year as Divine Mimesis, 1975).79 We should consider these images as biographemes, more or less according to Barthes’s definition in the essay that marked his return to the author, Sade, Fourier, Loyola: “Were I a writer, and dead, how I would love it if my life, through the pains of some friendly and detached biographer, were to reduce itself to a few details, a few preferences,

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a few inflections, let us say: to ‘biographemes.’ ”80 And it is Barthes himself who authorizes the association of photography and biographeme in his later work Camera Lucida (1981): “I like certain features which, in a writer’s life, delight me as much as certain photographs; I have called these features ‘biographemes.’ Photography has the same relation to History that the biographeme has to biography.”81 Although Barthes’s definition seems tailor made for the images of the “Yellowed Iconography,” it must also be noted that Pasolini’s biographemes also act as links of reference not only to his life (bios) but also to many of his other works (grafia, in the broad sense). The reader is asked “to combine, negotiate, and assess the intermedial relations between text and image”82 as well as to reconstruct the identity of the author, who evidently is not the one “clubbed to death” but rather a lively performing figure in the text. One last consideration concerns the use of the term yellowed in the title of this photo-text. “Yellowed” indeed also characterizes the protagonist’s guide in canto 1: Pasolini the civic poet of the 1950s (“I’m yellowing little by little in the 1950s”; “I’m destined to yellow”). In canto 3, the adjective is used to describe the photographs of the partisans (“Look at their photographs, now yellow”). Yellowing is thus an obvious metaphor for the passage of time and the destruction of reality as it had been known in the past. The famous “Abiura dalla ‘Trilogia della vita’ ” (Abjuration of the Trilogy of Life) published on June 15, 1975—and therefore during approximately the same period as the insertion of the “Yellowed Iconography” in Divine Mimesis—also concludes with the image of yellowing: “I am working to put my life back in order. I am forgetting how things were before. The faces I loved yesterday are beginning to yellow.”83 The yellow in Divina Mimesis is also the color of the face of an author who saw the certainties of the past collapse one by one and who transposed them in the failed pages of the text. However, he is also someone who still wants to redefi ne his own identity and role and to put his life, not his death, back in order.

3 Celebrity

The “ photogr aphic ” poem at the end of Divine Mimesis , like an intellectual biography in images, heightens the author’s presence, making his performance in the text more obvious. But what if we were to read it as an expression of Pasolini’s awareness that he needed to use images to construct a new form of authorship—a spectacular one? Simona Bondavalli was the first critic to discuss Pasolini in terms of “spectacular authorship.” She analyzed how Pasolini used interviews to control the interpretation of his work and at the same time to critique the media culture and star system, which both fascinated and challenged him. According to Bondavalli, Pasolini constructed an author-character through the manipulation of his own image, which imbued his work with his personal presence and gave him the opportunity to critique the culture industry from which he felt alienated.1 Indeed, Pasolini’s transition from literature to cinema in the early 1960s coincided with his discovery of the power of images in mass-media

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society, along with his growing distrust in the representative ability of the word, a distrust that was complexly manifested in Divine Mimesis. In the aftermath of Italy’s postwar economic boom, the exponential growth of the film industry and television’s increasing power contributed to the mass production and consumption of new icons and the birth of a star system modeled on Hollywood’s. Newspapers, fashion magazines, and gossip rags obsessed over the lives of Italian celebrities, singers, actors, and TV personalities. And as Marcia Landy shows in Stardom, Italian Style, film directors rose to the status of auteur, thanks to the theories of Cahiers du Cinéma.2 Federico Fellini, Luchino Visconti, Roberto Rossellini, Vittorio De Sica, and Michelangelo Antonioni were just a few of the star directors who had to deal with newfound celebrity. After the success of his first films, Accattone (1961) and Mamma Roma (1962), Pasolini no longer aspired only to be a famous poet and writer. He sought the role of international celebrity at a time of particular visibility for Italian cinema. His authorial performance would have to adapt, even if defiantly, to the demands of the nascent society of the spectacle. In a way, he even solicited its effects, purposefully adjusting his image to create a dynamic public identity, triggering controversy and polarizing critics. Pasolini was fully aware that celebrity (and the personal myth that comes with it) is never spontaneous but rather a construction, “a product deriving from the media, entertainment, or public relations industry.”3 This construction necessarily involves the commodification and alienation of the subject. In this regard, Pasolini comes close to and in some respects anticipates Guy Debord’s theories in The Society of Spectacle (1967). According to Debord, in the society of spectacle relations between images have been substituted for relations between people. It is only through radical action that the spectators can liberate themselves from the addictive spectaular images and the conformism those images promote. Debord’s situational agency is very similar to the authorial performativity through which Pasolini aimed to undermine accepted forms of life, politics, and art.4 Pasolini’s understanding of the alienation provoked by media culture made his search for celebrity quite dissimilar from that of other twentieth-century Italian artists. For instance, Pasolini’s view was far different from the attitude of the decadent poet and writer Gabriele d’Annunzio (1863–1938), despite the critical tendency to associate the two authors. The latter was one of the most prominent cultural figures in postunification Italy and certainly the first to understand the importance of the media in fueling his celebrity and his cult

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of personality. Because d’Annunzio created a pervasive public persona and carefully administrated his personal myth following the rules of the rising culture industry and image culture, many of Pasolini’s detractors—including Franco Fortini—accused Pasolini of having “played d’Annunzio’s role.”5 The target of their polemic was not d’Annunzio the artist but his authorial model or “authorial palimpsest.” 6 Fortini was simply voicing a common negative attitude toward Pasolini’s spectacular authorship. Enzo Siciliano suggests, for example, that before Pasolini only “d’Annunzio had been able to use the means of mass communications for the purpose of disseminating his own image as a writer, while at the same time defying the good manners of the period.”7 In the intellectual circles of 1960s Italy, Pasolini’s turn from writing to cinema was seen as a narcissistic attempt to increase his visibility and pursue a more remunerative career. D’Annunzio was the other author who had established a strong relation to cinema before Pasolini; several of his novels and tragedies were adapted into silent films, a total of twenty-two productions between 1911 and 1920. His supertitles for Giovanni Pastrone’s film Cabiria (1914), an unprecedented international success, greatly increased the poet’s notoriety. Although d’Annunzio considered cinema an industry prone to the audience’s “execrable” taste, he realized that it had the power to expand his international fame and, above all, his profitability. He was not concerned with the dubious quality of the films that used his name so long as they had market potential. His extravagant lifestyle required huge amounts of money, and he didn’t shy away from also advertising an endless number of mass products and brands to obtain it, asking for large sums in exchange for the market appeal of his fame. In many ways, d’Annunzio was the Italian inventor of celebrity branding, and he was the first writer to double as a copywriter. He created advertising campaigns and names for the most disparate products, among them Saiwa biscotti and crackers, which are still sold. As odd as it may appear, this “Dannunzian” brand was a meaningful example for Pasolini, despite the later artist’s entirely far more critical approach to consumer and mass society. In an interview during the shooting of Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975), Pasolini was asked about rumors regarding scenes of coprophagy in his film. In his response, he mentioned Saiwa as an example of the metaphorical “shit” that consumer culture obliges people to eat. He then claimed that with Salò he wanted to establish a direct analogy between historical fascism and what he saw as the new form of fascism represented by neocapitalist society, which directly manipulates the body of the

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consumer.8 From the point of the film industry, Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom was an indigestible product, a quintessential art fi lm, that could not be experienced by the masses without shaking their conscience. We do not know if Pasolini was aware that d’Annunzio was behind the Saiwa ads, but the anecdote helps us to understand his position on the relationship between market and artist as well as the latter’s search for a consumable celebrity in media culture. Unlike d’Annunzio, Pasolini was very ambivalent about the myth created by his media presence. In 1964, he wrote to the readers of Vie Nuove, a weekly magazine associated with the Italian Communist Party (PCI), declaring his refusal to take part in any mythology: “I don’t want any part of your mythology, not even for that piece of success or the defamatory or celebratory spreading of my name it could grant me.”9 But even this apparent resistance is part of the construction of a public persona, portraying an author who is the unwitting victim of the media and his own success. In a television interview by journalist Enzo Biagi, recorded in May 1971 but not broadcast until November 3, 1975, the day after Pasolini’s death, Pasolini criticized the antidemocratic nature of television, describing it as the producer of an incommensurable power disparity between those pictured on screen and the audience. Not content with his host’s dismay, he asserted that success is nothing but the flip side of persecution.10 It is true that at a very superficial level Pasolini’s constant presence in the news and gossip columns of the time seemed to justify the claim that he was just another d’Annunzio. As Barth David Schwartz writes in his pioneering and monumental biography, the articles about Italian society and politics that Pasolini published in Il Corriere della Sera became “the most discussed phenomenon in Italian journalism since Gabriele d’Annunzio.”11 However, in suggesting a parallel between d’Annunzio’s and Pasolini’s fame, Schwartz makes no reference to the fundamental differences in the nature of the fame that the two authors experienced. D’Annunzio was well supported by a large part of Italian society. Behind closed doors, his defiant attitude toward conventions and his restless and at time ridiculous “dongiovannism” were tolerated, if not admired, because they ultimately confirmed the myth of Italian virility on which fascism would capitalize.12 During the years of the Fascist dictatorship, d’Annunzio’s incredible influence in Italian society was also confi rmed by Mussolini himself, who felt threatened by the hero-poet’s mass appeal.13 During his lifetime, Pasolini’s celebrity derived more from Italian society’s hostile reception of his unconventional intellectual positions and his

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homosexuality than from his artistic output. Although he did publish his editorials in Il Corriere della Sera, one of the leading Italian newspapers with a bourgeoisie readership, each article fueled heated debates and sometimes even harsh mockery from both the left- and right-wing press. His name was a synonym for scandal, so that he can be considered a paradigm of Italian public morality.14 The delay of the broadcast of his TV interview with Enzo Biagi seems to confirm that in his case success was indeed the flip side of some sort of persecution. In Italian law, public television could not grant air time to anyone under prosecution. In 1971, Pasolini, as the director of Lotta Continua, a principal newspaper of the extraparliamentary Left, was involved in a trial, charged with incitement to crime and antinational propaganda. At the same time, hundreds of private citizens urged that charges for obscenity be brought against the director for The Decameron, released that same year, and Pasolini was still resolving a police charge from a town outside Catania, Sicily, for the alleged slaughter of some sheep during the production of the film Porcile (1969). These absurd charges, all brought in a single year, were just a few in the series of legal battles and trials by media he underwent, which many have seen as an actual “persecution” or public “lynching.”15 Hyperbole aside, his legal troubles and the resulting media attention both contributed to his fame and were a consequence of it. Needless to say, the masses he stirred up were far different from the crowd that cheered during d’Annunzio’s famous balcony addresses. Pasolini’s troubles with the law began as soon as he arrived in Rome, after the novel The Ragazzi (1955) was indicted for containing pornographic content. Then on June 30, 1960, Pasolini was accused of helping a thief escape by giving him a ride in his car. In the same year, the novel A Violent Life (1959) was denounced by the Azione Cattolica, a Roman Catholic lay association under the direct control of Italian bishops. On July 11, 1961, two journalists from the newspaper Il Messaggero accused him of corrupting minors after seeing him in the company of some boys near the Port of Anzio. The next year Mamma Roma was accused of offending common moral sense and containing obscenity, and in 1964 La ricotta was charged with contempt of religion. And so it went. The stream of legal charges and trials, which would continue until his death, is paralleled by attacks from the press.16 The journalist and historian Adalberto Baldoni, who was associated with right-wing movements at the time, recalls that Pasolini was a prime target of the conservative press. Magazines and newspapers such as Lo Specchio, Il Nuovo Meridiano, Il Tempo, and Il Borghese were more interested in Pasolini’s affairs than in Fellini’s or Marcello

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Mastroianni’s, and they put his picture on the front page along with vulgar, violent headlines that often incited demonstrations and aggression against him and the so-called pasolinidi, an expression coined by the rightwing press as a label for “inverts.” The word’s existence shows the extent to which Pasolini’s homosexuality had contributed to his public image and “inverted celebrity.”17 At the same time, Pasolini was harshly criticized from the left by the cultural establishment of the PCI for his representation of the world of the borgate, which was deemed “vulgar” and “obscene” and thus not the positive depiction of the working class that the party promoted. Some prominent party members, including Secretary Palmiro Togliatti, distanced themselves from Pasolini, concerned by the media exposure of his homosexuality.18 However, Pasolini was not officially a party member. The PCI had expelled him in 1949 (two years after he signed up) for moral indecency, following a trial for engaging in a homosexual encounter with four minors during a village festival in Ramuscello in the Friulian countryside. As the first openly homosexual Italian celebrity, Pasolini paid an extremely high price for his notoriety, a price that informed his critical attitude toward his success and visibility. If we look back to his definition of the author in “The Unpopular Cinema,” the political and social reaction to his work and life was in fact a demonstration that Pasolini was indeed “a living protest,” an author who provoked hostility and hate with his artistic and existential choices. Such an author cannot help but scandalize, and whoever rejects the pleasure of being scandalized, Pasolini argues, is a moralist. In a similar line of thought in the Vie Nuove article, a few lines after claiming to reject his own celebrity, he accepted the idea that he had, despite himself, become a myth and was setting out to embrace that condition with greater sincerity: “It is true that we need ‘myths’ and ‘authorities,’ and he who, through the culture industry or the support of a current of opinion or the organization of a party or chance, becomes a ‘myth,’ an ‘authority,’ also acquires new responsibilities toward himself and others. At that point his relationship with others is whatever it is; it is no longer that of an equal among equals. . . . Perhaps at this point I am too a bit of an authority: but leave me a few years of work and study to learn to do it better, to better fi nd the conjunction between authority and sincerity.”19 This sincerity is obviously difficult to achieve within the mechanisms of the culture industry because celebrity does not allow separation between the real person, the persona, and the character. It instead constantly confuses them in what the sociologist Edgar Morin calls a “mixed zone.”20

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This confusion emerges with particular clarity in Pasolini’s comment about the absurd accusation of having attempted an armed robbery at a gas station near San Felice Circeo in 1961: “One day, a crazy man accused me of having held him up (wearing a black hat and gloves and carrying a gun loaded with golden bullets). This accusation passed for valid and reliable because at some underdeveloped cultural level we tend to confuse an author and his characters: he who describes the robbers and the robbed.”21 In outlining what he saw as the motivation behind the hoax, Pasolini revealed himself to be entirely aware that people had uncritically superimposed his image over the world of the petty criminals he described in his Roman novels and his early fi lms. In his comment, Pasolini referred to an article about the alleged attempted robbery that the newspaper Il Tempo published on November 30, 1961, along with a photograph of Pasolini holding a machine gun. In that photo, however, he is not committing a crime but playing the role of Leandro “Er monco” in a scene of Carlo Lizzani’s film Il gobbo (The Hunchback of Rome, 1960).22 Revisiting this episode years later, Pasolini underlined the identity transfer produced by his on-screen visibility: “Essentially, I was no longer Pasolini, but Leandro il Monco: and the judgment of Leandro il Monco became a judgment of Pasolini.”23 This sharp perception of the implicit power of any film appearance informs the strategic importance of Pasolini’s onscreen authorial performances in his own films, which gradually intensified beginning in the late 1960s, following his first cameo in Oedipus Rex (1967). Authors such as Dante had once represented for Pasolini a model of literary authority.24 But with media exposure and celebrity, Pasolini needed to elaborate and dramatize his own authorial image through a projection in figures and images that—belonging properly to the system of spectacle, in which he was by then irremediably involved—would allow him to denounce the alienating character of spectacle. Two choices he made are particularly telling in this regard: to cast Orson Welles in the role of the director in La ricotta and to use Marilyn Monroe—a perfect figure insofar as she is tragic, an icon of the exposed body, and a victim of unbelievable fame—to stage his ambivalent attitude toward his own myth.

D irec ting Star Shot in 1962 and released in cinemas the following year, La ricotta is a thirtyfive-minute short that is part of the unfortunately titled collective fi lm

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RoGoPaG, formed from the initials of the directors involved: Roberto Rossellini, Jean-Luc Godard, Pasolini, and Ugo Gregoretti. The symbolic inscription of his name after that of one of the masters of neorealism and one of the most promising directors of the nouvelle vague represented a confirmation of Pasolini’s growing fame but also seems to have generated a bout of authorial anxiety, reflected in the form of the film itself. La ricotta, which Alberto Moravia immediately called “brilliant”25 and which is one of the most complex works in Pasolini’s filmography despite its limited length, is essential not only in terms of authorial representation and performance but also in terms of understanding the metalinguistic aspects of Pasolini’s late work. In analyzing the characteristics of the Italian star directors, such as Fellini, Rossellini, and Visconti, Marcia Landy claims that one of the factors that contributed to their stardom was that “their investigations of the cinematic image particularly involve metacinematic considerations that include the character of stardom.”26 This assessment makes it difficult to understand why Landy makes no mention of La ricotta in her discussion of Pasolini. She limits herself to dedicating ample attention to Pasolini’s use of Anna Magnani’s star power in Mamma Roma, which was shot the year before La ricotta. She reads the former film as a critique of the ideals of Rossellini’s film Roma città aperta (Rome Open City, 1945), in which Magnani plays the role of Pina, whose death remains one of the most important scenes in world cinema. According to Landy, Pasolini exploited Magnani’s star image, wresting from it associations with motherhood, femininity, and national identity. But what about the use of stars to address and shape his own celebrity? Following the logic of the market, Pasolini would cast international stars such as Maria Callas (Medea, 1969), Silvana Mangano (Oedipus Rex and Theorem, 1968), and Terence Stamp (Theorem) to launch his films. But The Ricotta is a more significant example because Pasolini did not cast just any international star to play the role of a filmmaker but film director Orson Welles. So we must ask, how does Welles’s stardom influence the concept of Pasolini’s authorship? The film was inspired by the real news story of an extra who caught a chill while acting in the crucifi xion scene on the set of Richard Fleischer’s Barabbas (1962), shot in Rome. The Ricotta is also set in the sparse and arid countryside outside Rome, where a film troupe, with the assistance of numerous extras who are residents of the nearby slums, is shooting the crucifixion scene in a film about the life of Christ.27 One of the residents, Stracci (Rags), is asked to play one of the thieves who were crucified with Jesus. Stracci is a poor vagrant who, thanks to various Chaplin-esque strategies, ends up with indiges-

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figure 3.1. Tableau vivant of Rosso Fiorentino’s painting Deposition (1528). Source: Image from La ricotta (Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1964). Courtesy of Arco Film, Cineriz.

tion from eating too much ricotta and dies on the cross during the final scene before the eyes of the director, played by Welles, and a group of visitors gathered for the final take. This is a film within a film: on the one side there is the grotesque, comic, moving story of Stracci, who represents the reality behind the scenes of the film; on the other, there is the world of representation, the fiction of the cinema. Emphasizing this idea, the director shoots tableaux vivants, detailed reconstructions of two canvases by Pontormo and Rosso Fiorentino, each representing the deposition of Christ (figure 3.1). The Ricotta, in short, is divided between two concepts of the cinema: one, as Gian Piero Brunetta has noted, is cinema as life, tied to reality, represented by the subproletarian story of Stracci, shot in black and white;28 the other is the aestheticizing, didactic, refined scenes of the tableaux vivants, which were shot in color, a technique Pasolini had never used previously. It is interesting to note that his use of color does not correspond to a mimetic principle but rather contradicts it: the representation of reality is in black and white, whereas the representation of representation is in color. As Tomaso Subini has suggested, Pasolini used color abstractly, not in reference to actual things, but to the mannerist world of Pontormo and Rosso.29 At the same time, the contrast between color and colorlessness also indicates a possible crossroads in Pasolini’s film career between the Accattone and Mamma Roma models of cinema and the temptation of a change that could turn out to be fatally aestheticist and devoid of commitment or critical edge.

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The Ricotta was conceived in every respect as a work of transition, which we can see in the fact that for the first time Pasolini no longer looks at the world of the Roman subproletariat from the inside as a world separate from the rest of society—a perspective he also inhabited in his early Roman novels. There were no characters like Orson Welles in those novels or in his first two films; “there were no bourgeois representatives, no relationship with the rest of the world through the mediation of the author or a character representing the author.”30 If Pasolini’s reflection suggests that The Ricotta represents a turning point for the question of authoriality as an explicit function within his work, the contrast between black and white and color also seems to be the visual manifestation of an unresolved aesthetic dialectic, a Pasolinian artistic crisis. This crisis is manifested metaphorically through Pontormo and Rosso Fiorentino’s mannerism. Roberto Longhi, with whom Pasolini had studied in Bologna, had suggested that mannerist painting was meant to manifest “the desperate ‘vitality’ of a crisis.”31 This phrase, which Pasolini found in Giuliano Briganti’s book La maniera italiana (The Italian manner), a volume used on the set of The Ricotta for the reconstruction of the tableaux vivants, came to define his poetics in the 1960s (it was also the title of a poem he wrote in 1963, which I return to later on). Through color, Pasolini announced a crisis that he associated with the emergence of an explicit authorial function in his work. The use of color and of black and white forced him into a particularly violent and antirealistic type of montage that asserts the author’s presence. However, The Ricotta is also the first work in which Pasolini revealed his own presence in the film through a complex system of intertextual citations—most obviously by using a film director as a main character. In her article about Pasolini’s spectacular authorship, Simona Bondavalli lingers particularly on the scene in which the director is interviewed by an inexperienced journalist. Pasolini used this scene to exhibit his ability to manipulate the media and create a spectacular persona, which could attract the attention needed to sell his works.32 The interview sequence, however, does not appear in the first version of the script. Right after he decided that his next film would be The Gospel According to Saint Matthew (1964), Pasolini conceived of the scene as a way of projecting aspects of his own authorial figure onto Welles’s character. At this point, the idea of a director making a fi lm on the life of Christ using nonprofessional actors from the Roman slums became an overt example of calculated intertextuality—that is to say, one of the principal characteristics of the Pasolinian authorial performance.

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At the same time, Pasolini’s attitude to the director seems ambivalent, far from a total identification. He thought of the director as a “caricature of myself, a version of myself pushed past certain limits and caricatured.”33 It is easy to identify the limits Pasolini mentions in the cynicism and the conceit of a filmmaker who is fully aware of the power that his celebrity grants him. But one must not forget that the caricature does represent Pasolini to a large extent. In fact, some of the director’s responses to the interviewer, regarding, for instance, the “profound, intimate, archaic Catholicism” that he intends to express through his work or his affiliation with Marxism, can easily be attributed to Pasolini. In short, Pasolini played with his own public image in this film. To do so, he also cast some friends, including Elsa De Giorgi, Adele Cambria, and Enzo Siciliano, in the group of people gathered to watch the shooting of the final scene. He took the same approach—with different effects—in Gospel, where Mary is played by his mother, Mary of Bethany by his friend Natalia Ginzburg, and many of the apostles by his fellow intellectuals, including Enzo Siciliano (Simon), Giorgio Agamben (Philip), and Alfonso Gatto (Andrew). In the interview scene, when asked about the Italians, the director quotes some verses from “Worldly Poems,” a poem Pasolini wrote during the filming of Mamma Roma and partially inspired by it. At first, the director does so in an implicit manner, as if he were using his own words to call Italians “the most illiterate people / and most ignorant bourgeoisie in Europe.”34 But then he reads the following lines from the poem aloud: I am a force of the Past. My love lies only in tradition. I come from the ruins, the churches the altarpieces, the villages abandoned in the Apennines or foothills of the Alps where my brothers once lived. I wander like a madman down the Tuscolana, down the Appia like a dog without a master. Or I see the twilights, the mornings over Rome, the Ciociaria, the world, as the first acts of Post-History to which I bear witness, by arbitrary birthright, from the outer edge of some buried age. Monstrous is the man

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born of a dead woman’s womb. And I, a fetus now grown, roam about more modern than any modern man, in search of brothers no longer alive.35 Besides forming a poetic portrait of Pasolini, these lines are a desperate declaration of poetics, which, as Sandro Bernardi has noted, contain almost all the typical rhetorical figures and imagery of Pasolini’s writing: anaphora, synoeciosis, oxymoron, the themes of ruins and of being a foreigner in his own homeland, and the characteristic prophetic tone. It is the self-portrait of an intellectual who feels increasingly alienated from the present—or “PostHistory,” as he claims—and who continues to find inspiration only in a past that over time becomes more and more archaic and barbaric, as demonstrated by films such as Medea and Oedipus Rex. In a more subtle manner, the insertion of the long reading of a highly complex poem within Pasolini’s film should also be read as an open declaration of his new intermedia aesthetic based on the idea of the contamination of genres. The reading is also a provocative and scandalous act in the face of the inexperienced journalist’s apathetic conformism. The director, in fact, questions the interviewer on the meaning of the text. In spite of the journalist’s evident inability to interpret it, the director berates him for being an average man, “a monster. A criminal menace. A conformist! A colonialist! A racist! A slave-driver!”36 Pasolini thus replies by proxy to the conservative press’s accusations that he himself was a monster and a criminal and in this way declares that the real social danger lies in his opponents. This exchange sets off a sort of pedagogical mechanism for the viewers, who are faced with their own inability to understand Pasolini’s poetry and are induced to desire to understand it so as not to be accused of being the sort of average man the director describes. At this point, we should ask ourselves who the fi rst-person speaker is in Pasolini’s poem when the person reading it is the director as played by Welles. The ambiguity is heightened by the fact that during the reading Welles is holding the 1962 volume entitled Mamma Roma, which includes the script of the film along with the poem, which was later republished in Poem in the Shape of a Rose.37 The audience sees a cover featuring a still from the film, with Anna Magnani’s face clearly visible (figure 3.2). The film within the film is doubled for a few minutes, so that Pasolini’s fi lm about a film also contains a second Pasolini film. As if that weren’t enough, Pasolini’s authorial selfinscription in The Ricotta is literalized by his name, which appears on the cover

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figure 3.2. Mamma Roma enters the frame in La ricotta. Source: Image from La ricotta (Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1964). Courtesy of Arco Film-Cineriz.

of the book Mamma Roma. This concurrence of authorial signature and idea of a film within a film seems to contain the seed of the Velázquez effect that Pasolini would develop fully in What Are the Clouds?, as discussed in chapter 1. The self-inscription is not limited to the authorial figure of the director. It also suggests an intertextual reading, which is confirmed by the wealth of allusions to Mamma Roma and Accattone. In The Ricotta, the tableaux vivants concentrate on the motif of Mary’s lamentation, emphasized by textual references to thirteenth-century Umbrian poet Jacopone da Todi’s work “Pianto della Madonna” (Cry of the Madonna). Similarly, Mamma Roma ends with Anna Magnani’s desperate cry after the death scene of her son, Ettore, which is shot from the same point of view as Andrea Mantegna’s painting Lamentation of Christ (c. 1480s). The intertextual connection is demonstrated by the opening lines of “Worldly Poems,” which describe the shooting of Mamma Roma: Then, a vision. The passion, peasant-style (an endless traveling shot with Mary coming forward, asking about her son in Umbrian, singing her torment in Umbrian)38 Cementing the thematic connection between Mamma Roma and The Ricotta, one of the angels surrounding the cross in the latter film is played by Ettore Garofalo, the boy with the Caravaggian features who plays Ettore. The

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presence of the same actors in different films functions as an authorial signature. For example, the first frame featuring Stracci is an extreme close-up in which he lies stretched out on the ground (figure 3.3), an image not only anticipating his end on the cross but also alluding to the final scene of Accattone, which features a close-up of the dying Accattone’s (Franco Citti) face (figure 3.4). The amateur actor playing Stracci, Mario Cipriani, also plays the role of the thief in Accattone, whom the protagonist asks to help change his life. In Accattone’s death scene, Cipriani observes Citti’s face in a play of gazes that leaves no doubt as to The Ricotta’s intertextual connection with Accattone. Intertextuality reminds the spectator of the author’s past, and the character played by Welles shows the risks in Pasolini’s artistic future. But why did Pasolini choose the American director for this off-kilter self-projection? As Sergio Citti, one of Pasolini’s collaborators, recalls, Pasolini wanted Welles at all costs because “no one better than the ‘myth’ Welles could express and represent the director (that is, the director of the film in the film).”39 According to Sandro Bernardi, Welles was the director who in all the history of cinema most made himself into a character: he was an actor, but, more importantly, he was a protagonist in his own work.40 Welles furnished a model for an author who persistently sought out a performative mode, putting himself in play as the author alongside the other characters (as Pasolini did in the Trilogy of Life, discussed in chapter 5). Welles was also an outsider of the studio system. According to Oriana Fallaci, who interviewed the director on February 4, 1962, Welles was a genius “hated because everything he does, he does it well, because he has the guts to say what he thinks, because he did everything just before everyone else.”41 According to Welles, this hatred toward him was caused by his refusal to go along with the mainstream, by his being a forty-six-year-old man who goes up against “intolerance, ignorance, idiocy, racial discrimination, fascism, and who tricks himself into believing he can transform the movie camera into a tool of cultural development”—in short, by being “a left ist.”42 Pasolini’s choice to cast Welles in the role of the director was thus motivated by projection: for Pasolini, Welles embodied the type of author as a living protest that he had theorized, someone with the skill to construct his own celebrity from a negative myth in open antagonism to the dominant values of neocapitalist society. A more important reason at the base of this self-projection was that Welles was also one of the latest director-stars, along with Alfred Hitchcock, to be

figure 3.3. Mario Cipriani’s first appearance in La ricotta. Source: Image from La ricotta (Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1964). Courtesy of Arco Film-Cineriz.

figure 3.4. Franco Citti’s last shot in Accattone. Source: Image from Pasolini, Accattone (1961). Courtesy of Arco Film, Cino Del Duca.

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named among the ultimate auteurs by the critics of the journal Cahiers du Cinéma. Critics in the Italian establishment were rather hostile toward Welles through the early 1960s, until Goff redo Fofi devoted a laudatory piece to him in Il Nuovo Spettatore Cinematografico. But François Truff aut had long since named the American director one of the most important cineastes in the world, comparing the release of Godard’s Breathless (1960) to the revolution of Citizen Kane (1941).43 Truff aut was the first to speak of a “politique des auteurs”—later Anglicized by film critic Andrew Sarris as “auteur theory”44— in his famous article “Une certaine tendance du cinéma français,” published in 1954. He attacked directors such as Jean Delannoy, Yves Allégret, Jean Aurenche, and Pierre Bost, whom he identified with the quality French film tradition but found guilty of being too commercial and literary and of depending too much on adapting successful novels to the screen. For Truffaut, an auteur is a director who instead of adapting someone else’s work “transforms the material into an expression of his own personality.”45 The cinema is therefore an art bound up with the director’s personal expression; it is precisely his unique personality that gives the work organic unity. As examples, Truffaut pointed to Robert Bresson and Jean Renoir, the latter of whom was a particular favorite of Pasolini’s, as well as to Welles and Hitchcock. The Ricotta is a mise-en-abyme of Pasolini’s engagement with this type of authorist poetics, in which he immediately saw potential applications well beyond the cinematic sphere. But his adoption of the auteur’s poetics was not the result of a sudden conversion on the road to Cinecittà. Before he began to direct, he wasn’t remotely interested in the theories of Cahiers du Cinéma, perhaps because up to that point his film work had been limited to coscreenwriting, albeit in important films such as Mario Soldati’s La donna del fiume (1954); Fellini’s Le notti di Cabiria (1957) and La dolce vita (1960); and Mauro Bolognini’s La notte brava (1959), Il bell’Antonio (1960), and La giornata balorda (1960). Surprisingly, in 1960, after a few months of collaboration as a film critic for a magazine, Pasolini wrote a highly unflattering critique of contemporary French cinema, while admitting his limited knowledge of the subject: “I won’t say anything about the nouvelle vague, as everyone is full of it, especially because I am little informed. I have almost no desire to go and see what it has produced.” The neophyte critic seemed to have a particular aversion to Truffaut: “I could barely stand The 400 Blows: at every frame I was tempted to run from the theater—that’s how irritated I was by the presumption of that amateur.” 46 This judgment looks even more ungenerous when we recall that Pasolini was trying to make his own first film at the time, despite not

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having—he would later say, as if it were a merit—any technical skill. But with a little more experience, fourteen years and several directing achievements later, Pasolini appropriated in a long essay on La nuit américaine (Day for Night, 1973) the rationale behind Truffaut’s panegyric of the auteur. Pasolini claimed that the fi lm, seemingly “preplanned in the script down to the last detail,” was redeemed by Truffaut’s personal artistic poetics, where editing, “rather than being conceived of as a practical procedure, is conceived of as an aesthetic act.” In this case, Truffaut’s work as a rigorous craftsman “casts back the ennobling light of the artistic or, rather, strictly aesthetic end, which was certainly not in the intentions of the commercial directors of the myth of America.” 47 In writing about Truff aut, Pasolini was indeed also speaking about himself, tracing the portrait of a figure of poet-director whose personality and aesthetic are all that guarantee the work’s success. His cinema is nothing but the expression of this total and totalizing authorial performance that can never be confused with a collective artistic work. In short, just like poetry, film must express—at every level—the author’s absolute individuality, as he told Jon Halliday during a famous interview: “As far as ‘my’ films are concerned, I have never even remotely thought of doing a group project. I have always conceived of film as the work of a single author, who not only writes the script and directs but also chooses the set, the characters, even the costumes. I choose everything, including the music.” 48 Although it is well known that Pasolini’s cinema is indebted to his collaboration with other extraordinary professionals, starting with his trusted photographer Tonino Delli Colli, the idea of the auteur is key to the construction of Pasolini the author. With an even greater emphasis on the author’s centrality, he remarked in a long interview with Jean Duflot, “I don’t want to sound too egocentric, but I believe that auteur cinema determines a very specific style and working mode. I don’t understand the creation of a film as a group job at all. A film is the work of one author. This author is the only one who decides on the script, the miseen-scène, the direction of the actors; he is the one who always makes the researches, chooses shooting locations, costumes, and possibly the music.” 49 What has not yet been highlighted is how Pasolini moved beyond the poetics of the film auteur, adapting it to his own concept of a multimedia author, and how The Ricotta represents his initial experiment in this new poetics. This movement is demonstrated in part by the fact that Godard’s fi lm Breathless is the visual subtext for Pasolini’s poem “A Desperate Vitality,” whose title, as mentioned earlier, refers to the poetics of mannerism staged in The Ricotta.

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In the poem, Pasolini repeats the phrase “like in a Godard film” as a sort of  mantra and describes himself driving his car like the protagonist of Breathless, played by Jean-Paul Belmondo. “A Desperate Vitality” is important to this discussion of The Ricotta because it is structured like a script, and the text is constructed in part by adapting to writing the most characteristic cinematic innovations of Godard’s films, such as the direct cut and the medium shot. More remarkably, much like Pasolini’s cinema, Godard’s cinema is marked by various strategies of self-representation, which complicate the notion of authorship and often become a way to reflect on the medium and analyze the director’s relationship to the culture industry.50 In the poem, Pasolini performs his ambiguous relationship to his public image, representing himself “in an act—without historical precedents—of the ‘culture industry,’ ” being interviewed by a journalist he calls “the cobra in the wool cardigan.”51 The interviewer is as obtuse as the journalist who interviews the director in The Ricotta. In both cases, the interview becomes primarily a performance for Pasolini himself—an act of “self-invention” and “selfreinvention,” to use John Rodden’s terms.52 This performance reinforces the image of the self as the victim (“I, voluntarily martyred”) of a cynical and conforming system and at the same time constitutes an act of selfpromotion, a genuine performance in which Pasolini strategically organizes and reorganizes his own biography and work, suggesting—as was his habit—ways of reading it. Just as the interview scene in The Ricotta contains references to his own poetry and to Mamma Roma, “A Desperate Vitality” provides what Pasolini calls “a synoptic table . . . of [his] career as a poet.”53 Pretending that he is being asked for the title of what he is currently working on, he presents the reader with a partial index of Poem in the Shape of a Rose: —maybe . . . “Persecution” or “A New Pre-History” (or Pre-History) or . . . [And here he hoists, recovers the dignity of civil hate] “Monologue on the Jews” . . . 54 Over the arc of his career from 1958 to 1975, Pasolini gave about three hundred newspaper, radio, and television interviews.55 Some—like those with

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Jon Halliday and Jean Duflot 56—were later collected in separate volumes, published outside of Italy, or furnished the material for the first TV documentaries on him, which profoundly affected his reception abroad and heightened his reputation as a controversial director. Thus, it would be naive to think, as he might have liked us to, that the interview was a form of violence committed against him by the media system. On the contrary, the interviews are integral to his authorial performance as they correct and consolidate a particular biographical narrative.57 In the interviews with Halliday and Duflot, for example, Pasolini asserted that his membership in the Communist Party ended because of his depleted enthusiasm (“when my membership card lapsed, I didn’t bother to renew it”58), when, as already mentioned, the fact is that he was thrown out of the party on October 26, 1948, after being accused of corrupting minors. It is not clear whether the reasons for this revision were personal or political, but it is evident that he uses the interview as a way to control his own image. One could say that Pasolini’s ideal means of self-construction was not so much the interview as the self-interview, a subgenre (clearly represented in “A Desperate Vitality”) that guarantees the author full power over his own image because it allows him to double his voice as both interviewer and interviewee. This is the case, for example, with his interview about Salò published in Il Corriere della Sera on March 25, 1975, under the title “Sex as a Metaphor for Power.” In a note attached to the reprinted interview, Pasolini, not without due irony, specifies that the interview is actually a self-interview and that “there is nothing cornier than a director talking about his work on the set.”59 This statement almost seems like a reference to the previously analyzed scene from The Ricotta, in which the journalist asks the director questions “like a kid asking his mom for jelly or a hooker asking her john for a tip.” 60 This film is in fact an indispensable example of the critical and creative use that Pasolini made of the interview as an intermedia genre and as a “public performance” of authorship.61 The authorial voice that emerges from this interview in The Ricotta runs counter to the normal form of journalistic interviews. In fact, both questions and responses are prescripted—constructed so as to conform to the ideas that the author wants to express in that scene. Bondavalli is thus right to claim that in writing the questions and answers for an interview to his self-caricature, Pasolini guided the effect the interview had on viewers, condemning the cynical mechanisms of the culture

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industry while also revealing his awareness that he nevertheless had to work as an artist within the system of late capitalism: Director : Do you have a heart problem? Journalist : No, no, knock on wood! Director : That’s too bad because if you fell dead right here, it would be a good angle for the fi lm launch. Since you don’t exist anyway. Capital doesn’t consider the existence of manual labor, except when it’s necessary for production. And the producer of my film is also the director of your paper! . . . Good-bye!62

The choice to cast Welles as the director, therefore, is not just a sign of a poetic stance with regard to the poetics of the auteur but also a reflection of the conscious logic of marketing one’s own authorial image and artistic product. In the fi rst version of the script, when Pasolini had not yet resolved what he would do with the figure of Welles, he has the interviewer ask the director his opinion “on the director-writer P. P. Pasolini.” 63 As John Francis Lane points out, it was only in the sound phase that Pasolini substituted Fellini’s name for his own, despite leaving the director’s response (“He dances!”) unchanged. According to Lane, Welles asked Pasolini what the response meant, and Pasolini replied, “I don’t know. Somebody said it about me in some provincial Fascist newspaper.” 64 However laconic, this reply demonstrates how the figure of the director in The Ricotta underwent a radical transformation over the course of the film’s production. Replacing his name with Fellini’s opens the fi lm up to the projective play I have been describing. At the same time, the choice of Fellini should not be considered a random fi ller during the sound overlay, as Tomaso Subini suggests in his careful study of the film.65 Not only is Fellini an Italian example of the superstar director, but, after the overwhelming success of La dolce vita in 1960, he was also associated with the critique of contemporary Italian society and the vapidity of the star system, with its corollaries of success, fashion, money, and media.66 The scene in La dolce vita where the blond Hollywood diva played by Anita Ekberg is interviewed, for example—an interview pieced together from actual interviews with female stars such as Marilyn Monroe—shows the potential homogenizing power of a system that reduces the female body to the status of commodified sexual object. Fellini’s name, therefore, acts as an additional confirmation of the central role that the discourse on cinema and celebrity occupies in The Ricotta. Welles’s performance, characterized by

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dryness, cynicism, and aestheticism, represents not a critique of authorship but rather its reinforcement. It is as if Pasolini is suggesting what he could have become after Mamma Roma had he given in to the siren call of the star system, while also showing us a deformed self-portrait that contributes to the definition of his authorial figure.

M arilyn Right after finishing The Ricotta, Pasolini returned to a film project he had begun in 1962 that seems to be the complete opposite of the mannerist and didactic tableaux vivants imagined by the director in that fi lm. This project, La rabbia (The Anger, 1969), was a montage of unused fi lm footage from the archives of the cinegiornale (newsreel) Mondo Libero, which had been made available to Pasolini by the producer Gastone Ferrante. In the periodical Paese Sera in April 1963, Pasolini described the raw material as a “tremendous viewing, a series of squalid objects, a depressing parade of international disaffection, the triumph of the most banal relations. In the midst of all this banality and squalor, every so often some beautiful images appear: a stranger’s smile, a set of eyes in an expression of joy or pain, and interesting sequences full of historical meaning. A visually fascinating black and white corpus, in large part visually fascinating.” 67 After months of “strenuous work,”68 Pasolini created a one-hundred-minute-long film with a carefully arranged soundtrack. He also wrote a poetic text to accompany the fi lm, which was read by the painter Renato Guttuso, one of the primary exponents of Italian social realism, and the writer Giorgio Bassani, who had previously dubbed Welles’s character in The Ricotta. The Anger is an extreme example of Pasolini’s unpopular cinema because it ignores all market imperatives. Its very form is a protest against the conformism of mass culture, and the film demonstrates the centrality of auteurism in Pasolini’s new poetics. In a counterintuitive manner, the use of unoriginal film material emphasizes the centrality of the author. According to Pasolini’s theory, montage allows for a shift from cinema, a potentially uninterrupted recording of the world represented in the case of The Anger by stock footage of the news and history of the 1950s and 1960s, to film, the personal expression of an author’s poetics and ideology. This intention is expressed in Guttuso’s voice at the start of The Anger: “Perhaps I’ve written this fi lm following no chronological or even logical trajectory, but only my

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political reasoning, and my poetic feeling.” Pasolini’s text goes along with the images of epochal moments, such as the Soviet invasion of Hungary, Israel’s attack on Egypt, the Cuban Revolution, the Algerian War, and the fights for independence in Africa. The Anger emerges as “an ideological and poetic essay” in which history is critically recomposed.69 Georges Didi-Huberman (who dedicated his volume Survivance des lucioles [2009] to Pasolini) suggests that The Anger’s montage is dialectical, supported not by cinematic logic but rather by a sense of urgency and historical emergency.70 For Pasolini, montage becomes a form of political action, which organizes pessimism, to borrow Walter Benjamin’s noted phrase, through images: “For to organize pessimism means nothing other than . . . to discover in political action a sphere reserved one hundred percent for images.”71 According to Didi-Huberman, remontage (remonter) is necessary for Pasolini to demontage (démonter) the contemporary world’s dominant ideology of normality, its rejection of all that is different or could disturb the reactionary bourgeois order that gave rise to colonialism, racism, underdevelopment, and class conflict— some of the primary themes of Pasolini’s late work.72 In short, Pasolini uses montage to create what he called a poetic “state of emergency,” which allows the author to analyze, challenge, and critique reality. Considered in this way, montage becomes a performative gesture charged with subjective value, a violent expression of the author as living protest. The originality, complexity, and richness of Pasolini’s work have discouraged close readings of the film. In the pages that follow, therefore, I would like to focus on one particular aspect of it: Pasolini’s critique of the star system and mass society’s promotion of celebrity. David P. Marshall has claimed that celebrity is a production of the dominant culture: “It is produced by a commodity system of cultural production and is produced with the intentions of leading and/or representing.”73 In The Anger, Pasolini shows his interest in the star system by including two sequences featuring movie divas Ava Gardner and Sophia Loren. They are perfect examples of what Edgar Morin has called “Lollobrigidism,” the recovery of the erotic Hollywood actress, which played an essential role in the star system’s renaissance in the 1950s.74 Interposed between the repeated image of a skull and exhumed bones (figure 3.5), we first see Ava Gardner, who, like the Hollywood star played by Ekberg in La dolce vita, is smiling as she gets off a plane at Rome’s airport, welcomed by a crowd of admirers and paparazzi (figure 3.6). This scene is followed by images of Sofia Loren, who had already acquired international stardom thanks to her five-picture contract with Paramount Pictures in 1958 and her Academy Award for Best Actress in Vittorio

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figures 3.5, 3.6, and 3.7. Exhumed bones, Ava Gardner, and Sophia Loren. Source: Images from La rabbia (Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1963). Courtesy of Istituto Luce, Minerva.

De Sica’s film La ciociara (Two Women, 1961). Yet the images of Loren that Pasolini chose to include in The Anger are not from that film. They are almost absurdly insignificant images of Loren’s visit to an eel farm in Polesine during a break in the shooting of Mario Soldati’s film La donna del fiume (The River Girl, 1954), for which Pasolini worked as a screenwriter (figure 3.7). Taking inspiration from Didi-Huberman’s interpretation of Brecht’s estrangement theory, Marco Antonio Bazzocchi argues that the picture of bones that Pasolini alternates with those of the movie stars nullifies the power of the rapid array of images of modernity.75 However plausible, this interpretation fails to take into account the premises of Didi-Huberman’s discussion, which considers Brechtian montage as an example of the political value of the image. The friction created by the juxtaposition of improbably related images—which Didi-Huberman calls dysposition (dys-placement)—shows “how the world appears and how it gets deformed.”76 One can argue that it is not the images of the skull that warp the glossy world of celebrity but, on the

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contrary, the superficiality and banality of the scenes taken from the world of the entertainment industry that “dys-place” the true perception of history and the present. In doing so, they reveal the contemporary world’s ideology of death, corresponding to the void of a normality without memory: as a sentence that appears on the screen at the beginning of the movie points out, “Even if we don’t want to remember, war is a terror that never wants to end, in the soul, in the world.” The skull’s empty eye sockets don’t reveal this ideology; rather, it is revealed by the stars’ equally empty smiles as they perform their own empty stardom. At the same time, the image of the bones, with its photographic stillness (which in the screenplay Pasolini indicates with the expression “still frame skull”) and contrasted with the uninterrupted flow of the images of the actresses, clarifies Pasolini’s theory of death as montage (“Death performs an instant montage of our life”). The skull with its death symbolism, just like the cut in montage, halts the continuity of reality and turns it into film. It is in the later lengthy sequence dedicated to Marilyn Monroe that Pasolini’s reflection on the celebrity system is articulated with its greatest conceptual clarity and poetic beauty and that he firmly establishes the association between stardom and death. In 1962, right after the American actress’s suicide, Pasolini wrote a long poem about her titled “Marilyn,” which was put to music by Macello Panni and sung by Laura Betti during her recital Giro a vuoto n.3. An interview of Pasolini by Sam Benelli in 1963, in which Pasolini discussed his project La mortaccia (the ur–Divine Mimesis), reveals how much Monroe’s death struck him. In the interview, Pasolini imagined Monroe among the characters in hell, transformed into a mimosa plant,77 which is perhaps reminiscent of the Dantean contrappasso for suicides (“we were men, and now we have become plants” [Inferno, 13.37]) but is also a floral symbol associated with women in Italian culture. That same year Pasolini added the poem to The Anger, editing the sequence that he would later consider “the only piece worthy of keeping” in the entire film78—possibly a judgment that relates not to the aesthetic success of the sequence but to its effectiveness in communicating his critique of media culture. As opposed to the sequences dedicated to Gardner and Loren, the sequence dedicated to Monroe is constructed from photographs rather than from film clips; it is thus a small experiment within the film. In their stillness, the photos in this “photo poem” work, as Susan Sontag writes in On Photography, as “a trace,” an impression, but above all, “a death mask.”79 The photos are “ghostly images”80 of Monroe’s tragic body. As Reni Celeste has noted in her discussion of how the Monroe myth contributed to her end, a star is always

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suspended between heroism and tragedy because “glamour and disaster are the two major commodities of the media culture.”81 The photographs are part of a precise conceptual choice. They include portraits by important photographers such as George Barris, Richard Avedon, and Lawrence Schiller as well as a series of images of Monroe when she was still Norma Jean, a young girl of humble roots who had a mentally ill mother and grew up in foster care. However, none of the images is drawn from the actress’s films. This choice might at first seem motivated by the fact that, as Florence Jacobowitz and Richard Lippe state, “of all the film stars, Marilyn Monroe was, perhaps, the most photographed,” and her persona was even in the 1960s more identified with its still image than with the films in which she appeared. In fact, they write, “Monroe is one of the first film stars to be cultivated and marketed as a celebrity who is larger than the sum of her onscreen roles. Her life was appropriated and devoured by the press and to a large extent she collaborated with its public exposure.”82 The photos in Pasolini’s sequence come from the pages of a single magazine, an Italian reprint of the thirty-seven page feature originally published in Paris Match on August 18, 1962. They are taken a bit sloppily, as if to indicate their source. It is hard to imagine that this type of footage was among the unused fi lm material from the archives of the newsreel Mondo Libero; it seems more likely that the choice of images was Pasolini’s alone. The use of photographs rather than fi lm is clearly a strategy specifically used to resignify Monroe’s image (figures 3.8 and 3.9). Pasolini presents us with an image that is three times removed from the actress’s body: the photographs were reproduced first in the pages of the magazine and then on the screen in Pasolini’s film. Celebrity, Pasolini suggests, is rooted in this endless technical reproducibility of the subject, which evaporates and disperses that subject’s essence in the form of the pure surface of the image. So, he asks us, what does the performance of celebrity subjectivity mean under commodity capitalism? In the context of the society of the spectacle, subjectivity is hyperconstructed and reconstructible, rooted in the value of an infinite chain of signifying images that, according to Pasolini’s theory, can take on meaning only through the montage achieved by death. In this respect, it is significant that Pasolini did not reedit the Gardner or Loren sequences. Instead, he simply drew them from the natural cinematic imagination of the world and inserted them into his film without poetic comment. The Monroe sequence, however, is a metamontage: within the montage of The Anger, Pasolini remontaged Marilyn, disaggregating the value attributed to her image. He did so

figures 3.8. and 3.9. The Marilyn sequence. Source: Images from La rabbia (Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1963). Courtesy of Istituto Luce, Minerva.

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by establishing specific parallels between the portraits of the actress and the text of his poem, read by Bassani with notes from Tomaso Albinoni’s Adagio in G Minor in the background. In addition, Pasolini composed the Monroe sequence according to clearly identifiable poetic principles, in particular anaphora and repetition, which create a system of visual rhymes. Three photographs in particular are repeated several times over the course of the sequence. In the first, the actress is shown with an upset expression, far from the carefree attitude of her characters. The second, a portrait by Bert Stern, is related three times to the theme of beauty: The world taught it to you. And thus your beauty became its own. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The world taught it to you, and thus your beauty was no longer beauty. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Thus surviving from the ancient world, demanded by the future world, possessed by the present world, your beauty became an affliction.83 Monroe’s natural beauty, once it is “owned by Power,” becomes not only a condemnation but also the most evident sign of the distance between the subject and its image, carefully constructed to embody a model by means of surgical procedures, bleached hair, and a new name, which was imposed on the subject like a mask that now appears funereal. The third image, a portrait by Avedon in which Monroe is lying with erotic languor on a chaiselounge, covered only by ostrich feathers, is associated with the theme of gold each time it is repeated: And thus you carried your beauty away. Like fine gold dust it vanished. .................................................. Like a small golden dove it vanished. .............................. Like a golden white dove it vanished.84 Since Avedon’s photo is one of the few with an explicit sexual charge, the transient nature of the “gold dust” is a reference to Marilyn’s iconic blond hair, a

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classic feature of the desirable Hollywood starlet. As Richard Dyer argues, peroxide blondness often signifies wealth because of the precious metals (platinum or gold) with which it is typically associated. But Pasolini transforms the “gold dust” that has dyed Monroe’s hair into a symbol of Christian purity, like the dove evoked in the poem.85 Pasolini tries to excavate Monroe from her internment as the stereotypical sex symbol, which she hated: “A sex symbol becomes a thing—I just hate to be a thing,” she once said.86 In a fascinating article, Ara H. Merjian proposes a different type of religiosity for the sequence. He suggests that Pasolini’s image of gold dust evokes Andy Warhol’s painting Gold Marilyn Monroe (1962), “hovering in the gilt solitude of a neo-Byzantine hieraticism.”87 Merjian’s claim is thought provoking, though I believe that Pasolini’s project is diametrically opposed to the American artist’s. Pasolini reviewed Warhol’s exhibition Ladies & Gentlemen in 1975 with some detachment, although he ended up buying some of the large canvases portraying black and Latino drag queens that Warhol presented. It is interesting that Gold Marilyn Monroe possesses the frontality of a Byzantine mosaic—and that Pasolini recognized that frontality in Warhol’s canvases: “the impression is of looking at a Ravenna fresco representing isocephalous figures, that is, all frontal. Repeated to the point of losing their own identity and being recognizable, like twins, by the color of their clothing.”88 Pasolini, in short, was accusing Warhol of transforming his subjects into icons, rigidifying them, fi xing them definitively in a unitary image, homogenous and compact, a model of “obsessive repetition.” This impression is also given by Warhol’s celebrity prints, whether the subject is Mao or Elizabeth Taylor, Elvis or Queen Elizabeth II, Jacqueline Kennedy or Marilyn Monroe. The content of these pieces is always the same: celebrity. Stardom was at the core of Warhol’s pioneering pop art, and he built his artistic and celebrity persona by drawing from other stars. In Jonathan Schroeder’s terms, he created a brand, with the clear commercial intent of commodification and distribution.89 It is telling that Monroe, whom Edgar Morin regards as the perfect symbol of the star system, became one of Warhol’s most famous subjects.90 Warhol, who notoriously bleached his hair and played the role of the dumb blonde, aspired to Monroe’s iconic status, a status that he also helped to create by proliferating her image, or, to be more precise, one specific image—a publicity photograph from the film Niagara (1953), which he used as the basis for each of his mass-produced portraits. Like many of Warhol’s subjects, Monroe is also often duplicated within the frame, as in Double Marilyn (1962) and more emphatically in Marilyn Diptych

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figure 3.10 Andy Warhol, Marilyn Diptych (1962). Acrylic paint on canvas. 2054 × 1448 mm. Source: © Tate, London 2016.

(1962), a silkscreen that replicates Marilyn Monroe fift y times, with half of the images in color, the other half in black and white (figure 3.10). As Reni Celeste aptly puts it, Warhol believed that “stars were constructions or patterns that could be duplicated to infinity.”91 Pasolini, reflecting on the portraits in Ladies & Gentlemen, connected the idea of a single photographic model with the Warholian obsession with celebrity: “it is to be noticed that the photograph always seems to be obsessively the same, always from the front or from a three-quarter view, never in profile; always in the manner of the film stars, never in the manner of everyday passing shots.”92 Pasolini’s use of different photographs in his own portrait of Monroe almost seems like a response to Warhol, who, Pasolini argued, “burns” the psychology of the subject and turns it into a single surface. “If you want to know all about Andy Warhol,” the American artist himself once famously suggested in an interview, “just look at the surface: of my paintings and films and me, and there I am. There’s nothing behind it.”93 In using the same publicity photograph, a portrait constructed specifically for commercial purposes, Warhol made it his own and dissociated it from the subject’s his-

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tory. In typical capitalist fashion, he misappropriated the copyright of the image.94 In The Anger, Pasolini’s aim is the exact opposite: to emancipate Monroe from the icon created by the society of the spectacle and to return to the woman her own image. Like Giotto’s student, whom he plays in The Decameron, Pasolini works as a perspective painter with the intention of extracting Monroe from the repetitive, flat, Byzantine surface of Warhol’s prints. He paints an intimate, three-dimensional portrait with montage and poetry. Unlike Warhol, he doesn’t fetishize the actress’s image by focusing on a particular fi xed arrangement of her signature features. He instead allows her complexity to come through. In particular, Pasolini avoids—as much as is possible, that is—referring to the overt sexuality for which Monroe was perhaps best known.95 By neutralizing sexuality in favor of vulnerability, naturalness, and innocence, Pasolini frees Monroe’s image. He liberates Monroe from the heteronormative male gaze for which she was imaged as an object. He presents her not as a blonde bombshell but as “a little sister,” which precludes any erotic association: But still you remained a little girl, silly as antiquity, cruel as the future, while all the stupidity and cruelty of the present came between you and your beauty possessed by Power.96 Pasolini’s poem focuses instead on Monroe’s “small, kid-sisterly breasts” and her “little belly so easily bared.” A victim of the star system machine and the media, Marilyn was, for him, “passively immodest, obediently indecent.”97 He implies that the celebrity system, like neocapitalism, enforces passivity and obedience. Pasolini thus projects the contradictions of his time onto Marilyn’s (photographic) body, and the actress’s passing, as Colleen RyanScheutz writes, thereby becomes the symbol of an innocence “lost to the seductive and corrupting ‘machinery’ of the present.”98 The photos of Monroe are alternated with sequences of the New York City skyline, beauty pageants, women in the fields, and a popular Via Crucis, where a bleeding Christ—like the lamb that Monroe is hugging in one of the last images in the sequence—is a metaphor for the victimhood shared by the actress and Pasolini himself. In his reading, in fact, they both are, though in different ways, involuntary products and victims of the mechanisms of spectacle. In making her a sister—a dead sister—Pasolini establishes the fra-

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ternal relationship that is often associated with mechanisms of authorial projection in his work. In short, it is not difficult to see in The Anger a portrait of the author who wanted to defi ne himself in a few lines—“a force of the Past” as well as “more modern than any modern man”—as a perfect example of the synoeciosis that Franco Fortini identifies as a characteristic feature of Pasolini’s reasoning.99 “Worldly Poems,” the poem that contains the lines “a force of the Past” and “more modern than any modern man,” brings out another important aspect of the construction of Pasolini’s image: the lack of living siblings. [I] roam about more modern than any modern man, in search of brothers no longer alive.100 In Pasolini’s oeuvre, the figure of the brother is a great symbolic figure for absence and carries out an important mythopoeic function.101 Pasolini’s brother Guido was killed by Communist partisans in May 1945, an event he constantly remembers in his autonarratives, like a true Barthesian biographeme. However, the figure of the brother-partisan is above all, as Bazzocchi has written, an autobiographical “double” with whom Pasolini identifies as an intellectual: the image of someone who dies in combat.102 The same image appears in the figure of Pasolini-Virgil in Divine Mimesis (“he had the step of a partisan climbing the mountains / going into the hills”)103 and explicitly in the poem “A Desperate Vitality.” In the latter text, Pasolini imagines his death and identifies himself with his brother’s unburied corpse: Like a Resistance fighter dead before May ’45, I shall begin to decompose, ever so slowly, in the harrowing light of this sea, a poet and citizen forgotten.104 But there is another deceased older brother in Pasolini’s work: Antonio Gramsci—a brother, writes Andrea Zanzotto, “who is, however, dust.”105 In the poem Gramsci’s Ashes (1957), Pasolini calls the founder of the PCI “not father, but humble brother.”106 Gramsci, too, is a dead brother with whom the poet identifies (“you, dead, and us, / equally dead, with you”), thus evoking the

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scandal of his own ideological contradictions (“being / with you and against you”). Much has been written on the Pasolini–Gramsci relationship,107 but what is relevant for my argument is that Marilyn Monroe, the “little sister,” symbolic icon of the society of the spectacle, is also part of this genealogy of dead familial figures. Through her gold ashes, Pasolini manifests his awareness—as Andrea Miconi has it—that he is “a mythical figure of the collective imagination”108 as well as his will to resist a world dominated by the powerful apparatus of communication and consumption. For Pasolini, then, Monroe’s suicide did not represent—as it did for Warhol—the martyrdom required to become an eerie posthumous icon of immortality. It was instead a metaphor for the radical rejection of a system of alienating power: a paradoxical act of extreme resistance, like his brother’s death. Monroe’s suicide was a form of agency against enforced passivity. The importance of the theme of suicide in Pasolini’s portrait of the actress is also confirmed by the soundtrack for The Anger, Albinoni’s Adagio in G Minor. Sandro Bernardi points out that this same work is used in the soundtrack of Orson Welles’s film The Trial, an adaptation of Kaf ka’s famous novel that had been released in 1962. At the end of Welles’s movie, Josef K. is condemned to death. His executioners offer him a knife, but he refuses the chance to commit suicide. In Kafka’s story, they then slice him open as he passively surrenders to the sacrifice. In Welles’s version, on the contrary, he yells that the executioners will have to kill him, and then they toss dynamite into the quarry where he is standing. He tries to throw it back at them, struggling “with all his might against the absurd and incomprehensible law that condemns him to death.”109 Albinoni’s Adagio starts to play as the smoke of the dynamite blast forms a mushroom cloud, an image evoking the nuclear threat.110 A similarly apocalyptic series of nuclear explosions opens and closes Pasolini’s Monroe sequence. In both cases, the subject’s suicide or refusal of it is depicted as a way to oppose the passivity and conformism enforced by the system: Now you’re the first, little sister, you Who never mattered, poor thing, you with your smile, you’re the first outside the gates of a world abandoned to a destiny of death.111 For Pasolini, Monroe was a scandalous figure not because of her unbridled sexuality but because her death, which in his view was a public rejection of

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“obedience” and a withdrawal from the system that had absorbed and exploited her image: “Is it possible that Marilyn, / little Marilyn, has shown us the way?”112 Suicide, of course, should not be taken literally but as the symbol for that death drive that Pasolini associates with the author as living protest in “Unpopular Cinema.” Just as the author exhibits his death drive by breaking conventional codes of expression and so challenges the system of social values that those norms support, Monroe’s death is a symbolic form of resistance and protest against the conformist system of celebrity that Pasolini was also confronting in the 1960s.

4 Self-Portrait

In 1973, photographer Massimo Listri, already well known for his portraits of cultural figures such as Eugenio Montale and René Clair, immortalized Pasolini standing in front of one of his most famous self-portraits, the oil painting Self-Portrait with a Flower in His Mouth from 1947 (figures 4.1 and 4.2). It is the second in a series of self-portraits characterized by floral symbolism.1 In this canvas, with its strong expressionist traits, Pasolini’s face seems to correspond to the description Federico Zeri once gave it during a television interview: “a beautiful Greek bronze flattened after falling off a truck on the highway.”2 Indeed, the face in the painting is misshapen and burnished with green. The painting’s attention to the use of color has led some to argue that it is modeled on a self-portrait by Van Gogh.3 What makes the canvas of particular interest, however, is not so much its form as its metapictorial nature: hanging on the chalky wall behind Pasolini, who has a red flower in his mouth, is an image of one of his early drawings of a young Friulian peasant, squatting with a blade of grass or flower in his lips.

figure 4.1. Pier Paolo Pasolini, Self-Portrait with a Flower in His Mouth (1947). Tempera on hardboard, 350 × 432 mm. Source: Courtesy of Graziella Chiarcossi and Fondo Pier Paolo Pasolini—Gabinetto G. P. Vieusseux, Florence.

figure 4.2. Pasolini in front of Self-Portrait with a Flower in His Mouth. Source: Photograph by Massimo Listri, 1973. Courtesy of the artist.

figure 4.3. Federico De Rocco, Portrait of Pasolini (1947). Oil on canvas. Source: Courtesy of Sandra Mior.

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The presence of a work within the work is a detail that begs consideration and not only because, as French art historian André Chastel has written, this motif is always used to indicate specific intentions4 but also primarily because the composition of Pasolini’s self-portrait is already a direct imitation of another painting: a portrait of the poet, also from 1947, by his friend Federico De Rocco (1918–1962) (figure 4.3).5 A nineteen-year-old Pasolini met De Rocco in Friuli in the summer of 1941, and De Rocco introduced him to painting,6 an art that Pasolini continued to work on over the years (though not without long breaks) under the guidance of another painter friend, Giuseppe Zigaina (1924–2015).7 One can easily notice even in De Rocco’s portrait a tendency toward what Pasolini called “the deformation of the object and a sensual understanding of the chromatic subject.”8 The sensuality we find in Pasolini’s self-portrait, however, is something else entirely. Behind De Rocco’s Pasolini we see a canvas depicting two nuns, a subject that Pasolini never painted. The fact that in Self-Portrait with a Flower in His Mouth Pasolini portrayed himself before a picture of a young man in a sensual position suggests that the image is an authorial performance, a staged self-projection through which Pasolini queers De Rocco’s image to express the fundamental role his homoerotic desire played in his creativity. Pasolini thus takes control of his image, transforming his friend’s portrait into a selfportrait that is rich with implications for his work. In this chapter, I analyze Pasolini’s self-portraits, starting with his early drawings, and follow their developments in parallel with his other work. In particular, I demonstrate that Listri’s photograph is itself another example of Pasolini’s construction of his authorial performance in the last phase of his career.

The Mirror of Narcissus Adolescent male figures can be found throughout Pasolini’s work, to the extent that they form an important thematic nucleus. Analyzing the metamorphosis of Pasolini’s “ragazzi” from the perspective of homosexual desire, Dario Trento argues that in Amado mio (My Amado), Pasolini’s semiautobiographical novel written in the same period he painted Self-Portrait with a Flower in His Mouth, the young Pasolini’s economy of desire was tied to the order of pictorial representation.9 In the following scene in particular, the act of portraiture seems to compensate for the impossibility of erotic possession:

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To come up with a pretext for his excitement and his devotion, Desi asked the young man if he would let him paint his portrait. Benito agreed, a little surprised, blushing. So Desi took some paper and pencil and began to draw him. “Do you know why I’m making a portrait of you? “No,” Benito replied. . . . “Because I can’t kiss you.” After a brief silence he persisted: “The eyes and lips I’m drawing . . . I wish I could kiss them.”10

The fact that the protagonist’s name, Desi, is a diminutive of Desiderio (Desire) reaffirms the dynamic that this story stages through the portrait. The many images of young Friulian peasants that Pasolini drew or painted between 1943 and 1947 often link the boys with the floral symbolism seen later in Self-Portrait with a Flower in His Mouth (figure 4.4). They also contain a sense of the impossibility of contact with one’s object of desire. One could thus say that Pasolini’s early portraits are the exact opposite of the celebrated male nudes by Italian painter Filippo De Pisis (1896–1956), whose technique was a model for Pasolini. Whereas De Pisis’s portraits were hastily sketched on scrap paper as a sort of artistic release after a homoerotic encounter, Pasolini’s crystallize the frustration of his sexual desire. In a convincing psychoanalytic reading of Pasolini’s early poetic works, Rinaldo Rinaldi understands them as a “gigantic self-portrait” of the author. He argues that they contain the typical dynamics of the Lacanian mirror stage, where “slowly, the specular figure of the subject-Pasolini becomes an external image; it becomes autonomous, crystallized in the faces of the ‘young men’ of the collection Poesie a Casarsa (Poems in Casarsa): faces in which the subject continually recognizes himself, as if they were living mirrors.”11 The many images of boys that Pasolini drew in the same years register this recognition, where the subject is reflected in his object of desire. The flower, I would argue, is one of the visual signals of this narcissistic mirroring. In the myth of Narcissus, who falls in love with his reflection in the water and drowns trying to kiss it, we can fi nd the model for the impossible kiss sublimated in the beloved’s portrait. Pasolini takes up the image of the “mirrored boy” in his early poetry and painting, an aspect of his work that many critics have thoroughly analyzed.12 The relevance of the myth of Narcissus is also demonstrated in Pasolini’s expressionist version of Caravaggio’s Narcissus (c. 1597–1599), a painting held at the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Antica in Rome.13 Pasolini’s work is a mediocre

figure 4.4. Pier Paolo Pasolini, Boy with Flower (1943). Pen on paper, 178 × 225 mm. Source: Courtesy of Graziella Chiarcossi and Fondo Pier Paolo Pasolini—Gabinetto G. P. Vieusseux, Florence.

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tempera painting on oval paper, but he nevertheless used to keep it in his bedroom, sealing his narcissistic secret in “the little bedroom of the self.”14 This spatial metaphor for the private space of Pasolini’s homosexuality comes from a letter to longtime confidante Silvana Mauri, written in August 1947, the same year the twenty-seven-year-old artist did Self-Portrait with a Flower in His Mouth.15 Pasolini’s secret was of course revealed in a most traumatic outing on October 29, 1949, when the PCI newspaper L’Unità published a short article, “Espulso dal P.C.I il poeta Pasolini” (Poet Pasolini thrown out of PCI). The piece covered the so-called Ramuscello affair and the accusation of corrupting minors.16 Traces of Pasolini’s confl icted relationship to his sexuality can also be found in Self-Portrait with a Flower in His Mouth. Notably, the painting doesn’t show a mirroring between subject and object of desire, between portrayer and portrayed. On the contrary, it shows the alienation of the subject in his object of desire. If this self-portrait was the first public “visual declaration” of Pasolini’s homosexuality, it also manifests the difficulty of such a condition and the impossibility of real contact with the object of his desire. This impossibility is made explicit by the placement of the two figures on parallel frontal planes, suggesting identification—which is also indicated by the floral symbolism—but not contact. According to his correspondence with his cousin Nico Naldini (who was also homosexual) and his friends, Pasolini thought of his sexuality in pathological terms at that time. The painful deformation of his face in the painting should consequently be interpreted as the sign of a highly problematic and problematized subjectivity, especially if we compare it to the clarity and simplicity of the boy’s portrait. The title of Pasolini’s self-portrait could thus refer to Luigi Pirandello’s one-act play L’uomo dal fiore in bocca (The Man with a Flower in His Mouth, 1922), in which the flower is a metaphor for the protagonist’s mouth cancer, which makes him an other in a society of healthy people. Pasolini’s self-portrait is not the result of an unconscious mirroring but a strategic authorial performance of the kind that I discussed in relation to Theorem (1968), in which, after the Visitor leaves, Pietro is described as obsessively “draw[ing] a head, which resembles, though certainly awkwardly, the Visitor’s.” Precisely because the subject of the portrait represents the impossibility of contact with the object of desire—due to the repression of his sexuality—Pietro’s attempt turns out to be a performance of failure: “he still laments softly to himself, murmuring miserably how that drawing still does not, does not resemble him, it will never resemble him—and even if it bears some likeness, it will be a disgusting and absurd effort—that in the

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emptiness (gasping thus, holding a paintbrush) he found it and in the emptiness will leave him.”17 In his attempt to capture the Visitor’s essence in a portrait, Pietro tries many techniques. In the end, he becomes an abstract painter, an author who expresses the complexity of his desire and identity by experimenting with color and unconventional organic materials, just as Pasolini would do.

Cr acked Mirror Scholars have only rarely given Pier Paolo Pasolini’s drawing and painting consideration. For one, the idea of Pasolini the painter is actually an “essentially posthumous notion”18 because the first major exhibition of his art wasn’t organized until 1978 at the Palazzo Braschi in Rome. It is also difficult to express great enthusiasm for his output, which is “scant” in comparison to other elements of his work.19 Even while admitting the connection between Pasolini’s visual art and literary production, art historian Giulio Carlo Argan has written that it doesn’t make sense to ask whether Pasolini should be considered a painter because “behind every figural representation of his there is always something already verbally (and even mentally) described.”20 Without delving into questions of artistic value here, however, I intend to take this aspect of his work into careful consideration. Not only does it have important connections with his writing, but, as Marcelin Pleynet has stated, “it’s actually impossible to separate Pasolini the painter from Pasolini the filmmaker and writer.”21 The inextricability of these roles is the result of a careful self-fashioning. Painting and drawing accompany the various phases of the development of his poetics; although he made less art when he discovered cinema, his canvases and drawings are not sporadic phenomena. In Pasolini’s mythographic reconstruction of his authorial debut, writing and drawing are depicted as parallel practices, both originally tied to the evocative power of the Friulian dialect, which he seems to have discovered in an epiphany: “One morning in the summer of 1941, I was on the wooden stoop outside my mother’s house. . . . I, on that stoop, was either drawing (with green ink or with the tube of ochre from the oil colors on cellophane) or I was writing verses. When I heard echo the word ROSADA [rugiada, dew].”22 Many years later, recalling his first attempts at painting, he referred to the techniques he used as antitraditional (like his language in Poems in Casarsa): “most of my artwork from that

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period was done by finger, with the paint directly from the tube, on cellophane; or I painted with the tube directly, squeezing it.”23 Later, affirming his early linkage of pictorial sign and poetic word, Pasolini said that his painting was dialectal, “a dialect as a ‘language for poetry.’ ”24 His desire to debut as a poet coincided with his debut as a painter, encompassing a specific vision of his work in which disciplinary boundaries cannot be determined. Pasolini’s self-portraits initially seem like idealized self-images, bearers of a traditional authorial image: that of the demiurge who “controls the arrangement of what he wants to reveal.”25 This attention to mise-en-scène is also demonstrated in several depictions of himself at an easel in profi le or from behind. For instance, one of Pasolini’s very first (and not very good) known compositions was made on a large sheet of drawing paper divided in half. On the left, there is a watercolor vase of flowers, on the right a pastel sketch of the author shown from behind, painting the vase. The words “Io pittore Pasolini” (I, Pasolini the painter) at the top of the paper leave no doubt as to the drawing’s nature and function. Stefano Ferrari argues in his study on psychology and the self-portrait that “man turns to the self-portrait also to become a spectator of himself, to control himself and the world through it,”26 so Pasolini’s depiction of himself from behind in the guise of a painter—that is, without a mirror—demonstrates a specific aim: to stage himself in the third person as an author at work, to declare his own ability to order and represent the real or, we might also say, to direct the stage of the world. We are indeed at the origins of the “Velázquez effect” that I discussed in chapter 1. Focusing on the theme of the self-portrait in Pasolini’s artworks can thus help us to shed light on the evolution and importance of his later authorial performance. One of the most important moments in Pasolini’s growth as an artist was his encounter with Roberto Longhi, in particular Longhi’s lectures on Masolino and Masaccio between 1941 and 1942 at the University of Bologna—when Pasolini first started to paint with pastels and oils.27 These lectures, which he saw as contributing to his pictorial “revelation,” are essential not so much for interpreting his graphic production of the period but for understanding his move to fi lm, which, as Alberto Marchesini has shown, took place under the sign of pictorial citation.28 Discussing his own cinematic technique during the fi lming of Mamma Roma in 1961 (the screenplay for which was dedicated to Longhi, “to whom I am indebted for my artistic epiphany”29) and the frontality of his frames, Pasolini explained: “What I see in my head, as my field of vision, are the fres-

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coes of Masaccio, of Giotto, who are the painters I love most, along with certain mannerists (like Pontormo). I can’t seem to conceptualize images, landscapes, or compositions of figures beyond this initial painting passion, from the fourteenth century, where man is at the center of all perspective. So when my images are in motion, it is a little bit as if the lens were moving over them as over a painting.”30 Clearly, the memory of Longhi’s documentary on Vittore Carpaccio in 1947 lingered in Pasolini’s mind. The documentary was made with a pioneering montage technique, using several black-andwhite photographic reproductions of the Venetian artist’s paintings, which the video camera moves over in search of details and faces that Longhi’s voice describes with elaborate expressions and unexpected connections. The sense of hieratic stasis in Pasolini’s cinema derives from this sort of aesthetic experience, translated into his filmic representation of the real, which is always already “artifice, culture, spectacle,”31 an aestheticized pictorial experience of the world. This stillness, which has always made emotional involvement in his early films difficult for many viewers, is intensified by his particularly abrupt editing, which juxtaposes one image and another, one face and another, with often alienating effects for the audience. This type of montage also originated with Longhi’s teachings, if we give credence to Pasolini’s description of his lectures: What did Longhi do in that small, out-of-the-way, virtually unfindable university classroom on Via Zamboni? . . . He projected slides on a screen. The full and detailed view of works, from the same time and the same place, by Masolino and Masaccio. The cinema used to act on me, even as mere projection of photographs. It acted in the sense that a “frame” representing a piece of Masolino’s world—with that continuity that is in fact characteristic of the cinema—was dramatically “contrasted” by a “frame” representing a piece of Masaccio’s world in turn.32

The Ricotta (1964), as I have shown, also documents a link between painting and cinema. It is no surprise, then, that after a nearly fifteen-year hiatus Pasolini returned to drawing and painting after he made that film. The faces and bodies of the young Friulian peasants, representatives of a mythic and rural Italy, are replaced by the faces and bodies of the young Roman underclass: bodies uncontaminated by the bourgeoisie’s sexual mores and guilt complexes. Pasolini returned to drawing as well with his portraits of a young, curly-haired

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figure 4.5. Ninetto Davoli with paper flower in his mouth. Source: Image from La sequenza del fiore di carta (Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1969). Courtesy of Castoro, Ital-Noleggio Cinematografico.

boy with laughing eyes. This is Ninetto Davoli, a young Roman of Calabrian origin whom he met on the set of the fi lm. Davoli became the center of Pasolini’s only stable affective relationship (leaving aside his bond with his mother), the end of which led him to write L’hobby del sonetto (The sonnet hobby), a collection of 110 sonnets.33 Pasolini’s love for Davoli, which he confessed in an unsent letter to Ennio Flaiano written sometime in 1963,34 reminded him of his intense youth and his early portraits—so he recuperated the image of the boy with a flower in his mouth in many of Davoli’s fi lm appearances. In the short film The Sequence of the Paper Flower (1968), a gigantic red flower is a grotesque symbol of the boy’s innocence (figure 4.5); in the Andreuccio da Perugia episode in The Decameron (1971), it stands for his joyful sexuality (figure 4.6). If, in Davoli’s case, the pencil was quickly replaced by the video camera, it is striking that during this same period Pasolini returned to self-portraiture. His series of nine drawings in pastel and chalk once again seem to emerge at an important moment in the definition of his authorial figure. As we saw in chapter 2, the year 1965 was a landmark one for the development of Pasolini’s poetics, the culmination of that “irrationalist crisis” he had felt so forcefully in the early 1960s. In 1964, during a public debate, Pasolini spoke of Gospel According to Saint Matthew as the “most resounding manifestation, striking, completely clear, and precise,”35 of his intellectual crisis, and of Poem in the Shape of a Rose, which was published that same year, as the “diaristic” transcription of that crisis:

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figure 4.6. Ninetto Davoli as Andreuccio da Perugia. Source: Image from Il Decameron (Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1971). Courtesy of P.E.A., Artemis Film, Les Productions Artistes Associés.

None of the problems of the 1950s Concerns me anymore! I betray the livid moralists that turned Socialism into a Catholicism equally boring! Ah, ah, the committed province! Ah, ah, the competition for being the most rational poet of all! Ideology, a drug for poor professors! I abjure that ridiculous decade.36 This rejection of his political commitment of the 1950s is the first of a long list of rejections that culminated in 1974 with “Abjuration of the Trilogy of Life.” It should come as no surprise that the self-portraits of 1965 show a Pasolini physically marked by the sense of his crisis: skeletal, patchily shaven or with stubble, and, most importantly, with a pained, lost expression on his face; indeed, one of the drawings, Autoritratto con la febbre (Self-portrait with a fever), explicitly references his malaise (figure 4.7). Pasolini not only portrayed himself feverish and disheveled but also did so using a yellow chalk, which makes his face almost illegible on the paper, a volatile ghost figure. These selfportraits seem to be in dialogue with some of his self-representations in the poems collected in Poem in the Shape of a Rose, as in “The Guinea” (“Showing my face, my thinness— / raising my lonely, childish voice— / is meaningless”)37 or in “In Search of a Home” (“with my face baked / by fever, dry pale skin

figure 4.7. Pier Paolo Pasolini, Self-Portrait with a Fever (1965). Yellow chalk on paper, 245 × 330 mm. Source: Courtesy of Graziella Chiarcossi and Fondo Pier Paolo Pasolini—Gabinetto G. P. Vieusseux, Florence.

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and a beard”), a transcription of Self-Portrait with a Fever onto the page,38 or in these lines from “A Desperate Vitality”: —I am like a cat burned alive, crushed by a tractor-trailer’s wheels, hung by boys from a fig tree, but with eight of its nine lives still left, like a snake reduced to a bloody pulp, —cheeks hollow under despondent eyes, hair thinning frightfully at the crown, a half-eaten eel arms now skinny as a child’s.39 Marco Antonio Bazzocchi has aptly said of these poetic self-portraits that “the poet’s body seems no longer to possess its own vital center.” 40 We are looking at a series of “wounded” self-portraits, to borrow Sara Ugolini’s expression, portraits in which the wound is “a correlative of a state of mind, a metaphor for discussing a tendentially negative psychological condition.” 41 A personal crisis modifies self-representation and becomes an authorial crisis, both outside and inside the work, as we saw in the case of Divine Mimesis. We must also remember that the ideological crisis of the early 1960s was accompanied by what Pasolini called his “cancro da scandalo” (cancer from scandal), the endless series of legal and media trials that turned him into a celebrity much against his will. It is this climate that gives rises to what is perhaps the most fascinating of Pasolini’s drawings. It is undated but was found by his cousin Graziella Chiarcossi in a folder from 1965, the same year as Self-Portrait with a Fever, along with some typed manuscripts from the same time. It is one of Pasolini’s few abstract works, a sketch made with a grease pencil on lithograph transfer paper, with its characteristic yellow color (figure 4.8). In accordance with a technique he used later for his portraits of Maria Callas, he had folded the paper to make sixteen squares, in which he sketched terse bunches of wavy diagonal lines that are difficult to interpret. Franco Zabagli, in his attempt to decipher the nonfigural nature of this mysterious drawing, speaks in terms of an “ideogrammatic table” and “imaginary alphabet.” 42 More modestly, Francesco Galluzzi asks whether the lines might be Pasolini’s mouth or a flock

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figure 4.8. Pier Paolo Pasolini, The world doesn’t want me anymore and doesn’t know it (undated). Grease pencil on paper, 640 × 490 mm. Source: Courtesy of Graziella Chiarcossi and Fondo Pier Paolo Pasolini—Gabinetto G. P. Vieusseux, Florence.

of birds.43 Giuseppe Zigaina has compared the figure in each square to a mandala, an imago mundi concealing alchemical significance filtered through Jungian psychoanalysis.44 What is certain, especially when the words Pasolini himself wrote at the bottom of the drawing are taken into consideration—“il mondo non mi vuole più e non lo sa” (the world doesn’t want me anymore and doesn’t know it)—is that the work “seems to openly announce a life crisis.” 45 Because of these words, I argue that the drawing belongs to the category of Pasolini’s self-portraits. However, his dramatic use of abstraction invites us to consider it as the performance of a different kind of author. Pasolini was never shy about his hatred for modern art, but it would be wrong to assume that his position on the subject didn’t develop over time, as The world doesn’t want me anymore and doesn’t know it seems to demonstrate. In 1962, writing in the journal Vie Nuove, he said that he detested experimental music and abstract painting. In particular, Pasolini argued that abstraction was “a typical and glorious product of neocapitalism, its integral representa-

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tion. Abstract painting obeys the neocapitalist request, asking the artist not to intervene: ‘Artist, mind your own internal business! Make your art be the diagram of your intimacy, the most unconscious and deep!’ This is what capital asks of the artist.” 46 Pasolini’s evaluation of abstraction is reductive, but it is also intriguing when one thinks of his mysterious drawing. Notably, in one of his most political movies, The Anger (1963), he contrasts Jean Fautrier’s abstract works with images of atomic explosions, almost as an illustration of his statement in Vie Nuove. Fautrier’s drawings are accompanied by the following verses in the film: The class that owns beauty. Empowered by the use of beauty, arrived at the extreme limit of beauty, where beauty is only beauty.47 So why did Pasolini conceive of abstract art as an empty form of beauty that expresses bourgeois ideology but then experiment with it in his own drawing? The wavy lines of The world doesn’t want me anymore and doesn’t know it recall Fautrier’s drawings from the 1960s, and the drawing is not the only example of Pasolini’s experimentation with abstraction. Critics such as Zigaina, Cesare De Michelis, and Galluzzi have called the undated drawing Pasolini’s only abstract work, but between 1968 and 1970 he created several paintings and drawings that clearly reference the work of major figures in abstract art. Most notably, Barene con cielo grigio (Reefs with gray sky), made in 1968 with mixed media, is for all intents and purposes an abstract work, reminiscent of some of Jean Dubuffet’s landscapes. The same can be said about Pali e reti del Safon (Poles and nets in Safon), a piece from 1970 in which, despite the title, it is difficult to see any sort of figurality. Abstraction is particularly evident in the portraits Pasolini painted between 1969 and 1970, a period to which I would also date The world doesn’t want me anymore and doesn’t know it. A portrait of the poet Andrea Zanzotto done in 1969 represents an interesting example of Pasolini’s change of heart about abstraction. He depicted the poet in profile with splashes of white and brown paint. The technique he used is reminiscent of Jackson Pollock’s action painting, although the work is actually a dramatic integration of abstraction and figuration. This striking combination of form and formlessness corresponds to Zanzotto’s linguistic experimentation in his masterpiece La beltà (Beauty, 1968), which Pasolini reviewed the same year. He interpreted the collection as the conscious manifestation of a poetic mental structure, characterized by the destruction of all semantic fields. The result is

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a psychological, elegiac landscape of ruins and remains, where language—in a parallel to Art Informel—regresses to the level of organic decay.48 Similarly, in Pasolini’s portrait of Zanzotto, abstraction functions to deform or disfigure the self, which is subjected to the pressure of history. Also in a series of portraits of Maria Callas, Pasolini’s spontaneous drips and blobs of paint straight from the tube seem to represent the limit of representation. The Callas portraits are constructed through a series of attempts to sketch the soprano’s profile on one piece of paper, similar to the arrangement of The world doesn’t want me anymore and doesn’t know it. Abstract painting has become, in Pasolini’s eyes, a way to express the violence inflicted on the subject by contemporary society. The drips of color literally deface the profiles, highlighting, as Fabien S. Gérard has noted, the difficulty of capturing the subject’s interior identity.49 Just like Pietro in Theorem, Pasolini seems to stage an authorial performance of failure. In fact, Pasolini’s recourse to abstraction suggests that we should interpret also his undated drawing as representing not just a wounded self-portrait but the wound as self-portrait. For such a reading, Pasolini’s pencil repeatedly and violently makes graphic wounds on the paper, creating images of the subject’s psychic wound, the trauma caused by the world, which attacks him for his anticonformist, provocative, and sometimes scandalous attitude.50 The use of the graphic sign as wound is similar to Viennese Actionism, in which artists such as Günter Brus, Otto Muehl, Hermann Nitsch, and Rudolf Schwarzkogler acted on their own bodies through color and pictorial signs in imitation of the violence to which society subjects the individual.51 Arnulf Rainer is perhaps the most relevant Actionist in the context of Pasolini’s drawing. In the late 1950s, Rainer began working on the figure of the artist, altering photographs of his own face and body. By making violent marks, the artist lacerated his image and modified its physiognomy to the point that his face became nothing but a graphic sign. Pasolini’s drawing must be read in this way, as the graphic manifestation of a torn self-image, which in spite of violent rejection by the world never ceases to be at the center of representation. Pasolini’s work, permeated with its author’s existential conflicts, also becomes a wounded self-portrait that “reflects the existential vicissitudes to which the artist feels subject,” the artist whose “mere artistic vocation is perceived as destined for a role of subversion and risk within society.”52 The self-portrait, too, is a form of protest. The world doesn’t want me anymore and doesn’t know it represents the most iconoclastic performance of Pasolini’s authorship, for it is the expression of his

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relationship to the society of the late 1960s. However, his exuberant return to painting and the issue of self-portrayal are probably also the reason for his sudden performative authorial turn in The Trilogy of Life (1971–1974), in particular his decision to play the role of a painter in The Decameron, which I discuss in the next chapter. Moving away from the contemporary world, which he can represent only through the deforming effect of abstraction, and retrieving the uncontaminated past of Boccaccio, Pasolini returned to an idea of realism that has no place in the modern world. As I have shown, Pasolini was aware of the need to strategically perform his self-representation in order to control his relationship with his audience, whether contemporary or future. As Anne Collins Goodyear has written in a discussion of Marcel Duchamp’s portraiture, an ongoing investment in selfportrayal is “an effort that not only includes self-portraiture but extends to [the artist’s] dissemination of portraits of himself by others.”53 Like Duchamp, an artist who problematized the notion of the author, Pasolini combined selfrepresentation and the appropriation of work by those who portrayed him in order to construct his authorial persona. Thus, it comes as no surprise that when Massimo Listri took the photograph of Pasolini posing with a flower in his mouth in front of his earlier self-portrait, Pasolini had just returned to the volume of his early poems, La meglio gioventù (The best of youth, 1954), with the idea of rewriting it to adapt it to his new vision of the world as well as to a new authorial image. The result, La nuova gioventù (The new youth), published 1975, is in a certain sense a rejection—and not a painless one—of the worldview that had sustained his poetics from the beginning of his career through the late 1960s. For Pasolini, these years marked the beginning of the cultural genocide of the Italians and the “bleak enthusiasm” that led him—in the last poem of the collection—to entrust the preservation of the values of the past to a young fascist: Take this weight, boy, though you hate me. Carry it yourself. It shines bright in your heart. And I should walk lightly on, always choosing life and youth.54 Substituting “nero” (black) for “bianco” (white) and “vecchio” (old) for “giovane” (young), The New Youth is like the photographic negative of The Best of Youth, its dark side. Listri’s portrait photograph should then be read as a self-

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portrait by proxy, an authorial performance in which Pasolini is both his new self and his old self. The flower in the mouth is the senhal of the oxymoronic old youth of the poem but at the same time is a clue to the past, the intertextual signal that unites Pasolini’s present work with that of his past. This relationship is demonstrated, too, by another poem from The Best of Youth, where his awareness of the value of the photographic medium in the performance of self-image is evident: I strike a pose. One, two, three, click! A young poet looks at the world From the background of a photograph.55 Returning to his own works through rewritings and changes that modify their meaning (as we saw previously in the case of Divine Mimesis, a perfect model of this type of process) is equivalent to returning to his own image and modifying it, as if it were a form of pictorial penitence, a velatura on a selfportrait. Listri’s portrait photo thus bears witness not so much to the way Pasolini saw himself in 1973 but to the way he wanted to be seen. The connection between work and author can therefore be the fruit of a deliberate performative visual strategy.

5 Acting

O n January 7, 197 7, Rol and B arthes delivered his now well-known inaugural lecture as chair of literary semiology at the Collège de France. The lecture focused on the concept of power, which Barthes described as a plural, ubiquitous, and enduring entity, a “parasite of a transsocial organism, linked to the whole of man’s history.”1 Pasolini seems to share Barthes’s main concern—defining how intellectuals can take action against power and avoid being co-opted by it—and their antagonistic strategies are in fact remarkably similar. For Barthes, there is no way for the author to resist and survive power other than to constantly shift ground, just as for Pasolini the author’s performance must be a “continuous struggle” through “permanent invention”2 and, consequently, constant self-reinvention. That is the spirit in which he began shooting his adaptation of Boccaccio’s Decameron in 1970, the first film of La trilogia della vita (Trilogy of Life), to be followed by I racconti di Canterbury (The Canterbury Tales, 1972) and Il fiore delle mille e una notte (Thousand and One Nights or Arabian Nights, 1974). With the Trilogy of Life,

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Pasolini once again shifted ground by looking for a synthesis of the two modes of cinema he had been developing up to that point. One was the realism of his first films from the 1960s, shot and conceptualized with the Gramscian concept of the national-popular work in mind;3 the other was his intellectual and experimental mode, which can be seen from Hawks and Sparrows (1966) to Pigsty (1969), which problematizes the relationship between audience and author according to his idea of the “unpopular cinema.” The Trilogy demanded that Pasolini again modify his understanding of audience. He intended to address the indistinct human masses with their petit bourgeois aspirations, which, in his analysis of neocapitalist consumerism, had already replaced the people in Italian society. His objective was obviously not to adapt himself to their tastes or to the demands of the entertainment industry. On the contrary, by supporting the progressive struggles for democratization of expression and sexual liberation, he intended to undermine the audience’s conservative mores by explicitly (and therefore scandalously) representing corporeality and sex in all its forms—in particular homosexual desire. Pasolini explained this intent publicly at a conference titled “Eroticism, Subversion, Commodity” in 1974. Responding to the lukewarm critical reception of the Trilogy, he explained that in a moment of profound cultural crisis (the late 1960s), . . . it seemed to me as if the only reality left was the reality of the body. . . . The star of my films was the corporeality of the people. . . . In my recent film work, it is also a provocation. A provocation on multiple fronts. A provocation to the conformist, bourgeois audience . . . A provocation to the critics, who by repressing sex from my films have repressed their content and therefore found them hollow, without understanding that ideology was there, indeed, and it was right there in the enormous cock on the screen, over their heads that did not want to understand.4

I return later to this provocative image of an enormous cock hanging over the spectator’s head. For now, we must notice how in the Trilogy Pasolini projects the innocence and joyous sexuality of the bodies he has loved, which he sees gradually disappearing into the past before his eyes. The model of the “popular body,” which he once identified with young Friulian peasants and then with the ragazzi from the Roman borgate, is here regressively identified with the bodies described in the more licentious stories of The Decameron, The Canterbury Tales, and Thousand and One Nights, three masterpieces of world liter-

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ature—each of which was addressed to broad audiences. For Pasolini, these openly sexual bodies from the past still seemed to embody one last possibility for resistance to the mass culture that was leveling out the desires of diverse sectors of society, starting with the young. Therefore, the bodies and the sexual organs that Pasolini represents in his films are not historical bodies. They encompass what Foucault called the “profoundly and originally utopian experience of the body.”5 It is through this utopian body that Pasolini believed he could elude power. He was mistaken. Despite the ideological content of this new phase in his cinema, many accused Pasolini of giving in to the allure of the marketplace. These detractors confused audience response with authorial intent. The Decameron was indeed the greatest commercial success of Pasolini’s directing career, even becoming the highest-grossing foreign film of the year in the United States.6 But this unexpected success, to Pasolini’s great disappointment, was due mostly to his unprecedented use of nude scenes and explicit sexuality, which in Italy inspired a trend of low-quality “Decamerotic” films with ideological intentions quite different from Pasolini’s.7 These films are mostly soft-core movies, such as Aristide Massaccesi’s Decameron n. 69, Pier Giorgio Ferretti’s Decameroticus, Franco Martinelli’s Decameron proibitissimo (Forbidden Decameron), and Gian Paolo Callegari’s Le notti calde del Decameron (The Hot Nights of the Decameron), all from 1972. They take from Pasolini’s work nothing but the actors’ nudity, the licentiousness of the situations, and the pseudomedieval setting.8 The other two films in the Trilogy, which radically challenged the limits of what could be shown in Italian cinema, shared the same fate. In fact, Pasolini’s films triggered the birth of a new cinematic genre, the commedia erotica all’italiana (sex comedy, Italian style), a subgenre of the commedia all’italiana, which had previously been characterized by its emphasis on social critique. Pasolini, who did not foresee this reaction, was prompted to write his now famous essay “Abiura dalla Trilogia della vita” (Abjuration of The Trilogy of Life), which was published in the leading Italian newspaper Il Corriere della Sera on June 15, 1975. In his inaugural lecture, Barthes refers to Pasolini’s “abjuration” as a radical way of shift ing ground: “to go where you are not expected, or, more radically, to abjure what you have written (but not necessarily what you have thought), when gregarious power uses and subjugates it.”9 By “abjuring” his Trilogy of Life films, Pasolini indeed performed a political act, denouncing the exploitation of his work by the assimilating power of mass consumerism, which conceded a form of false sexual tolerance in order to control, violate, and use the body’s innocence. “Abjuration of The

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Trilogy of Life” can thus be read in performative terms as a specific authorial strategy, and such a reading leads us to reconsider once again the concept of failure in Pasolini’s late work. By writing “Abjuration,” in fact, he modified the traditional perception of the author who has perfect control over his work by declaring that the conceptual premises of his films had been flawed— not, it is important to note, that the films were failures in aesthetic terms. At the same time, he also described the incompatibility of homosexual desire and modern society’s false sexual tolerance. He had no lingering illusion regarding the joyful corporeality of the young boys he once portrayed, described in his books, and filmed: Even if I wanted to keep making films like the Trilogy of Life, I couldn’t because at this point I hate bodies and sexual organs. Naturally, I mean these bodies, these sexual organs. In other words, the bodies of the new youth and young Italians, the sexual organs of these new youth and young Italians. You’ll object: “In reality, you didn’t represent contemporary sexual organs and bodies in the Trilogy, but ones from the past.” This is true, but for a while I was able to fool myself. The degenerating present was compensated for by the objective survival of the past and, as a result, the possibility to represent it. But today the devaluation of bodies and sexes has assumed retroactive value. . . . The kids and young people in the Roman subproletariat—the same ones I projected into old enduring Naples and then into the poor countries of the Third World—if they’re human trash now, that also means they were potentially so.  .  .  . The collapse of the present implies the collapse of the past.10

The illusion that made the creation of the Trilogy possible is the illusion Barthes describes at the end of his lecture in his reflections on the relationship between corporeality and temporality. In particular, he suggests a way of approaching the author’s historically perceived body that resonates with Pasolini’s operation. “If I want to live,” Barthes writes, “I must forget that my own body is historical. I must fling myself into the illusion that I am contemporary with the young bodies before me, and not with my own body, my past body. In short, I must be periodically reborn. I must make myself younger than I am.”11 One can thus think of the title of Pasolini’s film trilogy not simply as a celebration of sexuality as a life force but also as the author’s attempt to live as a contemporary of those young bodies from the past and thereby to forget his historical body. In part, I have already shown this idea through my

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analysis of Massimo Listri’s portrait photograph of Pasolini in chapter 4, which Pasolini staged to create the illusion that he was the contemporary of the young bodies in his early erotic drawings and self-portraits. But how is it possible to translate this forgetfulness of the author’s corporeal history in cinematic terms? I would argue that it is possible only through a radicalization of the performative component of the author’s bodily presence on the screen. In this chapter, I discuss what happens when Pasolini enters his cinematic narrative as an actor playing the peculiar role of an author and consider The Trilogy of Life as a statement of performative authorship.

D irec ting a s Painting Pasolini’s preparatory material demonstrates that he initially wanted to structure The Decameron in three parts. However, as shown by the several versions of the screenplay, only two symmetrical parts remain from the initial project. Pasolini cut the Boccaccian frame story of the plague in Florence and the structure of the ten days and ten storytellers.12 Out of the one hundred original stories, he chose nine, almost all set in the city of Naples and introduced by two characters: Ser Ciappelletto, played by Franco Citti, and a disciple of Giotto, played by Pasolini in a complex self-projection. Giotto appears as a character in the fift h novella on the fourth day devoted to “leggiadri motti” (witty remarks). This tale is very short and could seem almost insignificant among the other ninety-nine tales. Nonetheless, Pasolini expanded it by including the detail of Giotto heading to Naples to paint frescoes at the Church of Santa Chiara. As Alberto Marchesini notes, this addition turns out to be the film’s most subversive moment with respect to the literary text;13 it is also, I would add, one of the most salient moments for the question of Pasolini’s authorial performance. Until now, critics have discussed this film only to find correspondences between it and Boccaccio’s text. In Visualizing Boccaccio, an important volume documenting the history of representations of The Decameron, Jill M. Ricketts states that “Pasolini’s Giotto shares both the imaginative and the critical capacities of Boccaccio’s artists while at the same time . . . occupy[ing] a position parallel and sympathetic to that of the Decameron’s Author.”14 In short, Pasolini superimposes the painter and the writer on his own body by physically entering the work, as he would do with Dante and Virgil in Divine Mimesis, which he conceptualized while working on the Decameron project. Boccaccio,

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in contrast, limited himself to the edges of the text. His authorial voice emerges directly only in the prologue with his dedication to the “vaghe donne” (fair women) and in his envoy, where he defends his writing by likening it to painting. Similarly, Boccaccio presents Giotto as a transmedia artist, a master of both figurative art and the word, the “leggiadri motti” at the center of the novella of which he is the protagonist. As such, Giotto is a perfect platform for Pasolini’s cinematographic self-projection, particularly in light of the equation of writing and painting that I discussed in the previous chapter. The relationship between Boccaccio’s Decameron and Pasolini’s Decameron thus shines a light on all the phases of Pasolini’s career and emphasizes, “in an almost aggressive way,”15 the latter’s autobiographical aspects. Pasolini had initially thought of the poet Sandro Penna, his friend, for the role of Giotto. He considered Penna to be “our greatest living poet,”16 just as Boccaccio had considered Giotto “the greatest painter in the world.”17 After Penna refused, and Paolo Volponi also turned down the role, Sergio Citti convinced Pasolini that he himself should play the medieval painter. Pasolini was well aware of the “new meaning that [his] work would take on through [his] physical entrance into it.”18 First and foremost, as he stated in an interview by Dario Bellezza in 1970, “Giotto is no longer Giotto, but ironically, . . . an ‘Upper-Italian pupil of Giotto’s’ going to Naples to decorate Santa Chiara with realistic frescoes (in other words, just as I went to Naples to make the fi lm).”19 In another interview that same year, Pasolini reinforced this interpretation: “I’m a writer from upper Italy  .  .  . who goes to Naples to make a realistic fi lm. So there is an analogy between the character and the author. . . . In this role there is the whole work, we could say, the work within the work.”20 The metalinguistic tension in Pasolini’s aesthetics finds its fullest expression in The Decameron in conjunction with a reflection on the author made not through a caricature, as in The Ricotta, where the painting–film relationship also occupies a central role. Pasolini’s actual presence in The Decameron is very different from the authorial performances we have encountered previously. What Pasolini offers us in this film is the kind of “palpable subjectivity” Linda Haverty Rugg discusses in her study on the director’s image in art cinema. This subjectivity is bound to “a discourse of cinematic spectatorship that depends on the spectator’s recognition of the film’s author and the author’s desire to be seen through the self he projects.”21 The idea of creating a parallel between fi lming and painting was among Pasolini’s intentions even before he decided to play the part of the painter, as

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we can see in a letter he wrote to Franco Rossellini in the spring of 1970: “Altogether, the film will come to be a kind of fresco of an entire world between the middle ages and the bourgeois age, and stylistically it will represent an entire realistic universe.”22 The image of the fresco evoked in this letter is a clear reference to the interdisciplinary nature of the film and to Giotto, whom Pasolini considered a master of realism and a technical innovator. Giotto’s and Masaccio’s realism can in fact be found in the scratchy, primitive black and white of Pasolini’s early cinematic efforts.23 This connection emerges explicitly in a poetic description of shooting The Ricotta: The Saint is Stracci. The ancient snub-nosed face Giotto saw against encampment tufo and rubble, the wide hips that Masaccio chiaroscuroed like a baker a holy loaf of bread . . . 24 These verses already contain the ideas that make Pasolini’s choice to play Giotto’s apprentice so interesting. On the one hand, it is as if Giotto had already seen the face of Stracci—the wretch who plays a thief in the film within The Ricotta—before Pasolini saw it. The bodies of the Roman subproletariat are outside of history, or, rather, they belong to the metahistorical dimension of the outcast. On the other hand, it is evident that Pasolini had already conceived of directing as a pictorial act and had aligned his gaze with that of the medieval painter way before he made The Decameron. It is precisely the dialectic between the cinematic gaze and painting that enables his identification with Giotto’s pupil. For instance, in the screenplay the painter’s eyes are equated with the video camera—that is, with the director’s subjective shot: “Giotto has arrived in Naples, he’s in the belly of Naples; Forese, along with a friar, is behind him, but he doesn’t count anymore; he is already in second order; what counts are ‘Giotto’s eyes’ (a sort of subjective shot that, looking, takes hold of reality), the reality of those narrow Neapolitan streets, with their people, things, gestures, expressions, situations.”25 The link between the film being created before the spectator’s eyes and the fresco being created before the eyes of Giotto’s pupil is highlighted by the alternation of shot and reverse shot from the painter’s eyes to the still-unpainted wall inside the church, which gives the spectator the impression of being inside the film and participating in its creation. As Foucault had already written with regard to Las meninas, “As soon as they place the spectator in the field of their gaze, the painter’s eyes seize hold of him, and force him to enter the picture.”26

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figure 5.1. Pasolini as Giotto’s pupil frames reality with his fingers. Source: Image from Il Decameron (Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1971). Courtesy of P.E.A., Artemis Film, Les Productions Artistes Associés.

In one of the most metalinguistically pregnant scenes of the fi lm, we see Giotto’s apprentice in a crowded market, framing the reality around him. He does so by crossing the index and middle fingers of one hand against those of the other hand to form a sort of makeshift frame, a typical director’s gesture (figure 5.1). What his gaze frames are the main characters of the next novella, shown in profile as they shop, first in a medium shot, then in a medium closeup, and finally in a close-up on each character. The scene closely resembles the search for the actors in Notes Toward an African Orestes (1970), but in this case the framing gaze is that of the film’s author as well as that of the author in the film. What Pasolini shows us almost seems like a medieval version of the Kinoglaz theorized by Dziga Vertov, a “kino-eye” that can depict “people without masks, without makeup, catching them through the eye of the camera in a moment when they are not acting.”27 The scene that immediately follows shows the painter’s assistants preparing the various colors for the fresco. The actual novella begins, without interruption, only after the painter-Pasolini has made the first stroke of color on the still-white wall. Both brush and wall are “prosthetic devices” corresponding to the camera and the screen in Pasolini’s auteurist self-projection. As Haverty Rugg argues, when the screen or the camera are shown, they signal the author’s presence to the viewer because the cinematic apparatus “indicates that the narrative is not ‘real’ but made.”28 The effect produced by the market scene is very complex because Giotto’s apprentice’s gaze is at once the subject and the object of the image. The audi-

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ence, who recognizes Pasolini within the frame of the film, forgets that he is also behind the video camera, which, in a highly self-reflexive act, literally frames him. In her study on the relationship between film and autobiography, Elizabeth Bruss suggests that when the director enters the cinematic narrative as an actor, “we are forced to acknowledge that the cinematic subjectivity belongs, properly, to no one.”29 I would argue that the exact opposite happens in the case of Pasolini’s self-projection in The Trilogy of Life: the focus that the director places on the gaze reinforces the viewers’ belief that they are witnessing the film’s author at work. I discussed Pasolini’s aversion to modern art in the previous chapter, but the importance of Pasolini representing himself as Giotto’s apprentice in the act of framing has a curious parallel with one of the masters of American conceptual art, John Baldessari. Like Pasolini, Baldessari has always harbored a veneration for the cinema and for Giotto.30 In particular, in his work Virtues & Vices (for Giotto) (1981) Baldessari cinematizes Giotto’s “vignettes,” translating the narrative style of the frescoes at the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua through the use of seemingly unrelated and insignificant film stills that have constituted the favored material for his work for the past thirty years. However, I want to focus on a different work, a photograph taken in 1971 (the same year Pasolini’s Decameron was released), Pier 18: Hands Framing New York Harbor (figure 5.2). That year Willoughby Sharp invited twenty-seven conceptual artists to develop projects for an abandoned port on the Hudson River in New York. Baldessari’s work, faithful to its title, shows the artist’s hands, like Pasolini-Giotto’s in the film, “framing” an old barge docked at the pier. The viewer is presented not with the picture Baldessari could have taken (the one framed by his fingers) but with a potential image that documents the conceptualization that precedes the creative act, which is accompanied by the photograph of a note that shows the author’s name. It is a note for a photograph-to-be, which remained unrealized. Similarly, the question asked by Giotto’s pupil at the end of The Decameron—“Why make a work of art when it’s so nice just to dream of it?”31—evokes the concept or potential of a work rather than a completed work itself. In short, Pasolini and Baldessari use the same gesture of framing reality with their fingers to declare that the work has value not insofar as it is completed but insofar as it is imagined or dreamed, potentially contained in the theater of the artist’s mind. At the same time, both artists’ bodies enter the frame of their work, affirming the intimate bond between work and authorial corporeality. The author, like the viewer, is a corporeal, material being, not just an abstract function.

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figure 5.2. John Baldessari, Pier 18: Hands Framing New York Harbor (1971). B+W Photographs, Edition of 3, 7 × 10⅛ inches. Source: Image courtesy of John Baldessari.

Most criticism has interpreted the film’s closing question in light of the sequence in which the painter wakes up in his cot with a start, having dreamed of the Universal Judgment (an evocation of Giotto’s painting Judgment in Padua). This is an important scene that lays out the complex dialectic between diegetic and extradiegetic author and problematizes once again the notion of work. In the painter’s dream, Judgment appears as a complex living fresco, another note for a work to be made. According to the original screenplay, Giotto’s pupil’s fresco should have coincided with his great dream: “the fresco appears in all its divine splendor: with its characters simple and powerful in their adoration of God, who looks down on them from the heavens through the symmetrical haloes of the Saints.”32 The fresco revealed by the painter at the end of The Decameron, however, is completely different, and, most importantly, it is unfinished. It is a more modest triptych, including just two completed parts, apparently inspired by the series Postmortem Miracles of Saint Francis attributed to Giotto’s school and visible in the lower basilica of Assisi (figure 5.3).33 The third part of the triptych is empty, and yet the painter and his assistants celebrate the completion of the work. The spectator might well wonder, Why celebrate, when the fresco is unfinished? The uncompleted triptych has not attracted much attention from scholars, and it is therefore worth considering a few interpretative hypotheses. The unfinished triptych could be a reference to the film’s original three-part structure, which would have made the film three hours long, too much for the producer; Pasolini cut the film into two individual parts, leaving a third unfinished. In short, the unfinished fresco works as a visual apology for the film’s lack of symmetry. Maurizio Viano has argued that the missing fresco is

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figure 5.3. The unfinished fresco triptych. Source: Image from Il Decameron (Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1971). Courtesy of P.E.A., Artemis Film, Les Productions Artistes Associés.

a sort of announcement of a “sequel,” a reference to the other two parts of the Trilogy to come. Viano reminds us that the last film in the trilogy, Arabian Nights, contains an epigraph that establishes a direct tie with The Decameron: “The truth lies not in one dream, but in many dreams.”34 But the second film in Pasolini’s trilogy, The Canterbury Tales, was still unfinished in 1971, so at that point there weren’t even two complete parts in the triptych. I would thus argue that the missing part of the triptych suggests that we should look for the meaning of Pasolini’s work not in the specific work but in the process of its creation. The missing image, in short, is a negative analogy for the dream of the work to be made, not for the next fresco (that is, The Canterbury Tales) or for the forthcoming parts of Trilogy but the essential void at the end of a work that is constitutively in progress because it coincides with the author’s living performance.

D irec ting a s Writing If Pasolini was initially motivated to perform his authoriality in The Decameron by Penna’s refusal to play Giotto, in The Canterbury Tales it is clear that the director was programmatically developing an explicit discourse on authorship through his body and his performance. In the previous film, he constructed his authorial image through an analogy between painting and cinema. In The

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Canterbury Tales, Pasolini made his authorial presence even more explicit by playing the role of Chaucer, the author of the text on which the film is based. As he stated in an interview, making the text’s author one of the characters radically changes the meaning of the film: “As for the character of Chaucer, it is totally arbitrary and symbolizes the meaning of the film. As I have said many times, the film, in a certain sense, is metalinguistic. It is a film on film, a fi lm that is self-aware. . . . Chaucer was invented as an arbitrary character who bears metalinguistic significance in the fi lm.”35 If the character of Chaucer can symbolize the film’s meaning, it is precisely because Chaucer himself was a self-aware author. Indeed, at the beginning of an important study on the practice of self-fashioning in sixteenth-century England, Stephen Greenblatt mentions “Chaucer’s extraordinary subtle and wry manipulations of persona” as an example of modern authorial awareness, equal to that of Dante.36 As Pasolini had already done in Divine Mimesis, in The Canterbury Tales he is both author and intradiegetic narrator, but this time he establishes a relationship between writing and cinema: director-Pasolini corresponds to Chaucer-Pasolini. In the screenplay, this correspondence is outlined in the initial scene at the Southwark Inn, where the pilgrims gather before embarking on their journey. The insistent use of the verb to observe in reference to Chaucer evokes the scene of Giotto’s apprentice at the market in Naples and the use of the long shot: Before this great comic-realistic scene, which immediately gives sense to the whole work, here is Chaucer observing. Indeed, he has come to the inn like any other customer or pilgrim. He stays there to observe and, still observing, goes inside. Along with him (observed by him) enters “the Cook.”37

However, there seems to be a difference between the painter’s “looking” and Chaucer’s “observing.” If the work is a dream for Pasolini, we must also remember that, as he once stated, “an image has the character and the potential of a dream more than the word does. The dreams of the image are cinematic dreams, not literary ones.”38 In the case of The Decameron, the painter’s gaze instantly creates a fresco and a film still because his gaze coincides with the director’s. By contrast, Chaucer is constantly portrayed in the act of writing—as if his pen corresponds to the director’s gaze. Borrowing Alexandre Astruc’s expression, I would consider Chaucer’s pen a caméra-stylo, or camera-pen.39 Astruc, whose concept of the caméra-stylo forms the basis for

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figure 5.4. Pasolini as Chaucer reads The Decameron. Source: Image from I racconti di Canterbury (Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1972). Courtesy of P.E.A., Les Productions Artistes Associés.

his later theory of the cinéma d’auteurs, was the first to claim that a director can use the video camera as a writer uses his pen—that is, as a method of individual expression. In this view, Chaucer-Pasolini is not only another portrait of the author (the writer-director) but also a portrait of the cinematic auteur. In her pioneering study on Pasolini’s cinema, Naomi Greene notes that, despite their differences, both character-author figures—Chaucer and Boccaccio—share an important metacinematic function in the Trilogy. “Appearing at intervals throughout the films, they serve to anchor or join a series of unconnected tales. In this way, they play a vital role in the so-called ‘frame narrative.’ ” 40 Greene’s observation is limited to identifying the unifying function of these authorial figures within the individual fi lms. But we can move to a more general level and consider Pasolini’s performance throughout his late body of work. From these two films it emerges that he indeed conceived of the authorial performance as a guarantor of the coherence not only of the individual films, but of his entire transmedia and transdisciplinary work. The performance of the author is the principle that grants sense and cohesion to an otherwise fragmented collection of poetry, painting, prose, film, and essay. The insistent intertextual references between The Decameron and The Canterbury Tales illustrate this authorial performance. First, as Maria Caterina Paino has noted, the Neapolitan song sung by the indulgence seller during the opening credits of The Canterbury Tales, “Feneste che lucive,” reprises a melody that was used in The Decameron.41 Furthermore, Boccaccio’s volume appears

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repeatedly en abyme in the hands of Chaucer-Pasolini, who is overtaken with amusement every time he flips through it (figure 5.4). Pasolini’s film calls for a spectator who knows more than the single film. His performance as an actor, making the connection between the two films explicit, implies a demand for familiarity not only with his figure and his filmography but also with the paratext that surrounds the author’s work. According to the script, The Canterbury Tales was supposed to begin with the English writer at his desk in the darkness of his “medieval cell,” surrounded by piles of books from his library: “Chaucer is consulting these works, which he keeps and guards avidly. He looks here, then there. Then he picks up Boccaccio, reads a little, chuckles a little, then guffaws, by himself, for a while, like a crazy person. Then he takes the Boccaccio volume and hides it, ‘burying’ it carefully under a pile of other books and objects.” 42 This initial scene was not included in the final cut, which was complex and extended even after the premiere at the Berlin Festival, where the fi lm won the Golden Bear. Yet the idea of the “burial” of The Decameron (which no critic seems to have caught, not even those who have devoted monographic studies to the film) returns in another scene in the screenplay, where the author is framed in a study highly reminiscent of the one in Antonello da Messina’s painting St. Jerome in His Study (c. 1460): Chaucer is writing his book. . . . He glances quickly at the pile of books and objects that cover, no, bury the Decameron and furtively removes them until the book is revealed. He opens it, looks through it, chuckles: then again, and this time for good, he buries it. And begins to write again.43

This scene reveals the commonly known fact that Chaucer’s literary model was Boccaccio’s medieval “best seller.” At the same time, as Haverty Rugg suggests, with this scene Pasolini causes the viewers to “create a net of associations between the persona on the screen and the accumulated projections of the director as they exist in his films and in other forms of selfrepresentation.” 44 In short, the viewers are reminded that the author on the screen is also the author of the film Decameron: Pasolini. In this way, the spectator participates also in the construction of the author’s self, which includes and absorbs others. Pasolini’s performative self-projection produces an intersubjective model of selfhood, a collaborative and constructive authorial self.45 But there is something more important in this insistent exposition of a concealment or “burial,” as it were. This is a literal mise-en-scène of the

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author’s “workshop.” Not only his obvious sources but also, more interestingly, the cover-up of those sources—the strategy with which the author creates the myth of his own original authority—are here revealed to the public. Through his self-portrait as Chaucer, Pasolini deconstructs the traditional image of the author as transcendent figure, creator of an original sense whose origins remain inaccessible. Authorship is presented as a site of multiple discourses, and the author, as Janet Staiger has it, is revealed as “a textual ‘subcode’ to be decoded” by the spectators.46 With the Trilogy, Pasolini uses his own authorial performance to demystify not only the sedimented notion of the author but also his own image as an obscure intellectual and to establish with his new popular audience an apparently egalitarian relationship. In short, he wants to create a new form of popular cinema opposed to the false democracy of mass communication. As the essay “Abjuration of The Trilogy of Life” demonstrates, however, Pasolini was mistaken once again. In fact, the list of books that concludes the opening credits of his last film, Salò (1975), establishes a rather different relationship with the audience than Chaucer’s library: “Roland Barthes, Sade, Fourier, Loyola, Ed. du Seuil; Maurice Blanchot, Lautréamont et Sade, Ed. de Minuit (trad. it. Dedalo); Simone de Beauvoir, Faut-il brûler Sade?, Ed. Gallimard (trad. it. Sugarco); Pierre Klossowski, Sade mon prochaine: Le philosophe scélérat, Ed. du Seuil (trad. it. Sugarco); Philippe Sollers, L’écriture et l’expérience des limites, Ed. du Seuil. Nel film, citazioni da R. Barthes e P. Klossowski.” 47 This is the fi rst time in the history of Western cinematography that the spectator is given a detailed list of the sources for a film, both original works and their translations. Pasolini calls it an “Essential Bibliography,” and, indeed, the four libertines’ speeches do contain quotations from these texts. To Gary Indiana, these references constitute a bleak satire that “implies that there is more to be gleaned from Sade than any viewer could infer from what Pasolini attempted.” 48 But Indiana’s explanation fails to consider the sense of inadequacy and inferiority that pervades the spectator at finding himself “unprepared” not so much for the film but even before it begins. Salò’s bibliography is a sort of contrappasso for the spectator of the Trilogy, an intellectual punishment on Pasolini’s part for the disappointment and disquiet that he expressed in “Abjuration.” For the sake of my reading, it is not important to know if the texts listed are really relevant for a better understanding of the fi lm or if Pasolini really used and understood them. What is important to note is that the bibliography in Salò triggers from the very beginning a strong emotional and psychological detachment, placing the

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spectator in a position of intellectual inferiority with respect to the author, who, through the film’s story, symbolically gives his audience a Sadean (and sadistic) education, just as the female mistresses “educate” the young victims in the film. The performative gesture of placing a bibliography at the beginning of the film is meant to create an epistemological gap between author and spectator. Faced with the atrocities in the fi lm, one could quickly forget the initial bibliography. But Pasolini continues to project signals of his authorial presence even in the darkness he has created, as a firefly continues to emit intermittent light.

Ar abian Night s ’ Q ueer A genda Against all expectations, Pasolini has no on-screen role in the third and final film of his trilogy, Arabian Nights. In an interview by Carlo Giovetti in 1973, he claimed he was tired of playing such roles because “no good game lasts.” 49 Although Pasolini downplayed it, it should be clear by now that the type of self-projection and performance employed in the Trilogy was the result of a specific auteurist poetics that characterizes the last phase of his work. In fact, the “game” still fascinated Pasolini in the days before he filmed Arabian Nights, as Roberto Chiesi has documented.50 In the original screenplay, the film was to be divided into two parts and to begin with a scene on the outskirts of present-day Cairo, which Pasolini describes as gracefully as he had previously introduced the world to Rome’s borgate: Mohamed, Ahmed, and Alì, dressed in rags, or almost, or in blue jeans, or light-colored American T-shirts on their dark skin, etc., walk quickly down the uneven sidewalks, past the shabby houses, tiny shops, rubble from an old souk, etc.; they squeeze along the walls, behind which there is the dull green of some small gardens reduced to latrines; they go through squares that look like abandoned clearings, with steaming dust and heaps of rubble in the middle, with ruins of abandoned hovels, etc. . . . Basically, it’s modern Cairo, an immense and formless city, where tradition and modernity intermingle chaotically, like mud and dust. . . . In an alleyway sparkling with drainage water, teeming with hundreds of people churning in a fervor that hides the emptiness of their poor lives, they meet Nur ed-Din, who joins them . . . with a sweet and intense smile in his black eyes and full lips.51

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The scene perfectly embodies the sort of “transnational subproletariat” space at the heart of Pasolinian thought.52 The image is in fact an obvious superimposition of the lost world of the Roman slums onto the developing nations that Pasolini believed to contain an innocence uncorrupted by neocapitalism. In particular, the four Egyptian boys are reminiscent of Pasolini’s ragazzi, the protagonists of both his work and his nights of cruising. This connection justifies the erotic-narrative mechanism that Pasolini imagined giving rise to the first four episodes of the film. After some soccer in a dusty little field surrounded by a few palms and a skimpy-looking prickly pear bush, the four Arab boys lie in the shade and start masturbating: With a little smile, and no sense of guilt, almost as if it were a habit, a secret tradition, Mohamed unfastens the belt on his jeans and ponderously, from the broken zipper, pulls out his member, already erect, dry, clean, powerful. The others, still talking, with broken phrases and slight laughter, do the same; and they start pleasuring themselves, looking at one another. Mohamed throws his head back, his curls landing on the red earth, and he keeps on masturbating, looking upward (to the brutally blue sky, where the city lets out its lusty noises and its guilelessly heartrending music eternally with the same motifs). Mohamed’s eyes, black and dull, seeming to eff use their light through his transparent skin, are frozen in an image. An image rich and still as a crystal.53

The masturbatory act, symbol of a nonprocreative sexuality, dominated by jouissance and dépense, becomes a metaphor for the creative act: the first three stories from Thousand and One Nights that the spectator sees are in fact the product of the vision that captures the boys one by one as they masturbate together. According to the second part of the screenplay, “the author of the film” was to appear in this markedly homoerotic atmosphere, “walking excitedly, lost in thought. Looking around so raptly that the look on his face is almost sleepy, exhausted. At some point he pulls out a cheap, checkered notebook, and jots down a few messy, illegible notes, written in this worked-up agitation.”54 His physical description—“his thin face and feverish gaze”55—accords with Pasolini’s wounded self-portraits from 1965 and the verse portraits in Poem in the Shape of a Rose. After Pasolini’s self-projections onto a painter and a writer, the next logical step would be to play on screen the actual director of the film—or,

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rather, himself. This would have made explicit the idea that the author always plays a role, that being an author is, by defi nition, the result of a performance. The banter between one of the boys and the author, who caresses them and listens to them, confirms the fact that Pasolini had intended to play himself in the movie: Nur Ed -Din (letting himself be caressed): And you, what do you do? Autore: I’m a writer . . . The boys look at him in admiration. Nur Ed -Din: And what do you write? Autore: Poems, stories . . . 56

The fact that he declares himself to be a poet and writer instead of a director reinforces the idea that Pasolini wants to communicate the image of a transmedia author to his spectators. The original idea for Arabian Nights seems to be the radical representation of this principle because, by playing himself in his own film, Pasolini authorizes it—that is, he obliges us to an authorized reading of his work. The idea of a trilogy that gradually leads the audience to become familiar with his face, presented in various authorial guises (painter, writer, and, fi nally, director) is, in short, a metaportrait of a transmedia artist. Recalling that Listri’s portrait photograph of Pasolini, which I addressed in chapter 4, dates from the same period as the composition of Arabian Nights script, we see how Pasolini was elaborating his authorial performance on every front. Returning to the concept of the death of the author and to Foucault’s essay “What Is an Author?” one could say that the original script for Arabian Nights contains a forceful declaration against the eclipse of the author—against his death. According to Foucault, “the motivation, as well as the theme and the pretext of Arabian narratives—such as Arabian Nights—was also the eluding of death: one spoke, telling stories into the early morning, in order to forestall death, to postpone the day of reckoning that would silence the narrator. Scheherazade’s narrative is an effort, renewed each night, to keep death outside the circle of life.”57 Although Pasolini does not cite Foucault’s essay, which was published in Italian in 1971, he seems to capture this ability to resist death inherent to the infinite narrative of the original Arabian Nights. What conquered him more than anything else was the text’s “proliferation of tales one within another, the possibility of telling infinite fables, of narration for the sake of

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narrating.”58 As a consequence, it seems that the life referred to in the title Trilogy of Life can also be interpreted in this sense as the life of the author who lives on in the continual narrative proliferation of his work, conceived as infinitely open. The truth, as we read at the beginning of Arabian Nights, “lies not in one dream, but in many dreams.” It is during these same years, in fact, that Pasolini returned to the notes of Divine Mimesis, whose first canto was published in 1974 as “Sentenced to Live” after Pasolini had decided to open the book to the potentiality of incompletion.59 In the original screenplay of Arabian Nights, Pasolini’s authorial performance was strengthened further by the explicit representation of his own homosexuality, which is established not only as an important interpretative key to the work but also as its genetic origin. All the stories in part 2 arise from visions triggered by kisses between the author and the young Arabs. Had this version been filmed, Pasolini would have manifested the antagonist component of his authorship by openly performing on screen his own homosexual desire in the allegedly tolerant context of the 1970s. It is worth remembering, then, that the original text of Arabian Nights contains a frame narrative in which Scheherazade continually interrupts her stories not only to forestall her own death but also to avoid sex with the sultan. In his film, Pasolini replaces this female figure with a homosexual man and the idea of a forced heterosexual relationship with the image of natural homosexuality, free from cultural conditioning (albeit charged with orientalism). In doing so, he not only inverts the protagonist’s gender but also expresses the creative and positive aspects of homosexuality through the performance of a queer author. The way that Pasolini links authorship and homosexuality confirms the concept of authorial identity as a performative construction within his work. As Judith Butler claims, “Performativity is not a singular act, but a repetition and a ritual,” 60 just like the four kisses exchanged between the author and four boys or the scene described in the infamous “Note 55” in Petrolio, when the novel’s protagonist, a man turned into a woman, has sexual intercourse with twenty boys in a field beside Via Casilina in Rome, as if the ritualization of the sexual act could fix the subject in his newly found sexual identity.61 Pasolini’s on-screen queer performance, however, was not included in the version of Arabian Nights that was actually shot. Although for the purposes of this book the original screenplay is relevant to highlight the active presence of Pasolini’s reflection on the value of his own physical presence in the film, he ultimately opted for a simpler version without framing, where the different stories proceed sequentially and fit inside one another in a Chinese-box

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figure 5.5. Engaging in an aesthetics of homosexuality. Source: Image from Il fiore delle mille e una notte (Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1974). Courtesy of P.E.A., Les Productions Artistes Associés, United Artists.

structure. Yet, as many critics have noted, Pasolini did project the figure of the homosexual artist onto at least one of the characters in the film, the court poet Ramsun, who at the very beginning of the film invites three young Eritreans to his house for the purposes of reciting poetry and taking pleasure in one another. In the film, furthermore, many of the protagonists recite verses that celebrate male beauty and are prefaced by the phrase “as the poet says,” suggesting a close creative connection between homosexuality and the film. However, it is not only through the image of the poet that the film expresses what Joseph Boone calls Pasolini’s “subversively queer agenda.” According to Boone, who does not mention the original screenplay, Pasolini inflects “the predominant heterosexuality of the film’s superstructure with a subtle homotextuality.” 62 In particular, Pasolini’s queer sensibility allows for a homoerotic negotiation of the heterosexual, focusing the spectator’s gaze on the male actors’ genitals, which often occupy the center of the screen (figure 5.5). It is an aspect that Pasolini was very aware of, as demonstrated by his statement about the “enormous cock on the screen.” According to Boone, on the one hand, Pasolini’s focus on the male body unsettles the position of the heterosexually identified male viewer, who is forced to engage in a homosexual aesthetic. On the other hand, the different states of arousal and flaccidity in which the penis is represented provide an image of the male body that is

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more vulnerable than aggressive, an idea that is reinforced by the male characters’ passivity. Pasolini’s attention to the materiality of the male body, as John David Rhodes suggests, is indeed a prerequisite for his political critique.63 And I would add that this critique focuses on the author’s “scandalous act of invention,” 64 through which he exposes himself—although not literally, as in the original screenplay—by giving ample on-screen space to his queer gaze and forcing the audience to identify with it. Therefore, even if the author’s body is not in the frame, he performs a destabilization of the spectator’s expectations. Although Pasolini’s queer gaze is particularly evident in Arabian Nights, I would argue that it is present throughout the entire trilogy. Sergio Rigoletto, for instance, in his recent study on masculinity and Italian cinema, comments in detail on Pasolini’s “gratuitous exposure in close-up” of male genitals and the abundance of “prodigious bulges” in The Trilogy of Life.65 These obsessive close-ups of male crotches, far from representing a phallocentric point of view, undermine, erection by erection, the rigidity of the space that society allows to the representation of homosexual desire. For all these reasons, The Trilogy of Life is one of the rare joyful representations of homosexuality on screen in Italian cinema and certainly one of the most important queer interventions.

6 Voice

From 1968 to 1969, Pa solini worked on one of his mo st ambitious yet problematic projects, Appunti per un’Orestiade africana (Notes Toward an African Orestes, 1970). The film forged an unprecedented parallel between contemporary Africa and Aeschylus’s trilogy, which Pasolini translated into Italian in 1960 for Vittorio Gassman’s production at the Greek Theater in Syracuse, Sicily.1 He had already experimented with the idea of the film da farsi (film to be made) in the short Sopralluoghi in Palestina (Location Hunting in Palestine, 1963–1964), which followed his failed search for a location for his film on the Gospel (which was eventually shot in southern Italy). Subsequently, in another film about a film to be made, Appunti per un film sull’India (Notes for a Film on India, 1967–1968), Pasolini recorded the opinions and suggestions of people of all manner of social extraction as he searched the streets of Bombay for characters to play the story of a maharaja who lets himself be eaten by a hungry tiger.2 Aside from these two examples, in late Pasolini the “notes for a film” form becomes one of the ways in which the author’s

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centrality to his work is manifested by the performance of his inability or unwillingness to make the originally planned film. Although called “films to be made,” they are not simply potential films but rather cinematic experiments showing the complete exhaustion of an artistic and conceptual power in the planning and creation phase. In an interview by Roberto Costa, Pasolini explained why the fi lm on India was never made: “I can say, at the end of this investigation of mine, that I’ve tested the possibility of making this film to the extent that I have no desire to make it anymore. . . . [I]n some sense, I realized, doing this investigative film on a film to be made, that I had exhausted this film-to-be, exhausted the curiosity, the enthusiasm, and the passion to make it.”3 Why, the painter asks in The Decameron, realize a work when it is so nice to dream of it? For Pasolini, staging the prefi lm moment means dreaming of a work, completely exposing himself as author during the creative performance and mise-en-scène of what he calls in Petrolio “the theater of my head.” 4 The work of cinema resulting from this dream is not a fi nished product and, as such, is not subject to consumption by the market. It is instead a “living formal process,” never completely detached from its creator, whose originality resides in the conscious metalinguistic reflection that critically engages the audience, according to the formula used in Petrolio —a novel that, like Divine Mimesis, is based on the concepts fragmentation and openness.

Voice O ver B ody In Notes Toward an African Orestes, Pasolini tests the analogy between the situation of the Oresteia and that of Africa in the 1970s. Specifically, he asks whether African tribal society can be compared to ancient Greek civilization and whether Orestes’s discovery of democracy, which is brought to Argos in the tragedy and to Africa in Pasolini’s fi lm, corresponds to Africa’s discovery of democracy in the period of decolonization.5 Pasolini had previously explored the shift from tribal culture to democracy in the script for Il padre selvaggio (The Savage Father, 1962), an unrealized fi lm on the relationship between a young African and a Western teacher during decolonization.6 Pasolini had been interested in Africa and the Third World at least as early as his penning of the poem “Frammento alla morte” (Fragment to death) in 1961, as Giovanna Trento, among others, has documented.7 In it, he presents the continent as an alternative space to the Western world (“Africa! My only alternative”),

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where one can still find a lost human authenticity.8 These interests are obvious, too, in The Savage Father, The Anger (1963), and Appunti per un poema sul Terzo Mondo (Notes Toward a Poem on the Third World, 1968), the script on a project for a movie that was to be divided into five episodes dedicated to India, Africa, Arab countries, South America, and the black ghettos of the United States, respectively. Although we must credit Pasolini for being among the first in Italy to engage in a systematic reflection on neocolonialism, the postcolonial condition, and the self-determination of African peoples, his approach to these topics— inspired especially by Jean-Paul Sartre’s anthropological universalism—is not free of problematic contradictions.9 The opening credits of Notes Toward an African Orestes roll over the fi xed image of the volume of Pasolini’s translation of the Oresteia next to a map of Africa, foreshadowing an inherently insuperable antithesis between rational culture (Greek logos) and irrational nature. However, in the very next image, the spectators are not shown the parallel presaged by that didactic image. We instead see a superimposition: the reflection of a blurry face over a shop window. For three seconds, we are left wondering in front of a spectral figure (figure 6.1). When we finally hear Pasolini’s voice, we are able to anchor it to the author’s reflected body in a process analogous to the shot reverse shot formation, a literal acoustic mirroring: “I reflect myself with the movie camera in a shop window in an African city.”10 Like the window, the author’s voice acts as a mirror, which shows us what is in front of the video camera and what is behind it at the same time. Pasolini is not present in his film in the passive position of observer, as Alessia Ricciardi argues.11 The film is not a documentary. Rather, Notes Toward an African Orestes is an essay film, a cinematic notebook in which Pasolini’s presence becomes performative. As Donatella Maraschin writes, the image of the director on screen assumes the value of a subject performing within the film.12 However, as Luca Caminati points out, it is his voice, with its spectral autonomy, that suggests the “direct and self-reflexive participation of the author” in the film.13 Pasolini’s voice is not synchronous with his body but superimposed on it. The director’s lips don’t move. His voice is literally a voice over a body. We are thus called upon to experience a separation of gaze and voice, which corresponds to the author’s double position as observer and commentator in the film. The authorial voice also problematizes the work’s aesthetic status and genre:14 “Obviously I have come to shoot something, but what? Not a documentary, not a film—I have come to shoot notes for a film.”15 The inability to

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figure 6.1. The author’s reflection in an African shop window. Source: Image from Appunti per un’Orestiade africana (Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1970). Courtesy of IDI Cinematografica, I Film dell’Orso, RAI.

define the fi lm’s genre, which can be placed in a liminal zone, is in my view another strategic manifestation of the poetics of the author as a living protest. Starting with the exhibitionist impulse of the reflection in the window, Pasolini aims to undermine conventions and frustrate audience expectations through constant stylistic subversion. Only from this perspective is it possible to understand the “style without style” that the author’s voice mentions regarding Notes Toward an African Orestes—a negative style that redefines impotence or apparent stylistic failure as a form of strategic resistance against the homogenizing system of mass culture. Through the initial mirroring, in Notes Toward an African Orestes Pasolini declares from the start his poetics of performative self-exposure, superimposing Africa and author on a spectral space of interpenetration. The vision of contemporary Africa that emerges from the fi lm-to-be is not impersonal; it has no pretense to objectivity. On the contrary, it reflects (literally) the author and his poetics, his interests, his ideology, and his ideas.16 Pasolini had used his own reflection in Calderón, too: “Perhaps, also reflected / with me

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is the author.”17 However, in the play the author addresses the public only through the medium of the Speaker, whose function I discussed in chapter 1. In Notes Toward an African Orestes, the author’s voice, with its Barthesian “grain”18 that evokes the materiality of the body, speaks to us directly. According to Kaja Silverman’s categories, Pasolini’s vocal presence in Notes Toward an African Orestes can challenge the notion of the disembodied voice that “speaks from a position of superior knowledge, and . . . superimposes itself onto the diegesis.”19 For Silverman, such a voice exemplifies the position of the male subject of classic cinema, who sees without being seen and speaks from an inaccessible vantage point. The metafictional quality of this voice is sometimes stressed by vocal characteristics that evoke the director himself, as in the case of Orson Welles in The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), where the voice of the behind-the-scenes narrator and the authorial persona merge through a verbal signature. At the end of the credits, we discover that the voice we have been hearing throughout the fi lm belongs to the director: “I wrote and directed [this film]; my name is Orson Welles.” In Notes Toward an African Orestes, Pasolini’s voice introduces the film’s director, yet it is unlike Silverman’s concept of the disembodied voice. Pasolini instead exposes his face to the gaze of the cinematic apparatus and the viewing subject. The author’s voice emanates from the center of the film, not from a different time and space. Pasolini’s vocal performance is thus an unconventionally embodied voice-over that “designates not only psychological but diegetic interiority.”20 I would argue that the author’s voice functions as the suture stitching together the radical contradictions at the center of the film. Among these contradictions, there is the incongruence between the voice and the body of Africa. The alleged protagonists of the fi lm, the African people, are never asked anything about democracy or the Western world: they are just bodies, faces and profiles, possible embodiments of Greek characters, completely deprived of any individual or collective voice. This presentation of them is of course in open contradiction with Pasolini’s claim that “the great protagonist” of his fi lm is the people. The men and women of Uganda and Tanzania are muted, subalterns who cannot speak. Despite the film’s anticolonial intentions, its voice is that of the author—male, white, Western, representative of a country with a shameful colonial past—speaking for and about Africa. According to Keith Richards, this is one of the main limitations of Pasolini’s anticolonialism: his Western paternalism deprives the subaltern of a legitimate voice.21

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We should consider Pasolini’s only attempt to give Africa a voice from this perspective. He interviewed a group of African students at the University of Rome after showing them a rough cut of the film in the making. The African students, all of whom are young, male, middle class, and polyglot, certainly do not represent or speak for the majority of African people. Theirs is the voice of the young African intellectual, and their exchange with Pasolini functions as the debate between audience and author that Pasolini describes in “Manifesto for a New Theater.” When the students show resistance toward his ideas about Africa and the analogy with Greek tragedy, forcing Pasolini to recognize these problems, the director challenges their understanding of tribalism and national identity. Manuele Gragnolati is right to argue that Pasolini problematizes his own project by including the African students’ crucial perspective and presents a nondialectical image of two different worlds.22 At the same time, as Maurizio Viano points out, Pasolini’s debate with the students protects him from the accusation of ethnocentrism and cultural colonialism,23 as does his self-reflexive, vocal presence as an author. However, it is not Pasolini’s presence as a fi lmmaker that produces this effect; we see only his back during the debate scene. It is rather his voice, skeptical, argumentative, and perplexed, that represents his on-screen persona: the vocal performance exposes the author completely to our judgment, without sparing us the contradictions that have no possibility of syntheses. This aspect of Notes Toward an African Orestes highlights the fact that so far I have concentrated on the image of the author and the spectacular use Pasolini made of that image in his work but have not discussed in depth the problem of voice. The use Pasolini made of his voice, whether symbolic or actual, has never been the object of study. Giacomo Manzoli, in a volume devoted to voice and silence in Pasolini’s cinema,24 does not raise this issue at all. Pasolini, however, was fully aware of the importance of voice. “The cinema isn’t pure image; it is an audiovisual technique in which word and sound have the same importance as the image,” he once stated.25 But what happens when the sound is the voice of the author? In its cinematic incursions, Pasolini’s voice takes on many functions. It is his real voice when he presents himself as author, as in the documentaries and film experiments I have been discussing here. It is a dubbed voice when Pasolini plays a character within a fictional narrative, as in the case of Giotto’s pupil and Chaucer. What is the difference between these two voices? Is it possible that dubbing constitutes a performance of authorship? And what happens when the author’s voice becomes silent?

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D ubbing and Au thorship Dubbing is not a random aesthetic element in Pasolini’s work; to the contrary, he often uses it with antinaturalistic, estranging effects, enacting specific practices of authorial control. The voice is part of his creative process, and he treats it exactly like a manipulable image. As Pasolini recalled in a conversation with Jean Duflot, “I like to develop a voice, combine it with all the other elements of a physiognomy, a certain behavior . . . to mix.”26 In his conceptualization of dubbing, Pasolini seems to refer to the “stylistic magma” in his poetry that he also applied to the cinema.27 I hypothesize that even when Pasolini chose a voice other than his own for the characters he played, the author’s voice can still be heard through dubbing, which represents an additional aspect of his performance.28 A salient example of the performative value of dubbing can be found in Oedipus Rex (1967), in which for the first time in his career Pasolini played a fictional character on screen: the minor part of the high priest. Corinth is afflicted by plague because of Oedipus’s unconscious crimes, so the high priest turns to the king on the community’s behalf and begs him to come up with a solution. Unlike Tiresias, whose blindness does not impede his knowledge of reality, the high priest cannot see that Oedipus’s presence is itself the cause of the plague: “Oedipus, our King, we all implore you on our knees: find us a remedy, no matter which, whether it is suggested to you by a god or by a man like us.”29 This monologue, the longest in the fi lm, is spoken by someone with a southern Italian accent—clearly not Pasolini’s voice, although it is his face the audience sees wearing a magnificent shell headdress in the close-up. The separation between the acoustic and corporeal dimensions is underlined by the final upward camera movement, which isolates the voice, creating an uncanny voice-over effect, a sign of the authorial presence. In an interview in Cahiers du Cinéma in 1967, Pasolini explained the two reasons behind his decision to play the role: “The first because, at the time, I hadn’t found anyone appropriate. The second, because this sentence is the first in Sophocles’s text (the tragedy begins with it), and I liked the idea of introducing Sophocles myself, as the author, within my film.”30 Two significant points emerge from Pasolini’s statement: he wished to be associated, as the author of the film, with the first words of the text (just as in Notes Toward an African Orestes it is his words and not Aeschylus’s that introduce the film); and he is also aware of the value that his on-screen presence brings to the audience’s viewing and interpretation of the scene. So even before his authorial

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performances in The Trilogy of Life, Pasolini experimented with the superimposition of roles between himself, the character he is playing, and the author whose work he is adapting—in this case, Sophocles. To determine the effectiveness of this strategy, we can think through the reception of Pasolini’s authorial performance in Daoud Aoulad-Syad’s film Fi ntidhar Pasolini (Waiting for Pasolini, 2007), which makes explicit reference to Oedipus Rex. Aoulad-Syad’s film, which was the winner of the Best Arab Film Award at the Cairo International Festival, is an example of the “social-realist style” that, according to Valérie K. Orlando, characterizes contemporary Moroccan cinematography.31 It is set in a small, poor Moroccan village near Ouarzazate, where Pasolini shot most of Oedipus Rex in 1966, using the barren terracotta-colored landscape of the desert border and the intense faces of the Maghreb to create his imaginary and barbaric ancient Greece.32 Ouarzazate had become an important center for international film productions following Morocco’s independence from France in 1956; the cost of labor and extras were low, and the stunning scenery and dreamy casbahs provided the perfect backdrop for Hollywood films such as Lawrence of Arabia (1962) and endless swordand-sandal and Bible films. Waiting for Pasolini opens with the protagonist, an older man named Thami, excited to hear that an important Italian film is going to be produced in his village. As a boy, he had worked as Pasolini’s personal assistant during the Oedipus Rex shoot, and he is certain that his friend will finally be coming back. After meeting Pasolini, Thami had come to venerate the Italian director, whom he sees as “a Communist intellectual committed to the plight of the poor” as well as one of the last representatives of a cinema of ideas that no longer has a place in the world. Therefore, when an old friend who had worked with him on the set of Oedipus Rex tells Thami that Pasolini had been killed more than thirty years earlier, Thami is shocked. Despite this knowledge, he returns to the village and tells the members of the community that Pasolini is coming back to direct the new Italian film and that, just as he did forty years earlier with Oedipus Rex, he will hire everybody and bring wealth to the entire village without exploiting them. The reason Thami lies, he confesses at one point, is that he wants them “to believe in something.” His deception ultimately allows the director to set a complex performative mechanism into motion, so that Pasolini’s impossible arrival becomes a metaphor for an inert Third World passively waiting for the West to send support and hope. The tragic and absurd quality of the metaphor is underlined by the titular reference to Samuel Beckett’s play Waiting for

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figure 6.2. Pasolini playing the high priest. Source: Image from Edipo re (Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1967). Courtesy of Arco Film, Somafi.

Godot (1952), in which the two protagonists wait for someone who never comes. Just as Oedipus brought the plague to Thebes after giving the illusion of having liberated the city from the Sphinx, when the Italian film crew suddenly informs the villagers that production has been suspended, despair—like a plague—falls over the village. This is the moment in which Waiting for Pasolini begins to engage metacinematographically with the Pasolini’s highpriest scene in Oedipus Rex (figure 6.2). Waiting for Pasolini evokes this scene three times, until the scene assumes a pivotal role in the film’s narrative. The first time, Thami is looking at photographs of the production of Oedipus Rex. Pasolini is wearing the high priest’s headdress, and all we hear is the high priest’s monologue, which Aoulad-Syad turned into an uncanny voiceover. In Thami’s mind, however, what we hear is not a dubbed voice, but Pasolini’s own voice, the vocal performance of the fi lm’s author, with whom he engages in a dramatic conversation. The second time, Thami is with some friends at the local barbershop, where the high priest’s monologue scene is being shown on a small TV set. As they watch it, they try to identify the extras: one spectator is almost brought to tears by the sight of his dead father, and another recognizes his former lover. Just as Thami doesn’t differentiate between Pasolini and the character of the high priest, what the others see are not the people of Thebes, but their own community. The third time we see

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figure 6.3. Thami playing Pasolini’s role in Edipo re. Source: Image from Fi ntidhar Pasolini (Waiting for Pasolini, Daoud Aoulad-Syad, 2007). Courtesy of Films du Sud, Soread-2M, Vidéorama.

the scene in question is after the truth about Pasolini’s death has been revealed. Turning the cinematographic fiction into real life, Thami mimics Pasolini’s performance and, like the high priest, addresses the Italian production company that has brought catastrophe to the village. Donning the headdress (figure 6.3), Thami reenacts the scene that, by this point, we have already encountered twice: first as voice, then as image, then as actual embodiment. Followed by the people of Ouarzazate, Thami walks solemnly toward the Italians, who are standing on a set of stairs as Oedipus (Franco Citti) did in the original scene. In broken Italian, he delivers a slightly modified version of the original monologue. Thami has become, in Frantz Fanon’s terms, a native intellectual who feels the need “to compose the sentence which expresses the heart of the people and to become mouth-piece of a new reality in action.”33 So this scene shows how difficult it can be for the postcolonial subject to overcome the Oedipal complex in relation to Western culture. At the same time, it delivers a precise reading of the original scene, revealing the function of Pasolini’s authorial voice in Oedipus Rex. Thami’s performance suggests that, notwithstanding the dubbing, Pasolini had in fact established a connection between his authorial figure and the character of the high priest. Specifically, he presented the impotence of the traditional or organic intellectual, understood as the community’s represen-

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tative and moral guide. If Pasolini gave voice to Sophocles in his film, Thami reveals through the priest’s words that the person speaking in Oedipus Rex is symbolically speaking in the voice of Pasolini the author. The remake of the scene, in short, shows that for Aoulad-Syad, Pasolini the actor and Pasolini the author, despite the dubbing, cannot be distinguished. Dubbing, even when used against Pasolini’s own actual voice, is a way of performing a poetics in which the author’s identity and story occupy a central role. Indeed, we mustn’t forget that Oedipus Rex is also “a sort of autobiography, yet completely metaphorical and therefore mythologized,”34 a film in which the author literally depicts his own birth and childhood, narrated in the first frames showing Thebes, which is not a reconstruction of the Greek city but a transposition of Sacile in Friuli, Pasolini’s home town, in the 1920s. Dubbing in this film has thus the same artistic function as the use of “wide-angle distortion.”35 This confluence can be seen in the fact that the character of the messenger, played by Ninetto Davoli, is dubbed in the early scenes set in Corinth but later uses his own voice, with its unmistakable Roman accent, in the part of the film set between present-day Bologna (the city Pasolini associates with his intellectual formation) and the reinvented Sacile. This shift from a dubbed to a real voice shows how dubbing, far from being void of significance, is in fact also a necessary component of Pasolini’s authorial performance within the mythic, poetic, southern space of Oedipus’s story.

Live Voice The voice of the author, any author, always speaks where one wouldn’t expect it, through projections, alter egos, and characters. Such is the case in theater and literature. However, this voice can also be consciously presented as an authorial voice and address the reader directly. This is what happens, for example, in Petrolio or whenever Pasolini guides the reading of his works within them or even when he uses strategies external to the work, such as the selfreview. A less-common occurrence is the direct interpellation of the cinematic spectator. One of Pasolini’s “old loves,”36 Alfred Hitchcock, is an example of such a direct interpellation; he often personally presented, at times in silhouette form, the episodes of his acclaimed television show Alfred Hitchcock Presents. Hitchcock also shared with Pasolini the tendency to insert himself into his own movies through fleeting cameos, which, however, never break into the diegetic level. “The sole purpose of such apparitions,” as Thomas Leach,

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has written, “is to be recognized.”37 Pasolini, too, organizes a discourse of cinematic spectatorship that depends on the spectator’s recognition of the author and the latter’s desire to be recognized through his self-projections. He does so not only by playing characters such as the high priest, Giotto’s pupil, and Chaucer but also, well before Notes Toward an African Orestes, where we saw the authorial voice occupying a leading role, by using his own voice at the beginning of The Ricotta, which provides a truly unique example of direct interpellation. In this short fi lm from 1964, which I analyzed previously in terms of the caricature-portrait of the author through the director played by Orson Welles, it is possible to hear Pasolini’s voice. Referring to the silent-fi lm tradition of introducing the film with a note that frames the story, in The Ricotta Pasolini addresses the audience in his own voice, reading a text of an apparently cautionary nature, given the film’s delicate theme: “It isn’t hard to imagine that there will be concerned, ambivalent, scandalized responses to this story of mine. Yet I want to declare here that, however you take The Ricotta, for me, the story of the Passion, which The Ricotta indirectly evokes, is the greatest that has ever happened, and the texts that tell it, the most sublime ever written.”38 Given the fi lm’s lengthy legal battle against censorship, it is clear that this warning, far from producing its desired effect, may have actually helped to attract those scandalized responses.39 Yet if we consider The Ricotta as Pasolini’s first attempt to address the issue of his unpopular authorship in the society of the spectacle, through the device of metacinematic representation, we can find an alternative way of reading this text and see Pasolini’s use of his own voice as a true authorial performance. According to this reading, what matters is not so much the content of the notice, its literal message, but the fact that it is the fi rst time Pasolini introduced the author’s presence in the work by means of his voice. The author’s voice is the first element of the film that the audience comes into contact with. With the lights in the theater still down, before any image appears, a seemingly bodiless voice introduces us to the mystery of the created work, following a demiurgic model—perhaps too easily—that evokes the “authoritative Voice-of-God commentary,” wherein the author’s voice presumes to exercise epistemic authority over the audience.40 This is the kind of disembodied voice-over that Silverman discusses, referring to Welles’s film The Magnificent Ambersons,41 a reference that shouldn’t seem incidental for The Ricotta, considering that the famous American director plays the role of the director in Pasolini’s film.

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We can find a more complex example of the epistemic authority of the author’s voice in La sequenza del fiore di carta (The Sequence of the Paper Flower, 1969), the shortest of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s cinematic works, which has only rarely attracted critical attention. The lack of interest in this highly unusual cinematic object—technically imperfect and ambiguous—perhaps lies in the difficulty of framing it within Pasolini’s body of work. It evolved in a period of frenetic activity in the late 1960s as the short (less than eleven minutes) third episode in the collective film Amore e rabbia (Love and Anger), which premiered at the Nineteenth Berlin Film Festival in 1969. Pasolini shot his episode in color in 1968, a few months before he made Notes Toward an African Orestes, in which, as we have seen, his vocal performance constitutes an essential element of the “film-to-be.” Love and Anger, a collaboration among Carlo Lizzani, Bernardo Bertolucci, Jean-Luc Godard, Marco Bellocchio, and Pasolini was initially supposed to be called Vangelo ’70 (Gospel ’70) because, as Pasolini explained to Jon Halliday in 1968, it was going to be inspired by “parables or other passages from the Gospels.” 42 In reality, only Lizzani’s L’indifferenza (Indifference), a bitter reflection on the parable of the Good Samaritan, and Bertolucci’s Agonia (Agony)—which, like Pasolini’s short, was inspired by the parable of the barren fig tree—refer explicitly to episodes of the Gospel. Bellocchio’s episode in particular entirely falls outside the evangelical theme and was added at the last minute to replace Valerio Zurlini’s contribution, which he turned into an autonomous film, Seduto sulla destra (Seated on His Right or Black Jesus, 1968). This change created the need for a new title for Vangelo ’70 and led to the elimination of the opening titles, which had been filmed by Pasolini “as a meeting in a TV room (with a large Christ on the cross, sacrilegious, on the table) of the film’s directors.” 43 However heterogeneous in their stylistic and conceptual approaches, all five directors took the genre of short film as an opportunity for radical experimentation. John David Rhodes has even suggested that in Pasolini’s case The Sequence of the Paper Flower is “the closest Pasolini ever came to making an avant-garde film.” 44 I would argue that this assessment is justified not simply by the density the film acquires from stylistic pastiche but also—as in the case of his other film projects from that period—by a radical experimentalism that is due primarily to its metalinguistic and reflective nature, which is signaled by the presence of Pasolini’s voice. In this regard, I consider The Sequence of the Paper Flower another example of Pasolini’s subjective, essayistic cinema, the main subject of which is his own cinema. For the purposes of my analysis,

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then, let us listen to the director himself, who provides for Halliday an accurate description of this short film, which was originally entitled Il fico innocente (The Innocent Fig Tree), and an interpretation of its overall significance: For my episode, I chose the innocent fig. . . . [I]f you recall, Christ wants to pick some figs, but it’s March, and so the tree has not yet borne fruit, and Christ curses it. To me, this episode has always seemed very mysterious, and there have been many contradictory interpretations. The way that I interpreted it is more or less the following: there are moments in history when one cannot remain unaware: we must be aware, and being such does not amount to guilt. That’s why I have Ninetto walking down Via Nazionale, and as he walks without a care in the world, oblivious to everything, images flash on the screen, superimposed over Via Nazionale, of some of the important and dangerous things that are happening in the world: things that he, in fact, is not aware of, like the Vietnam War, relations between East and West, and so on. They’re just shadows passing over him, of which he is ignorant. Then at a certain point he hears the voice of God, amid the noise of the traffic, which spurs him to learn, to become aware. But, like the fig in the Gospel, the boy doesn’t understand because he is immature and innocent, and so in the end God condemns him and has him die.45

Despite Pasolini’s explanation, which is concentrated on the axis of meaning, the choice to use the technical term sequenza (sequence) in the film’s new title suggests a metalinguistic reading of Ninetto’s walk down Via Nazionale. It is perhaps symptomatic that the term parabola (parable) defi nes fi lm language in Pasolini’s essay “The ‘Cinema of Poetry.’ ” 46 This language, according to Pasolini, is based on the existence of a “hypothetical system of visual signs” that enable it to be read, just as we visually interpret our everyday reality. As an example of this interaction between subject and environment, Pasolini gives the image of a figure “walking down the street alone.” 47 Ninetto’s walk, which constitutes the longest sequence shot Pasolini ever made, seems to supports the aforementioned idea that “life itself, in the total sum of its actions, is a natural and living cinema,” 48 a cinema conceptualized as an “endless, continuous sequence shot.” 49 The confirmation that Pasolini shot his Love and Anger episode as an experiment to test his theories of film semiotics can be found in a text he wrote in 1967 called “Essere è naturale?” (Is being natural?). At the beginning of the essay, in order to postulate the identification of film and reality, Pasolini

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describes an example that is very important for understanding The Sequence of the Paper Flower: “In a film, there is a frame of a young man with curly black hair, black, laughing eyes, a face spotted with acne, a slightly swollen throat, as if from hyperthyroid, and a jovial, comic expression that emanates from his entire body. Might this film image refer to a social pact composed of symbols, as the cinema would be if defi ned by analogy as langue? Yes, it refers to this social pact, which, not being symbolic, is not distinguishable from reality— i.e., from the real flesh and blood Ninetto Davoli reproduced in that frame.”50 As Marco Antonio Bazzocchi has observed, “Ninetto the character is never separate from the real Ninetto” in Pasolini’s work, so that the boy’s body coincides with “the body of Reality.”51 Pasolini had a fetishistic love for the latter, which he expresses through the consecration or violent desecration of things.52 The long sequence shot that makes up the backbone of The Sequence of the Paper Flower thus represents what Pasolini calls the “naturalistic moment” of the cinematic story, the temporal flow of reality and life that must be synthesized and surpassed through montage. Ninetto’s death at the end of the film, beyond the metaphorical sense related to the parable of the cursed fig tree, also assumes metalinguistic significance in its ties to Pasolini’s theory of death as montage. The action of human life, just like a long sequence shot, lacks unity and sense so long as it is not concluded: “Death performs an instant montage of our life.”53 Ninetto has to die in order to allow the shift from the infinity of cinema to the expressive and poetic synthesis of the film. This point is suggested precisely by the author’s voice-over in the sequence, which Pasolini radicalizes by inserting his own voice among a kaleidoscopic montage of different voices, including the voices of author-friends such as Elsa Morante and Bernardo Bertolucci. In the film, this vocal montage represents the voice of God addressing Ninetto, ordering him to “know and want”—that is, to make himself aware of the violence of history that is literally looming in front of him, through a montage of superimposed sequences in black and white showing wars, protests, and massacres. However, it is Pasolini’s voice—and thus the voice of the film’s author—that utters the final words to the boy, announcing the need for him to “die, die, die.”54 The film ends, in fact, with the young man falling lifeless to the ground. This voice of God perfectly encapsulates the bodiless voice-over that Pasolini had undermined in Notes Toward an African Orestes through the reflection of his image at the beginning of the film. The open, embryonic, and dialectic nature of the fi lm to be made didn’t allow the author to enact the authorial

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synthesis that constitutes the passage from cinema to film. In The Sequence of the Paper Flower, however, the author’s vocal performance sharply confirms his total control over the sequence, conceived metalinguistically in terms of a demonstration in nuce of Pasolini’s theory of death as montage. Furthermore, the soundtrack, which alternates between meaningless fragments of dialogue, ambient noise, the roar of bombs, and an airy twist composed by Gianni Fusco, also reinforces the importance of sound for a metalinguistic interpretation of the film. In particular, the voice of God is introduced by the last piece in Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, “Wir Setzen uns mit Tränen nieder,” which Pasolini had already used in Accattone (1961) and The Gospel According to Saint Matthew (1964). In addition to indicating the mannerist penchant for self-citation that characterizes his cinema, this piece serves to weld the evangelical theme to the theme of the world of the outcasts while also introducing what Pasolini called, in reference to Accattone, the “death motif.”55 Ninetto’s death is thus already inscribed in the film even before its conclusion, so it must be understood both as the inevitable fate of the innocents and as the authorial need to shift from the “living natural cinema” of life to film. Bazzocchi’s idea of Ninetto as a liminal figure “at the limit between different places of reality”56 must then be reformulated in intertextual and metalinguistic terms. Not only is the boy in the film called “Riccetto,” like the protagonist of The Ragazzi, but Bach’s music connects him to other films (one inspired by the world of the Roman subproletariat, the other by the Gospel), so that the multiple levels of reality represented in Pasolini’s work intersect and converge in the body of Ninetto. In short, Ninetto is the bodily surface on which we can metalinguistically read the idea of cinema as the depositary of “the written language of reality,” which is a language, Pasolini writes, “composed especially of narrative, poetic, and documentary texts.”57

Silent Tr ansgression The last example of Pasolini’s voice in his cinema comes from his experiments between investigation and documentary, for which the director speaks on screen and enters into direct contact with his audience, especially in the form of the interview, as in Comizi d’amore (Love Meetings), which was made in 1963, the same year as The Ricotta and The Anger. For Love Meetings, Pasolini set out to cross Italy from North to South, like “a sort of traveling salesman,”58 to discover what Italians thought about topics such as sexual liberation,

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divorce, prostitution, and homosexuality. Like the author-directors of the various documentaries about sex made in the early 1960s, from Ugo Gregoretti to Enzo Biagi and Alberto Caldana to Virgilio Sabel,59 Pasolini took as his model the cinema verité, particularly as it was practiced by Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin in Chronique d’un été (Chronicle of a Summer, 1961). Rouch and Morin experimented with synchronized sound in their film, gathering responses from French people of different generations to an apparently simple question: “How do you live?” In the middle of Chronicle of a Summer, they show the interviewees the material they have shot up to that moment and record their reactions, which aren’t always positive and call the filmmakers’ own theoretical premises into question. Pasolini, of course, used this documentary as a model in Notes Toward an African Orestes, when he interviewed the African students. He was surely fascinated not just by Chronicle’s metafilmic aspect, the mise-en-scène of the process of the fi lm’s creation and editing, but also by the fact that Rouch and Morin did not try to hide their presence: they expose themselves in the very first frame. From a certain point of view, the verité of their experiment lies not in the form but in the declaration of the impossibility of a truth that falls outside the perspective of a subject. As Viano has pointed out, in Love Meetings “Pasolini embraced Morin’s and Rouch’s suggestion that the only possible documentary truth was one that included the filmmaker’s presence.” 60 In 1977, two years after Pasolini’s death, Michel Foucault published a review of Love Meetings in Le Monde. He described his general impression of Pasolini’s performances as an interviewer and a director: “The adults speak interrupting one another, and they go on at length; the young speak quickly and overlap. Pasolini the interviewer fades away: Pasolini the director looks on, all ears. The document cannot be appreciated if one is more interested in what is being said than in the mystery of what is not uttered.” 61 Foucault grasps that the true significance of Love Meetings lies not in what is said—which conforms to the social conventions the interviewees believe they need to respect— but in what is generally kept silent, what is covered up due to conformism, shame, or hypocrisy. At the same time, he reveals an interesting doubling: the interviewer-Pasolini, who in Foucault’s view makes himself invisible at the interviewees’ performance, and the director-Pasolini, who instead limits himself to observing what is taking place before him. It is important to note that this doubling is manifested especially through Pasolini’s voice—or, rather, in the dialectic between Pasolini’s interviewing voice, regardless of whether he is in the frame or not, and his disembodied,

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directorial voice, which from off screen comments on people’s responses and reactions. Contrary to Foucault’s observation, Pasolini the director certainly does not disappear or limit himself to observing what appears before him. The inaccuracy of Foucault’s reading leads me to suppose that the French subtitled version kept him from fully grasping the double register of the interviewer’s voice and his frequent manipulation of the interviewees and the audience. Notably, Pasolini, despite his inclination toward dubbing, understood that the fi lm would not be able to transcend Italian borders for linguistic reasons because “it would present huge translation problems: dialect accents and wordplay would be lost; also, it would be impossible to dub, and the subtitles would make it too cold. Anyone who doesn’t know Italian well wouldn’t be able to understand the meaning.” 62 And this difficulty in understanding is due not only to the language barrier but also to the intrinsic untranslatability of voice, with its tones, its grains, its subtleties. So Pasolini does not fade away in Love Meetings. On the contrary, as Miguel Andrés Malagreda has written, “in the fi lm’s interviews the viewer is confronted continually with the presence of Pasolini by his repetitive insistence on certain questions.” 63 It is the voice, in short, that makes Pasolini a constant presence throughout the first half of the film. Signaling the prominence of his presence, the interviewer-Pasolini provides prompts (“Yes, that’s it: I think things haven’t changed much”); reformulates responses when the interviewee seems inconsistent (“But earlier you said that you wished you could be free like a boy”); confirms the statements that conform to his own thinking (“bravo” or “right”); asks the interviewees to discuss and clarify their responses (“Why?” “Does it seem right to you that it’s that way or not?”); and is willing to make comments off screen about responses that displease him (“There is none so deaf as he who will not hear”).64 But Pasolini’s interaction with the interviewees suddenly ceases in the second part of the documentary, which is dedicated to Italy’s relationship with homosexuality. At this point, the model of Rouch and Morin’s new visual anthropology is replaced by a model that Malagreda aptly calls “(auto)ethnographic.” 65 The film’s object no longer seems to be Italian society but rather the author himself. Pasolini’s inquiry took place long before the birth of the gay rights movement. Homosexuality was classified as a sociopathic personality disorder by  the international scientific community until 1973 and was included as such in the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Nonetheless, many have accused Pasolini of suffering from an “internalized homophobia,” 66 and, indeed, in Love Meetings he care-

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fully avoids using the terms homosexual and homosexuality, employing instead an array of synonyms: inverts, sexual abnormalities, anomalies, sexual inversion, sexual irregularities, sexual perversions.67 His interviewees respond to such prompts with negative words including gross, repulsive, disgust, pity, repugnance, and horror. The term schifo (gross, nasty, filthy), for example, is used six times in just a couple of minutes. Paradoxically, in all of Love Meetings, these judgments are perhaps the only completely sincere ones expressed by the interviewees. The nonchalance with which everyone condemns homosexuality in front of Pasolini even while describing prostitutes and their clients as “clever” and approving of legal brothels makes one suppose that few of the interviewees were aware of his sexual orientation—despite his rising fame and especially despite the fact that his sexuality had already motivated harsh attacks against him in the media. In one striking case, for instance, Pasolini interviews a young man at a discotheque who, after stating his own disgust for “inverts,” seeks Pasolini’s approval: “That’s right, isn’t it?” 68 In his volume on the history of queer cinema, Thomas Waugh recalls that in 1960s Italy “gays were entirely invisible, including queer Pasolini himself,”69 meaning not just that homosexuals were closeted but that they were not even legible; they were invisible according to dominant social codes. The people answering Pasolini’s questions could not even conceive of the idea that a public figure might be homosexual, especially if he were not obviously “effeminate.” For the heteronormative ideology that characterized (and in large part still characterizes) Italian society, sexual difference, insofar as it is aberrant and shameful, cannot be anything but hidden. In Love Meetings, Pasolini’s voice, then, disassociates his authorial body from his desiring body.70 It is difficult not to be uncomfortable watching Pasolini get swept up in and bombarded with judgments (even insults) that must have affected him deeply, and the viewer’s discomfort is made more acute still by the fact that in this portion of the film Pasolini no longer comments on the interviewees’ responses. He no longer tries to get people to clarify the reasons behind their opinions. The viewer’s discomfort is not, as some might argue, a sign of the author’s internalized homophobia but instead the result of Pasolini’s silent but calculated and functional critique of conformist, heteronormative thought. Foucault’s sense of the interviewer fading away is actually the fading of the sexualized subject, who loses vocal control over his own interviews. Pasolini strategically neutralizes his own presence to encourage the interviewees to share their negative judgments on the “abnormal”: “Have you ever heard of those terrible things that

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are sexual abnormalities?” he asks them.71 For example, he does this when he interviews a young woman at a Milan dance hall: Pasolini: Listen, if at some point you get married and have children, your children could be one of those people. girl: Ah . . . let’s hope not. Pasolini : Let’s hope not, I sincerely wish that for you, but nonetheless it’s important to know about certain problems in any case, so they can be faced, don’t you think?72

Pasolini’s insistent questioning of why his interviewees think what they do is replaced by a rhetoric of silence—more specifically, by the silencing of his true opinion and his true self. This might look like a model case for Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s study Epistemology of the Closet, in which the scholar defines a separate homosexual space that is constructed by a complex network of knowledge and articulation, ignorance and silence.73 But Pasolini’s silence about himself fulfills a rather different function. Pasolini’s silence in Love Meetings should be understood not as a performance of internalized homophobia but as a subtle and subversive queer intervention that anticipates the more militant and strategic use of homosexual desire in The Trilogy of Life. His vocal passivity in the second half of Love Meetings is more akin to Judith Butler’s claim that the formation of heterosexual identity takes place through the melancholic refusal of homosexual desire.74 Exposing himself as a homosexual subject to the indirect judgment of his interviewees, Pasolini reveals unfiltered the homophobic violence of 1960s Italian society. As Derek Duncan writes in one of the most brilliant contributions on the issue of homosexuality in Pasolini, we must also consider the possibility that an internalized homophobic discourse “might have provided Pasolini with a language for talking about a subject that otherwise was silenced.”75 A language, I would say, expressed by silence. As Pasolini stated in his last public interview, “To scandalize is a right.”76 And an author understood as a living protest scandalizes with his mere presence. Pasolini explains this idea in his brief interview with Giuseppe Ungaretti—at the time one of the most famous living Italian poets—which he inserted into Love Meetings just before the questions turned to the topic of homosexuality:

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Pasolini : Ungaretti, in your opinion, do sexual normality and abnormality exist? Ungaretti : Eh . . . listen, every man is made in a different way . . . so all men are abnormal in their own way . . . Pasolini : Would it be indiscreet of me to ask you to say something about the norm, the transgression of norms, in your private, personal experience? Ungaretti : Well . . . personally, what can I say, personally I’m a man, I’m a poet . . . so to start I transgress all laws by making poetry.77

Ungaretti’s response—that every man is abnormal and every poet a transgressor of the norm—publicly legitimizes Pasolini’s performance of authorship and his homosexuality, despite the opinions of the people in the subsequent interviews. In Love Meetings, with a queer performance as effective as it is silent, Pasolini establishes a direct link between the transgression that is homosexuality and the continual transgressor that is the author, for the first time denouncing homophobia in Italian society.

Epilogue Body

I n 1972, a s Pa solini wa s filming Ar abian Night s , he started to write a novel that he intended to be “a sort of ‘summa’ ” of all his experiences and memories.1 Three years later, during an interview, he called the novel his “final work” and claimed that the project would keep him busy for several years or even for the rest of his life. He did not know, of course, that his life was about to be abruptly ended, along with the many different projects on which he was still working, including a film on the life of Saint Paul—“a double biography, of Paul the apostle and of Pier Paolo the artist.”2 At the time of his death, Pasolini had written 521 out of the 2,000 pages that he envisioned for his novel. Divided into 133 numbered appunti, or notes, the unfinished manuscript was published under the title Petrolio (Oil) in 1992. The book provoked an intense debate among scholars and reopened all sorts of conspiracy theories about Pasolini’s brutal assassination, which some claimed was motivated by the link he drew between politics, the Mafia, and economic power in his book.3

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Petrolio is indeed a large, cracked fresco of Italy’s shady political and economic scheming and corruption, painted through the convoluted story of Carlo Vallecchi, a left-wing Catholic engineer working for ENI, the Italian state-controlled multinational oil and gas company founded in 1953. At the beginning of the novel, overwhelmed by an unspecified anguish, Carlo sees, as in a vision, his body falling from a terrace. Two mysterious angel–devil figures, Polis and Tetis, then contend for Carlo’s corpse. They eventually revive him and split him into two identical figures. The first, Polis’s Carlo or Carlo I, is a ruthless businessman focused entirely on advancing his power at ENI. He makes strategic alliances with the Christian Democrats, the Mafia, and the neofascists and eventually travels to the Middle East in search of oil, following the steps of Jason and the Argonauts in their search for the Golden Fleece as well as ENI’s establishment of joint ventures with crude-oil producers, such as Iran. Tetis’s Carlo, Carlo II or Karl, is a sort of sex addict. He seduces his own mother, his grandmother, and his three sisters and then, having temporarily become a woman, has sex with twenty boys in a field. Petrolio follows the two Carlos, establishing a parallel between the development and expansion of ENI’s economic and political power, on the one hand, and the transformation of neocapitalist Italy, on the other.4 In the opening “Project Note,” dated spring 1973, Pasolini writes that the book “should be presented in the form of a critical edition of an unpublished text” (ix). This statement links Petrolio to Divine Mimesis, although it was only at a later stage in the latter’s development that Pasolini decided to publish it as an unfinished text, as I showed earlier. In contrast, Pasolini conceived of Petrolio from the start as structurally unfinished—that is, as a “programmatic set of draft s,” to use Carla Benedetti’s formula.5 Pasolini’s passing then made Petrolio truly unfinished and incomplete twice over. Because death deprived the author of the chance to perform the final montage of his work, the text that we read today is the highly problematic 1992 edition curated by Aurelio Roncaglia, who decided to publish all the notes and preparatory materials in strict chronological order. Roncaglia based his philological approach to Petrolio on the “Editor’s Note” that Pasolini wrote for the 1967 version of Divine Mimesis. “I am limiting myself to publishing everything the author has left. My only critical effort, which, anyway, is very modest, is reconstructing the chronological sequence of these notes as precisely as possible.” 6 Roncaglia thus basically takes on the role of Pasolini’s fictional editor. In his note to his philological edition he claims that it was not an arbitrary choice to transpose this editorial principle “from Divine

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Mimesis—where it represents a sort of appendix—to the case, in fact more pertinent, of Petrolio.”7 However, as I showed in chapter 2, Roncaglia’s choice is actually not pertinent at all because Pasolini discarded the fictitious editor in the final, published version of Divine Mimesis and expressed instead his authorial presence through a careful montage, which is not chronological in the least. In fact, he even included the original “Editor’s Note” with the modified title “For an ‘Editor’s Note’ ” to show that it also represented just one of many subsequently abandoned ideas. So Roncaglia essentially ignored the importance that Pasolini attributed to the unconventional authorial performance of textual montage and thus dismissed the possibility that Petrolio could feature an alternative temporality—that is, a temporality that challenges the linearity of narrative time—just as Divine Mimesis had done. During an interview by Lorenzo Mondo in January 1975, Pasolini described Petrolio as his final, encyclopedic authorial performance. “It contains . . . everything I know, it will be my last work.”8 I would argue that Petrolio, as a final, testamentary work, also represents a concentrated example of the metalinguistic interdisciplinary work that Pasolini was experimenting with in the last phase of his career through endless reworking and rewriting as well as a close-knit web of intertextual and transtextual references. Petrolio is indeed a work of works, which are strategically incorporated, appropriated, quoted, and remade. Its “architectural body” (535), which Franco Fortini compares to Antoni Gaudì’s uncompleted church the Sagrada Familia,9 should be considered a scale model of the larger architectural body of Pasolini’s entire oeuvre as well as the final stage of his performative authorial practice.

M ultiplication Pasolini’s ambivalence about what Petrolio’s genre should be—the book is alternatively called a “novel” and a “poem”—is among the elements that allow a comparison between that work and the author’s interdisciplinary corpus. According to the “Project Note,” the final version of Petrolio was to be characterized by an even more radical hybridism through the inclusion of a wide range of materials: letters from the author, letters from friends to the author, oral testimony reported in newspapers or elsewhere, songs, illustrations, historical documents, and even rare cinematographic documentaries (ix–x). Furthermore, some of the episodes would be narrated in the form of “visions.”

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On the one hand, the term vision refers to the allegorical tradition, of which Dante’s Comedy is one of the most illustrious examples; on the other, it suggests the interpolation of writing and cinema. For example, the long series of “notes” entitled “Il Merda” (The Shit), from the name of the young man who takes a walk with his fiancée on Via di Torpignattara, is entirely conceived as a film sequence, or vision: At the start of the Vision these two young people are passing the traffic light at the intersection of Via Casilina and Via di Torpignattara. Carlo, the one who is watching, observes them coming /toward/ him: in fact, he is in the middle of Via di Torpignattara, on a cart with cork wheels, exactly like a director on a dolly. And since the two Protagonists of the Vision are, as I have said, coming toward him, the cart is being pulled backward along Via di Torpignattara at the same very slow rate at which they more forward, so that the distance of the point of view is always the same. To turn again to film jargon, there is a long, slow backward tracking shot. (283)

The use of fi lm jargon suggests approaching Petrolio as an interdisciplinary and highly intertextual work and as a possible model and key to the interpretation of Pasolini’s entire late body of work. In The Empty Cage, a study dedicated to the problem of authorship in modern culture, Carla Benedetti maintains that intertextuality “confirms the lack of relevance of the creating subject, and thus the eclipse of the author”—that is, his Barthesian death.10 However, Pasolini’s entire oeuvre, in particular Petrolio, demonstrates that intertextuality does not at all kill the author. Intertexuality, transtextuality, and multimediality—all contribute in his case to shaping and reinforcing the idea of an author in control of the creative process, who can establish precise interpretative paths connecting his various works. In Petrolio, for example, the narrator, who is “omniscient and also somewhat pedantic” (458), addresses the readers directly and even advises them to go back to some of the previous notes: “It’s not without some pride that I recommend these internal references to my work. What I wished to do is realized precisely by creating and explaining the work in terms of itself, even literally” (459). According to this passage, intertextuality is part of the author’s performance within a work that metalinguistically feeds on itself. But what is the relationship of this omniscient narrator and the author of Petrolio?

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Petrolio’s fragmentary and stylistically uneven nature seems partially linked to the author’s identity, which, according to the “Project Note,” is “an unresolved philological problem” (ix) that the readers must solve by putting together all kinds of authorial signatures. As the narrator clarifies in “Note 42,” Petrolio “is not a poem about dissociation. . . . On the contrary, this poem is a poem of obsession with identity and, at the same time, its destruction” (150). Carlo is the embodiment of this idea. While his senseless body is split into two different and at the same time identical characters, he is also simultaneously looking at the scene: “he saw his own body fall. . . . Carlo observed his own body lying supine at his feet . . . /And now/ Carlo sees two beings arrive beside that supine body. . . . Carlo sees that the body lying on the ground, deprived of this senses, is also beginning to come alive again, as a newborn” (5–6, 9). Therefore, Carlo is three in one and one in three. Something similar can be said about the author, who assumes a triune position within the text. On the one hand, as Stefano Agosti argues in one of the most brilliant analyses of Petrolio, the calculated, fragmentary, and unfinished nature of the novel is a symbolic inscription of the author’s dead body in the text.11 On the other hand, the author is simultaneously an omnipresent narrator and a living presence because of his fragmentary self-projections in a multiplicity of characters, including Carlo. In “Note 4”—significantly titled “What Is a Novel?”—we are told that Carlo is also the name of the narrator’s father: “Carlo is my father’s name. I choose it for the protagonist of this novel for an illogical reason: in fact, between my father and this ‘split’ engineer \ technician \ whose story I am preparing to tell there is no possible comparison” (20). The reader familiar with Pasolini’s biography and oeuvre—that is to say, the ideal reader whom Pasolini has trained in work after work—will immediately realize that the description of the narrator’s father (an army officer from an aristocratic family, an adherent of fascism, and a volunteer for the Libyan war, with a temperamental and despotic nature) corresponds to Carlo Alberto Pasolini. The narrator, one should assume, is thus Pasolini himself. Carlo is indeed his age (“he’s my age, not my father’s” [21]), and they both graduated from the University of Bologna. The comparisons between Pasolini and Carlo disseminated throughout the novel suggest that the protagonist is a partial authorial self-projection. At the same time, the reader can fi nd textual traces of the author multiplied in several other characters, including in the note entitled “A Discovery at Porta Portese,” which tells the story of a Venetian literary man who fi nds a “suitcase full of

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books” on a stall at the famous Roman flea market. The books, which constitute a sort of travel library, are meticulously described: Shklovsky’s Sterna i teoriya romana . . . , a cheap edition of Dostoyevsky’s The Possessed: completely underlined.  .  .  . The Brothers Karamazov, much less thoroughly underlined . . . . Then an edition, also a cheap one, of the Divine Comedy, in which there was only one mark: a big corner of the page where Canto XXIX of Purgatory began was turned down. Whereas the pages on Dante (and also those on de Sade) in a little French volume, L’Écriture ed l’expérience des limites, by Philippe Sollers, were heavily underlined. There followed, in no order, all of Swift, all of Hobbes, all of Pound. Very heavily underlined and even annotated was all of Propp. Next to Propp, . . . was Apollonious Rhodious, The Argonauts. And Ferenczi’s Thalassa. There was Plato’s Republic and Aristotle’s Politics . . . Schreber’s Memoirs of a Neuropath and Strindberg’s Inferno. The presence of Roberto Longhi right there in the middle aroused his curiosity: Piero della Francesca . . . . In the center of the suitcase, as if in a “place of honor,” were the following five books: Don Quixote, Tristram Shandy, Dead Souls, Ulysses, and Finnegans Wake. (72–73)

The reader immediately realizes that the suitcase belonged to a nameless left ist intellectual who was previously introduced in “Note 6.” As the man was traveling on a train to Rome, someone stole his suitcase along with an identical suitcase belonging to another passenger. According to Renato Nisticò, the presence of a list of books in a literary work provokes the effect of mise-en-abyme concerning the cultural identity of the character who owns the volumes.12 Such a character, in our very peculiar case, corresponds to Petrolio’s author. The books contained in the suitcase are indeed the same ones on which Pasolini builds the structure of the novel, often through direct quotations.13 If Pasolini is the suitcase’s owner, it is clear that the author enters the novel through others besides Carlo. The author is thus an autonomous figure present throughout the narrative structure. He is, for instance, alluded to in a note describing a guest attending the dinner party of Mrs. F, “similar to the ‘Governoress,’ Julia Mikhailovna of The Possessed” (94), which is, not surprisingly, one of the books discovered in the suitcase: Another intellectual . . . was in another corner of the room, far more timid and so more aggressive; his aggressiveness—mixed with the natural

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sweetness, almost gentleness of his character—seemed part of a role he had been forced to accept. He did not seem to feel at all at ease; if anything, he seemed to feel he had been placed there by his stormy reputation. He looked like an adolescent, thin and pale, with almost exotic cheekbones and bewildered chestnut-brown eyes. An obscene sensuality dripped from his body, which was nevertheless ascetically and rigidly devoted to a completely intellectual adventure, like his older friend’s; his socks, besides, were short and his clothes a little too flashy. (102)

Once again, through this cameo, carved out of recurrent—and rarely flattering—physical and moral descriptions of Pasolini by the press, the author plays with his own image. Pasolini actually demands that we recognize him to be just another character in Mrs. F.’s sitting room, standing a few steps from Carlo, the protagonist of the story that he is writing.

I ncorpor ation The connection between authorship and Petrolio’s fragmentary nature suggests a parallel with a different work of art, which can help to elucidate Petrolio’s performative significance. In 1923, on their way to an art gallery, some workers accidentally dropped the crate they were transporting. It contained a delicate artwork made of two glass panels. When the author of the piece realized that a crack in the glass caused by the accident could not be repaired, he decided to declare the piece permanently unfinished—and show it anyway. In doing so, he implicitly made it an artwork that was posthumous even before his death. The artist, of course, was Marcel Duchamp, and his permanently unfinished work was the celebrated La mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, meme (The bride stripped bare by her bachelors, even), often called The Large Glass. In this piece, which Octavio Paz called a “negation of the modern notion of work of art,”14 Duchamp sandwiched several geometric shapes, connected together to create the appearance of a mechanical apparatus, between two large glass panels. It represents a closed system of scattered and unrelated materials, a bachelor machine that produces nothing but the work itself. This “theoretical apparatus,” as Rosalind Krauss calls it,15 lies at the core of the Duchamp’s oeuvre. Similarly, Petrolio, which Pasolini alternatively calls a “self-sufficient and pointless construction” (129) and a book that refers “to nothing other than

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itself alone” (29), was meant to be the summa of his work. In fact, Pasolini created a metaphorical crack on the surface of Petrolio when he conceived of it as unfinished. His choice formed the paradoxical figure of a living, posthumous author. Furthermore, like Duchamp’s bachelor machine, Petrolio stages the enigmatic epic of human desire, embodied by Carlo II and his impetuous and uncontrollable sexuality. The link between Duchamp’s Dada aesthetics and the perverse dynamics of desire seems to have developed in Pasolini’s mind during the making of Salò (1975), which he conceived while he was working on the novel. In an interview by Gian Luigi Rotondi, Pasolini recalled that he initially wanted to title the movie Dadà, “with in mind also dudù (canto / quel motivetto che mi piace tanto / e che fa dadà, dadà, da-dàda-dà!).”16 Pasolini’s reference to a popular song from 1932, whose original refrain (“du-du, du-du, du-du, du-du, du du du”) he modified to match the name of the avant-garde movement, is in line with Dada’s desecrating and absurdist attitude. Accordingly, in Salò, as writer Mario Soldati aptly noticed, “everything suddenly vacillates and feels unreal and unbelievable,”17 a pointless and sterile misquotation and repetition that mimic the dynamic of the four libertines’ desire: Curval: The principle of all greatness on earth has long been totally bathed in blood. And, my friends, if my memory does not betray me . . . Yes, that’s it: “without bloodshed there is no forgiveness . . . ” “without bloodshed . . . ” Baudelaire . . . Durcet: Your Excellency, the expression is not from Baudelaire. It’s from Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals. Curval: No, it’s neither Baudelaire nor Nietzsche. Nor is it from Saint Paul’s “Letter to the Romans.” C’est du Dada. Blangis: Sing me that sweet melody that I love so much. That goes “dadà, dadà, da-dà-da-dà!”18

The phrase is indeed Saint Paul’s, as Armando Maggi has demonstrated.19 However, this information does not reveal what is really at the core of this exchange between the libertines: the epic of desire common to both Petrolio and Salò. It is a mechanical desire, based on endless repetition, just as Petrolio progresses through citation, miscitation, and a montage of different materials. It is a sterile desire that can never be fully satisfied. This sterility is shockingly exemplified by the infamous scene in Salò’s during which the libertines use the bodies of their victims to create a sculpture from naked asses (which,

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as Alessia Ricciardi has pointed out, we might read as disturbingly similar to the images of the prisoners tortured at Abu Ghraib 20). In a similar desubjectivation of the body, which is reduced to the mere sum of erogenous parts, the libertines decide to determine who among their young victims has the most attractive ass. When the winner is finally selected, Curval points a gun at the boy’s head. But he doesn’t kill him because, he explains, the act of killing— like desire—is enjoyable only in its theoretical endlessness: “Don’t you see, we want to kill you a thousand times, to the limits of eternity, if eternity could have limits?”21 In a similar way, writing and desire coincide in Petrolio because of their endlessness. The infinity of the text in particular is addressed in “Note 1,” a black page at the beginning of the manuscript that contains only a set of periods followed by a laconic footnote: “This novel does not begin” (2). According to Massimo Fusillo, Pasolini refused to write an incipit in order to subvert the conventions of fiction and to disrupt the premises of the narrative form.22 I would add that by considering the novel an open form (“The form is based only on what is not the form. And the exclusion of form is always planned, calculated” [274]), with no beginning and no end, Pasolini at the same time allowed for an osmosis between Petrolio and his previous oeuvre, which he considered to be an endless project coinciding with the author’s performance. Both Petrolio and The Large Glass are surfaces of authorial inscription and signature. The names of their authors, for instance, are literally inscribed in their titles. As Rosalind Krauss has noted, Duchamp’s own name can be found in the title of his work: MARiée . . . CÉLibataires. According to Krauss, “The Large Glass is a self-portrait in which the subject sees itself as doubled and split.”23 The same can be said also of Petrolio, given the importance played by doubling and subjective dissociation in the text. Even the novel’s title, when following the name of the author, seems to be the result of an amplifying alliteration: PiER PaOLO PasOLInI PEtROLIO. Remarkably, on the folder containing Petrolio’s manuscript, Pasolini penciled “PPP/P,” an abbreviation that suggests a similar doubling and splitting of the subject. This notation could be considered mere coincidence, except that the dispersal of the author’s name in his various works is indeed a part of Pasolini’s authorial performance. The name “Paolo,” in fact, crosses Pasolini’s corpus as an explicit authorial signature. For instance, the narrator of Atti impuri (Impure acts), an unfinished early novel in the form of a personal journal, is called Paolo. In the first draft of the novel Il sogno di una cosa (Dream of a thing), published posthumously in 1994 under the title Romàns, we find Father Paolo, a Catholic teacher tormented by

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his attraction to a young boy. The father in Theorem, also called Paolo, experiences a similar torment after encountering the beautiful and mysterious Visitor; this Paolo is—and we can truly hear Pasolini’s voice in this confession— “a petit bourgeois who dramatizes everything.”24 Instead of accepting his homosexual desire, he donates his factory to his workers and ends up naked in the desert, screaming. Another Paolo, of course, is found in Pasolini’s unrealized fi lm about Saint Paul, which he wrote in May and June 1968 in the midst of the student protests. Although Pasolini did not find financing for his film, he did edit the screenplay in 1974 with the intention of turning it into a book. The text was published posthumously in 1977, and as Naomi Greene has argued, it “leaves no doubt that Pasolini views the father of the Church in a deeply autobiographical light.”25 The recurrence of Pasolini’s first name manifests his presence within a work even when he is wearing a fictional mask. As I have shown, in Petrolio, too, the author is disguised and dispersed among a multiplicity of characters. However, he also explicitly addresses the readers. In a letter to Alberto Moravia included in the Petrolio manuscript, Pasolini precisely describes the function of his authorial performance in the novel: In a novel the narrator usually disappears, giving way to a conventional figure who alone can have a real relationship with the reader—real precisely because it’s conventional . . . . Now, in these pages I address the reader directly and not conventionally. That means that I have not made my novel an “object,” a “form,” thereby obeying the laws of a language that would secure for it the necessary distance from me, < . . . > almost to the point of abolishing myself, or through which I would generously negate myself, humbly putting on the garments of a narrator like all other narrators. No: I have spoken to the reader as myself, in flesh and bone, as I write you this letter or as I have often written my poems in Italian. I have made the novel an object between the reader and me. (xi–xii, ellipses with angle brackets in the original)

The letter is signed “Pier Paolo,” so that it is clear that subject and author are in this case the same. However, Pasolini does not simply state the coincidence of author and narrator in his novel. Speaking to the reader as oneself, “in flesh and bone,” means first and foremost affirming also that the author’s corporeal performance, his physical crossing of the text, as in the episode of Mrs. F’s party, is an essential part of the creative process. In fact, there is no dis-

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tance between the author’s body and the novel because even though the latter is an object that separates reader and author, it is transparent, just like the glass panel in Duchamp’s The Large Glass. The latter’s transparency produces a very peculiar relationship between artwork, author, and viewer; the work becomes what Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari call an “apparatus of capture,” entrapping the body and the real.26 The inner workings of this apparatus of capture are rather simple. When someone stands on one side of The Large Glass, the viewer on the other side will see the first viewer’s body as a completing part of the piece. As one might remember, a similar principle of incorporation of the spectator into the work is at the base of Pasolini’s theater as well. However, the same process can work with the author’s body, as the many photographic portraits of Duchamp behind The Large Glass attest (figure E.1). When I discussed the film version of Theorem (1968), I pointed out an identical situation with regard to Pietro’s painting on glass panels, which incorporate the body of the author at work. Pietro’s authorial performance becomes part of the work in parallel to what Pasolini was also attempting to do at the time. Petrolio, too, is characterized by the idea of transparency. The episode “The Shit,” for example, is constructed as if within a transparent architectural structure: “In this first section of the Vision we see the scene as a whole. It is fashioned entirely of light metal and other transparent and unbreakable materials, at least as regards the essential structures; but there are other materials, too, apparently crystal, alabaster, . . . perhaps even plastic. But although the materials are hard and rigid, they are all transparent” (282). More importantly, however, Petrolio can be considered a transparent bachelor machine because the author is always visible behind the writing, and it is impossible to discuss the first without also considering the latter. For this reason, the novel represents the most radical gesture in Pasolini’s theorization of the author. It ends the passage from the author’s body being present in the work—as in The Trilogy of Life—to the coincidence of the work with the author’s body and multiple performances. This description of the novel also clarifies the function and meaning of a series of photographs that Pasolini commissioned from Dino Pedriali in October 1975, just a few weeks before his death. Marco Belpoliti has reconstructed in detail the story of these images, which Pasolini never saw, using both Pedriali’s testimony and information provided by Barth David Schwartz in his biography of Pasolini. According to Belpoliti, Pedriali took seventyseven photographs of Pasolini in two locations: Sabaudia, where Pasolini

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figure e .1. Marcel Duchamp viewed behind his work The Large Glass (1923). Source: Photograph by Mark Kauffman. From the Life Images Collection, Getty Images.

shared a beach house with Alberto Moravia and Dacia Maraini, and Chia, a small village near Viterbo, where he had purchased and remodeled a medieval tower in 1970, which he used as a retreat while writing Petrolio. Most of Pedriali’s photographs are conventional, posed portraits of Pasolini at work in the tower, typing the manuscript that would become Heretical Empiricism, or obsessively drawing Roberto Longhi’s profile on large pieces of paper. The house had in fact a large studio space, in which Pasolini was planning to spend long periods of time to fully return to painting and drawing. However, one set of images stands out. They were taken at Chia and show a fift y-three-year-old Pasolini in various positions behind the large glass window of his bedroom. We see him undressing, reading a book while laying naked on his bed, and looking out of the window, behind which Pedriali pretended to hide. The window’s transparency makes it clear that we are part of an act of violation, whose strategic function is worth considering. Pasolini explained to Pedriali, at the time a young photographer, that these images were to be included in a long manuscript that he was writing and that no one was to know about them. According to Belpoliti’s reconstruction, Pasolini

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wanted to be photographed as if caught by surprise, naked, “as if he were . . . unaware of the photographer’s presence. However, he added, at some point he would have acted as if he had realized that there was a presence out there, someone who was secretly watching and taking pictures of him.”27 As I have previously mentioned, Pasolini conceived of Petrolio as an interdisciplinary work made of different materials, including “illustrations.” At one point, he considered calling it Vas, from the Latin word for “vase” or “vessel.” Walter Siti reads this title as a Dantesque reference to “vas d’elezione” (Inferno, II.28), which is in turn a reference to Saint Paul in Acts 9:15, “vas electionis” (chosen vessel).28 Giuseppe Zigaina, however, interprets the considered title in Jungian terms as the vase for an alchemic transformation.29 More simply, I understand the title Vas in its figurative value as evoking the image of a container, a form corresponding to the novel (“my decision . . . is not to write a story but to construct a form” [129]), which Pasolini intended to contain a mix of different materials—including Pedriali’s photographs. It is impossible to know if Pasolini would have used those images, but if he had, what theoretical effect would they have produced? According to W. J. T. Mitchell, photography is a paradoxical medium, at the same time linguistic and nonlinguistic; in the interaction of text and image, the two forms maintain their respective autonomy.30 However, in interpreting the possible significance of Pedriali’s photographs for Petrolio, some Italian scholars have disregarded the tension between text and image. Siti, for example, reductively claims that the photographs simply intensify the written portion of the book, as if they themselves were written material. He argues that this combination of text and image shows the authorial self to be heterogeneous, shattered.31 In this view, Pedriali’s nude photographs of the author are meant to provoke the fragmentation of Pasolini’s authorial self. Marco Antonio Bazzocchi has reached similar conclusions. He interprets the nude images of Pasolini as a Foucaldian exposition sui or exemologesis, a performative gesture through which the subject rejects and publicly dramatizes his past life to break away from his self. Bazzocchi refers to the passage in Foucault’s book Technologies of the Self that links exemologesis to Christian confession: “Ego non sum, ego . . . . It represents a break with one’s past identity. . . . Self-revelation is at the same time self-destruction.”32 Bazzocchi, however, misreads Foucault to argue that Pasolini’s display of his naked body is a confessional gesture, a way to distance himself from his past works in order to claim the truth of his present political discourse.33 In fact, for Foucault, the ostentatious gesture has the function of showing the truth of the state of being a sinner

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seeking penitence—hardly appropriate in the case of Pasolini. Although Pasolini did reject The Trilogy of Life, as Bazzocchi claims, he did not “regret having made it.”34 Furthermore, to affirm that Petrolio is a work of penitence that disowns all of Pasolini’s past works contradicts the author’s statement that the novel is a summa of all his experiences and knowledge. Nevertheless, Bazzocchi’s interpretation does raise intriguing questions about the performative aspect of Pasolini’s display because, as Stephen Barber argues, the human body is “itself a projection in performance.”35 By showing his nude body, then, Pasolini engaged in a performative act that, far from rejecting his authorial past, actually radically exposes the author’s present and presence. Pasolini’s nudity, then, is not a sign of his innocence, as Pedriali claimed in a conversation with Schwartz.36 On the contrary, it represents his shrewd strategy to be the kind of scandalous author he describes in “The Unpopular Cinema”—that is, an author who is a living protest and who “in the necessarily scandalous act of inventing exposes himself, literally[,] to others.”37 In his discussion of these images, Belpoliti touches on something rather important: Pasolini’s need to appropriate Pedriali’s work, turning simple commissioned portraiture into self-portraiture, as he did around the same time with the double self-portrait by Listri discussed in chapter 4. “These images,” Belpoliti writes, “are the extraordinary testimony of the way Pasolini saw himself (or wanted to be seen).”38 As I have previously noted, Pasolini’s performances as Giotto’s pupil and Chaucer correspond to a similar need to communicate a precise authorial image to his audience. What, then, makes Pedriali’s photographs so special? His images of Pasolini testify not simply to how Pasolini wanted to been seen, as Belpoliti claims, but also to that he wanted to be seen. In particular, it is the staged idea of a photograph taken in secret that implies the author’s desire to be seen. If Pasolini had included Pedriali’s photographs, Petrolio’s reader would have become a sort of spectator, taking part in a voyeuristic game triggered by the images. The situation is reminiscent of the plot of Michelangelo Antonioni’s film Blow-up (1966), when a photographer, having spied on a couple in a public park, discovers that one of the images he has taken also captured a murder on film. The photographer didn’t intend to witness the act, but he cannot but desire to keep looking at the images in order to discover whom they portray. Unlike the photographer in Antonioni’s film, of course, the readers of Petrolio have not taken any photographs. But we nevertheless feel we are witnessing something disturbing, something we are not meant to see. Despite this awareness, the author leads us to assume the position of the voyeur, the spy.

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In one of the very first notes in Petrolio, “Note 6 Bis,” entitled “The characters ‘who see,’ ” we discover that everything we—and thus the narrator—know about Carlo II’s disorderly sexual conduct and his movements is the result of a pact among some sinister and powerful unnamed characters: Our imaginary characters meet, then—this /is the essence/—in the apartment of one with the most authority (not an official but, so to speak, a /head assassin/). The object of their attention is Carlo. What they decide is to follow Carlo, to spy on him, and to take note of everything he does. Charged with this delicate mission is a young /catechumen/ just starting out, though already trusted (a young fellow, an honorable fellow). . . . Everything Carlo . . . does will be “as if seen” by this hit man who does not judge. (31)

Just as in The Decameron, where everything we see is fi ltered through the painter’s gaze (standing for the director’s), everything that Petrolio’s narrator reports about Carlo is “as if seen” by Pasquale, the “honorable fellow” or “picciotto” entrusted with the job of spying on and writing a report about him. However, on a train from Turin to Rome, someone steels the suitcase containing his “perfect report” (36) along with an identical suitcase full of books (the second suitcase, as I have discussed earlier, belongs to an unnamed left ist intellectual, a double of Petrolio’s author). Thanks to this theft, Pasquale has “to make some notes and then report the facts in /large part/ orally” (36). The narrator explains that this extemporaneity results in the “illegible” nature of Petrolio, which cannot but reflect Pasquale’s oral report. I would argue that Pedriali’s pictures function as a sort of visual documentation in the novel or, in Pasolini’s terms, a “figural integration” of Pasquale’s stakeout. On the one hand, the images of Pasolini confirm his partial selfprojection onto Carlo; on the other, they reinforce the idea of the reader as spy because the reader’s gaze identifies, via Pedriali’s camera, with Pasquale’s. To understand the position of the reader as spy in Petrolio, we might compare the book to Alfred Hitchcock’s film Rear Window (1954), which can also be connected with Salò’s last scene for its insistence on the scopic drive.39 Rear Window’s protagonist is a photographer who becomes an involuntary voyeur of his neighbors’ lives and witness to a crime. In “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Laura Mulvey maintains that the protagonist’s spying stands for “a metaphor of the act of film viewing itself,” 40 a representation of the audience’s

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scopic drive, the desire to see. The window behind which Pasolini asks to be photographed is also, as seen by a spy, a fantasy window, a surface that reflects, along with trees and lights, the reader’s desire. In his reading of Rear Window, Slavoj Žižek notes that “throughout most of the film, it is the logic of desire that predominates: this desire is fascinated, propelled, by its objectcause, the dark window opposite the court yard that gazes back at the subject.” 41 Similarly, in Petrolio the reader desires the naked author behind the window, who becomes a passive object of that reader’s gaze thanks to Pedriali’s photographs. According to this idea, Petrolio represents the ground on which Pasolini is finally able to meet Roland Barthes, after having worked to prove wrong Barthes’s theory of the death of the author. Of course, just a few years after proclaiming the author’s death, Barthes confessed in The Pleasure of the Text his desire for the return of this figure: “As institution, the author is dead: his person . . . has disappeared . . . but in the text, in a certain way, I desire the author.” 42 Barthes had already brought back the author in 1971, in the preface to Sade, Fourier, Loyola, which Pasolini mentions in the “bibliography” given at the beginning of Salò. “The Pleasure of the Text,” Barthes wrote, “also includes a friendly return of the author.” 43 What is interesting for this discussion is the fact that Barthes explains such a return as a “figuration,” by which he means “the way the erotic body appears in the profile of the text.” 44 The key term in the description of this authorial appearance is obviously erotic. According to Jane Gallop, “in our contemporary critical vocabulary we might want to call such a relation to the author queer; in the language of the 1973 Pleasure of the Text, we would call this anti-institutional, anti-normative erotic relation perverted, or perverse.” 45 Pasolini’s nude body in Pedriali’s photographs is not a textualized body but a (homo)sexualized body that establishes a perverted erotic relationship between viewer and author. So, like Carlo, who turns into a woman, while keeping a male personality, the author stages and performs a sort of inversion. However, it not a sexual but a queer inversion because his male, dominant position of organizer of textuality and meaning is theoretically turned into one of passivity, as if the viewer were in a position of control over him. In summary, with Petrolio Pasolini completes the discourse of authorship he started in The Trilogy of Life. This discourse depends on the reader’s desire for the author and the author’s desire to be seen through the self he projects. Through the allegedly planned inclusion of Pedriali’s photographs in the book, Pasolini performs his authorship as a Barthesian erotic encounter with

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the reader in which he fictitiously assumes a passive role, a queer position that perverts the conventional notion of the author as the powerful, male principle in control of the text, which indeed consists of only incomplete fragments. By performing this passivity, Pasolini underlines the reader’s role in the construction of his authorship, following a collaborative and intersubjective model. At the same time, he places the author’s body at the center of his work as a necessary element of creative practice. The author’s corporeality, as “the entity which pre-eminently spans conjoined art forms” and media,46 is the site of origin and intersection of an interdisciplinary body of work.

P rojec tion As the last notes of Petrolio were accumulating on a bare wooden table in the tower at Chia, just a few months before the end of his life, Pasolini publicly acknowledged his performative approach to authorship by taking part in his friend Fabio Mauri’s action Intellettuale (Intellectual), a performance piece of great length, akin to other performances of the 1970s by artists such as Marina Abramovic, Gina Pane, and Vito Acconci. On May 31, 1975, in the Galleria d’Arte Moderna in Bologna, Mauri projected Pasolini’s film The Gospel According to Saint Matthew (1964) directly onto its author’s body while he sat, wearing a white shirt, at the end of a dark room, facing the audience (figure E.3). According to Mauri, in this piece “author and work form a sculpture of flesh and light, a compact unity.” 47 Although Pasolini did not conceive of the performance, it speaks “directly to the entire corpus of Pasolini’s themes and concerns: body, realism, representation, etc.,” as Luca Caminati points out.48 So we should consider Intellectual as a final example of the kind of appropriation that I have shown to be at the core of Pasolini’s authorial practice. By participating in Mauri’s performance, Pasolini de facto incorporated it into his own oeuvre. Intellectual is a work by Pasolini on Pasolini, a performative manifestation of the “Velázquez effect” that I have often described in this book. In this performance, though, the author is not shown at work. What we see is his own work performing a series of theoretical operations literally on the author’s flesh-and-bone body. In this regard, Pasolini used Mauri’s idea to manifest the essence of his poetics of authorship: to be inside and outside of his own work. In Intellectual, his body is turned into a cinematographic body, a corporeal screen, which enables the vision of his own film and metonymically of his body of work. Using Stephen Barber’s words, I would suggest that

figure e .2. Mary projected onto Pasolini’s body in Fabio Mauri, Intellettuale (1975). Source: Photograph by Antonio Masotti. Courtesy of Stefano Masotti.

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figure e .3. Pasolini performing in Fabio Mauri’s performance piece Intellettuale (1975). Source: Photograph by Antonio Masotti. Courtesy of Stefano Masotti.

in Pasolini’s case “the amalgam of performance and fi lm forms the human body itself” 49—or, more radically, that the body of the author is conceived of in performative terms. At the same time, The Gospel According to Saint Matthew acquires new meaning from its contact with the authorial body as Pasolini becomes a character within the fi lm. The effect is extremely powerful when the audience recognizes his friends (Enzo Siciliano, Giorgio Agamben, Alfonso Gatto) in the role of the apostles and his mother in the role of Mary projected onto her son’s body (figure E.2). The identification between Christ—the persecuted revolutionary who died for his scandalous new ideas—and Pasolini becomes even clearer. However, by having the film projected onto his body, onto this corporeal screen, Pasolini is also affirming the centrality of the author’s performance in our experience of his work. Elisabetta Benassi developed this idea in the videos described at the start of this book, which suggest that Pasolini is somehow always accompanying us on our journey through his oeuvre. In 2007, Benassi created another piece dedicated to Pasolini, an installation that can be put into dialogue with Mauri’s performance piece in 1975.

figure e .4. Elisabetta Benassi, Alfa Romeo GT Veloce 1975–2007 (2007). Automobile with tail lights, headlights, and high beams on, transformer, electric cables. Installation Palazzo Farnese Rome, 2007. Source: Photograph by Claudio Abate. Courtesy of Unicredit Group Collection on long-term loan to MAXXI, Rome.

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Benassi placed a replica of Pasolini’s Alfa Romeo—the car that his killers used to run him over the night of his murder—into the dark basement of the Palazzo Farnese in Rome. For years, she had looked for a vehicle of the identical model and color. The installation’s title, Alfa Romeo GT Veloce (1975–2007), does not refer only to this specific car. It works, as she told fellow artist Maurizio Cattelan in an interview, as a “clump of imagination” around Pasolini’s figure.50 As a matter of fact, the dates in the title suggest that Pasolini’s car has been running since 1975. With its sidelights, headlights, and main beams on, the Alfa Romeo is the only source of light in the dark space (figure E.4). Benassi’s piece can easily be interpreted as an invitation to cast light on Pasolini’s death because his murder remains unsolved. However, she also implies that Pasolini has never really left the world, that he is still a disturbing presence of light and obscurity. He is a paradoxical presence made of absence. I would also argue that the dialectic of light and darkness evoked by Alfa Romeo GT Veloce (1975–2007) represents a form of cinema. Pasolini’s car is indeed a rudimentary sort of film projector, which directs light toward us, the spectators, projecting light onto us, making us part of the installation—just as, in Mauri’s performance, a film was screened onto the author’s body. In Benassi’s installation, the spectators become a collective corporeal screen, thus participating in the artwork. The dialogue between audience and author that Pasolini hoped to provoke is present in Benassi’s work, though in a spectral form. The lights, which blind us as we enter the dark space, project a void image, a white screen: the absence of the author. And yet it feels as if Pasolini, invisible inside his car, in a posthumous performance of the author were still staring at us, asking for our participation and our recognition.

Notes

I ntroduc tion: D eath 1.

Elisabetta Benassi, Timecode, 3'40", with Elisabetta Benassi and Davide Leonardi. Camera: Jacqueline Zünd (2002), videotape, Beta SO, PAL Colour Sound.

2.

P. Adam Sitney interprets Hawks and Sparrows as Pasolini’s palinode of cinematic neorealism. As such, the film is a manifestation of Pasolini’s desire to continue his artistic journey in a rather different direction (Vital Crisis in Italian Cinema: Iconography, Stylistics, Politics [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995], 15–26).

3.

See George Didi-Huberman, Survivance des lucioles (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 2009).

4.

See Gian Maria Annovi, “Pasolini zombie,” Alfabeta2, no. 2 (September 2010): 13.

5.

Pier Paolo Pasolini, “Osservazioni sul piano sequenza,” in Pier Paolo Pasolini, Saggi sulla letteratura e sull’arte, 2 vols., ed. Walter Siti and Silvia De Laude (Milan: Mondadori, 1999), 2:1560, my italics). Throughout this volume, translations are mine unless otherwise noted.

6.

For a very articulate analysis on the way Pasolini’s death became part of Italy’s collective imagination, see the remarkable article by Robert C. S. Gordon, “Identity

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in Mourning: The Role of the Intellectual and the Death of Pasolini,” Italian Quarterly 32, nos. 123–24 (1995): 61–74. 7.

See the following vaguely hagiographic volumes: Enzo Siciliano, Pasolini: A Biography (New York: Random House, 1982); Dario Bellezza, Morte di Pasolini (Milan: Mondadori, 1981); and Dario Bellezza, Il poeta assassinato: Una riflessione, un’ipotesi, una sfida sulla morte di Pier Paolo Pasolini (Venice: Marsilio, 1996). Pasolini’s cousin, the writer Nico Naldini, is the author of a sort of rather repetitive series of short biographies: Pasolini, una vita (Turin: Einaudi, 1989); Pier Paolo Pasolini: Vita attraverso le lettere (Turin: Einaudi, 1994); Mio cugino Pasolini (Brescia: Bietti, 2000); and Breve vita di Pasolini (Parma: Guanda, 2009). Although containing a few inaccuracies, Barth David Schwartz’s weighty volume Pasolini Requiem (New York: Pantheon Books, 1992) is still the most detailed Pasolini biography.

8.

In 2001, an article by the political journalist Filippo Ceccarelli published in La Stampa prompted a new wave of conspiracy theories about the alleged political reasons for Pasolini’s murder. Ceccarelli connected the political motivations behind the death of Enrico Mattei, head of the Italian multinational oil and gas company ENI, in a plane crash in 1962 to Pasolini’s death. In his unfi nished novel  Petrolio (Turin: Einaudi, 1992), Pasolini indeed intended—among other things—to denounce the political intrigue that surrounded ENI and Mattei’s successor, Eugenio Cefis, a member of the P2 Masonic lodge, who was implicated in numerous Italian crimes and mysteries and linked to Mafi a and neofascist groups. When Pino Pelosi, who in 1976 had been convicted with “unknown others” of being Pasolini’s killer, retracted his confession on live TV in 2005, Pasolini’s murder suddenly became the source of many investigative books, which include Mario Gelardi, Idroscalo 93: Morte di Pasolini (Naples: Guida, 2006); Enzo Catania, Giallo Pasolini (Origgio: Agar, 2007); Giuseppe Lo Bianco and Sandra Rizza, Profondo Nero: Pasolini, De Mauro, Mattei (Milan: Chiarelettere, 2009); Lucia Visca, Pier Paolo Pasolini: Una morte violenta. In diretta dalla scena del delitto, le verità nascoste su uno degli episodi più oscuri nella storia d’Italia (Rome: Castelvecchi, 2010); Carla Benedetti and Giovanni Giovannetti, Frocio e basta (Verona: Effige, 2012); Carlo Lucarelli, PPP: Pasolini, un segreto italiano (Milan: Rizzoli, 2015); David Grieco, La macchinazione: Pasolini la verità sulla morte (Milan: Rizzoli, 2015); and Simona Zecchi, Pasolini, massacro di un poeta (Milan: Ponte alle Grazie, 2015). Many TV programs are dedicated every year to Pasolini’s murder, and the mystery of his death has pervaded the cinematic imagination of many Italian and international film directors, from Nanni Moretti with Caro diario (1993) to Marco Tullio Giordana with Pasolini: Un delitto italiano (2005), possibly the most intelligent and successful film about Pasolini’s case (for the book on which

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this film is based, see Marco Tullio Giordana, Pasolini: Un delitto italiano [Milan: Mondadori, 1994]). Centered on the last few hours of Pasolini’s life are Julian Cole’s short film Ostia (1988), featuring the artist Derek Jarman in the role of the Italian poet and director; the rather disappointing film Nerolio (1996) by Aurelio Grimaldi; Abel Ferrara’s film Pasolini (2014); and David Grieco’s film La macchinazione (2016). The long list of documentary films on Pasolini includes Ivo Barnabò Micheli, A futura memoria: Pier Paolo Pasolini (1986); Pasquale Misuraca, Le ceneri di Pasolini (1994); Cyril Legann and Antoine Soltys, Vie et mort de Pier Paolo Pasolini (2004); Giuseppe Bertolucci, Pasolini prossimo nostro (2006); Roberta Torre, La notte quando è morto Pasolini (2009). Also of note is the short film by the Chilean artist Alfredo Jaar, The Ashes of Pasolini (2009). Quite remarkably, Pasolini’s death has also become the subject of graphic novels, such as Jean Dufaux and Massimo Rotundo, Pasolini: Pig! Pig! Pig! (Paris: Glenat, 1993); Gianluca Maconi, Il delitto Pasolini: Cronaca a fumetti (Padua: Becco Giallo, 2006); and Davide Toffolo, Pasolini (Bologna: Coconino Press, 2005). It has also been memorialized many times in music, with several songs by Italian musicians (including Fabrizio De Andrè’s “Amico fragile” and Francesco De Gregori’s “Lamento per la morte di Pasolini”) and just as many international homages, from “Ostia (The Death of Pasolini)” by the British band Coil to the series of photos that Patti Smith famously posed for after she spray-painted “Pasolini is alive” on a yellow wall. Smith, in particular, stated on multiple occasions that she considered Pasolini “like lots of rock stars, Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, or Bob Dylan,” a star artist who “fused diverse means of expression: politics, poetry, fi lm” (Patti Smith, “Ispirata da Pasolini,” Corriere della Sera, July 11, 1996). 9. On that myth, see Walter Siti, “Il mito Pasolini,” MicroMega 6 (2005): 135. 10. Aldo Rossi, “La divina mimesis e il dopo-Pasolini,” Paragone: Rivista Mensile di Arte Figurativa e Letteratura 27, no. 312 (1976): 145. 11. Walter Siti, “L’opera rimasta sola,” in Pier Paolo Pasolini, Tutte le poesie, 2 vols., ed. Walter Siti (Milan: Mondadori, 2003), 2:1942–43. 12. For a detailed summary of the statements related to the reopening of the Pasolini case, promoted first in 2005 and then in 2007 by the editorial staff of the journal Il Primo Amore with a collection of signatures, see http://www.pasolini.net /processi.htm. 13. Flaviano Pisanelli, “Pier Paolo Pasolini e Roland Barthes: Linguaggio, forma, immagine e realtà,” in Pier Paolo Pasolini: In Living Memory, ed. Ben Lawton and Maura Bergonzoni (Washington, D.C.: New Academia, 2009), 77–78. 14. See Viola Brisolin, Power and Subjectivity in the Late Work of Roland Barthes and Pier Paolo Pasolini (New York: Peter Lang, 2011).

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15. Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” Aspen 5–6 (1967), later published in French as “La mort de l’auteur,” Mantéia 5 (1968): 12–17. 16. Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” in Image-Music-Text (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 142. 17. See Carla Benedetti, The Empty Cage: Inquiry Into the Mysterious Disappearance of the Author (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005). I refer to the original Italian title of Benedetti’s book, L’ombra lunga dell’autore: Indagine su una figura cancellata (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1999). 18. Seàn Burke, The Death and Return of the Author: Criticism and Subjectivity in Barthes, Foucault, and Derrida (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1992), 9. 19. Benedetti, The Empty Cage, 11. 20. Carla Benedetti, Pasolini contro Calvino: Per una letteratura impura (Milan: Bollati Boringhieri, 1998), 15. 21. Joseph Francese, “Pasolini: Filologia, poesia, petrolio,” Moderna 9, no. 2 (2007): 155. 22. The writers of such obituaries include influential thinkers such as Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Paul De Man, Wayne Booth, and Maurice Blanchot. See Burke, Death and Return of the Author. 23. See Benjamin Widiss, Obscure Invitations: The Persistence of the Author in TwentiethCentury American Literature (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2011). 24. The transcript of Foucault’s talk at the conference held on February 22, 1969, with Lucien Goldmann, Jacques Lacan, and Jean Wahl, among others, in attendance, was published as Michel Foucault, “Qu’est-ce qu’un auteur?” Bulletin de la Société Française de Philosophie, no. 63 (July–September 1969): 73–104. 25. Michel Foucault, “What Is an Author?” in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. Donald F. Bouchard (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980), 124. 26. Pier Paolo Pasolini, radio interview by Achille Millo, September 20, 1967, transcript, Centro Studi—Archivio Pier Paolo Pasolini, Cineteca di Bologna. 27. Pier Paolo Pasolini, “Gennariello,” in Lutheran Letters, trans. Stuart Hood (New York: Carcaner Press, 1987), 17. 28. Pier Paolo Pasolini, “Incontro con Pasolini,” in Pier Paolo Pasolini, Per il cinema, 2 vols., ed. Walter Siti and Franco Zabagli (Milan: Mondadori, 2001), 2:2973. 29. Pier Paolo Pasolini, “The Unpopular Cinema,” in Heretical Empiricism, trans. Ben Lawton and Louise K. Barnett (Washington, D.C.: New Academia, 2005), 268 (translation modified). 30. Pier Paolo Pasolini, “Gli studenti di ‘Ombre rosse,’ ” in Pier Paolo Pasolini, Saggi sulla politica e sulla società, ed. Walter Siti and Silvia De Laude (Milan: Mondadori, 1999), 1159.

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31. “And I look for alliances that only have / in common, as a payback, or exchange, / diversity, meekness and powerless violence: / the Jews . . . the Blacks . . . every banned humanity” (Pier Paolo Pasolini, “La realtà,” in Tutte le poesie, 1:1116). 32. Pasolini, “The Unpopular Cinema,” 268. 33. Ibid. 34. Ibid., 274. 35. Vittorio Russo, “L’Abiura dalla ‘Trilogia della vita’ di Pier Paolo Pasolini,” MLN 108, no. 1 (1993): 140–51. 36. Interview on the set of Uccellacci e uccellini (Hawks and Sparrows), 1966, recording held at the video library of the Centro Studi—Archivio Pier Paolo Pasolini, Cineteca di Bologna. 37. Pasolini, “The Unpopular Cinema,” 274. 38. Pier Paolo Pasolini, “Guerra civile,” in Saggi sulla letteratura, 1:1439. 39. Pier Paolo Pasolini, “[Intervento al congresso del Partito radicale],” in Saggi sulla politica, 715. 40. Patrick Rumble, Allegories of Contamination: Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Trilogy of Life (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1995), 136. 41. Rinaldo Rinaldi, L’irriconoscibile Pasolini (Rovito: Marra, 1990), 38. 42. Donald E. Hall, Queer Theories (London: Palgrave McMillan, 2003), 13. On the connection between queer and movement, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick writes: “Queer is continuing moment, movement, motive—recurrent, eddying, troublant” (Tendencies [Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1993], xii). 43. Queer Nation, History Is a Weapon: The Queer Nation Manifesto (1990), http://www. historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/queernation.html. 44. Leo Bersani, “Is the Rectum a Grave?” in Is the Rectum a Grave? And Other Essays (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 3–30. See also Teresa de Lauretis, “Queer Theory: Lesbian and Gay Sexualities,” introduction to “Queer Theory: Lesbian and Gay Sexualities,” special issue of differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, ed. Teresa de Lauretis, 3, no. 2 (1991): iii–xvii. 45. Compare Jean Laplance, Life and Death in Psychoanalysis (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985). 46. Bersani, “Is the Rectum a Grave?” 30. Lee Edelman has identified in queerness “the place of the social order’s death drive,” and his futureless apocalyptical vision may have some points of contact with Pasolini’s late “apocalyptic lucidity,” as Alessia Ricciardi has it. However, Edelman’s antisocial agenda is in overt conflict with the political and social value that Pasolini attributes to the queer author he represents. Edelman believes that “the queer” stands for “the resistance, internal to the social, to every social structure or form” (No Future: Queer Theory

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and Death Drive [Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2004], 3–4). On the contrary, Pasolini—who was an unorthodox Marxist—never meant to criticize the social per se. His specific target was the social model imposed by neocapitalism. For Pasolini’s supposedly apocalyptic tone, see Alessia Ricciardi, “Pasolini for the Future,” California Italian Studies 2, no. 1 (2011), http://escholarship.org/uc /item/8v81z/3sg. For a remarkable discussion of the concept of apocalypse in Pasolini, see also Armando Maggi, The Resurrection of the Body: Pier Paolo Pasolini from Saint Paul to Sade (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2010). 47. Pier Paolo Pasolini, “My Ex-Life,” in The Selected Poetry of Pier Paolo Pasolini: A Bilingual Edition, trans. Stephen Sartarelli (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 113. 48. Martyrdom is another motif often associated with a homosexual aesthetic. Its presence in the history of art and literature can be easily traced through the figure of St. Sebastian. That Pasolini also had in mind the image of this saint when he conceived of the homosexual subject as an “exemplary sufferer,” to use Susan Sontag’s fortunate expression, is demonstrated by his drama Porcile (Pigsty) and its later film adaptation in 1969. The main character, Julian—whose sexual difference is symbolized by his erotic attraction to pigs, which end up devouring him—is described as a “mannerist St. Sebastian.” Painters—who reinvented the figure of St. Sebastian and made him into one of their privileged subjects starting in the sixteenth century—strongly contributed to the spread of the association between the idea of torment and youthful beauty in the popular imagination. In a novel by the Japanese writer Yukio Mishima, Confessions of a Mask (1949), the homosexual protagonist has his first ejaculation over a reproduction of one of many Sebastians painted by Guido Reni. The image of the saint pierced by arrows represents the need to punish a sexuality experienced with profound difficulty. Numerous homosexual writers have taken up the figure of St. Sebastian as martyr in their works, such as Proust (inspired by Mantegna); Thomas Mann, who during his Nobel Prize acceptance speech spoke about the “grace in suffering—that is, the heroism symbolized by St Sebastian”; and Oscar Wilde. Among the filmmakers, one should not forget Derek Jarman and his film Sebastiane (1976). 49. Pier Paolo Pasolini, “Le belle bandiere,” in Pier Paolo Pasolini, Le poesie, 2 vols., ed. Walter Siti and Silvia De Laude (Milan: Mondadori, 1998), 1:1179. 50. Manuele Gragnolati, Amor che move: Linguaggio del corpo e forma del desiderio in Dante, Pasolini e Morante (Milan: Saggiatore, 2013), 35–68.

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1. Theater 1.

Pier Paolo Pasolini, “The Unpopular Cinema,” in Heretical Empiricism, trans. Ben Lawton and Louise K. Barnett (Washington, D.C.: New Academia, 2005), 270.

2.

Ibid., 269.

3.

Pier Paolo Pasolini, Calderón (Milan: Garzanti, 1973), reprinted in Pier Paolo Pasolini, Teatro, ed. Walter Siti and Silvia De Laude (Milan: Mondadori, 2001), 659–758; subsequent citations refer to the reprint in Teatro.

4.

See Stefano Casi, Pasolini: Un’idea di teatro (Udine: Campanotto Editore, 1990). Casi’s study represents the first important contribution to the analysis of Pasolini’s theater. Two other works—Edi Liccioli’s La scena della parola: Teatro e poesia in Pier Paolo Pasolini (Florence: Le Lettere, 1997) and Franca Angelini’s Pasolini e lo spettacolo (Rome: Bulzoni, 2000)—are heavily indebted to Casi’s seminal volume, which he updated and expanded in 2005 as I teatri di Pasolini (Milan: Ubulibri, 2005).

5.

The Living Theatre’s Italian tour in 1964 is a pivotal event for Pasolini and Italian theater in general. In 1966, Pasolini attended with great interest some of the group’s shows during his first trip to New York. In an interesting article, Pieter Vanhove argues that “a period of intense collaboration” between Pasolini and the Living Theatre followed that trip. However, to support his claim Vanhove mentions only that Pasolini cast Julian Beck, the cofounder of the Living Theatre, for the role of Tiresias in his film Oedipus Rex (1967). Vanhove suggests that Pasolini’s progressive detachment from the Living Theatre’s aesthetics, culminating in “Manifesto for a New Theater,” was an effect of the events of 1968 (“Gray Mornings of Tolerance: Pasolini’s Calderón and the Living Theatre of New York (1966–1969),” Studi Pasoliniani 5 [2011]: 31–46). Contrary to Vanhove’s assumption, I do not consider the use of Beck—the embodiment of the Living Theatre—in Oedipus Rex as a specific sign of Pasolini’s participation or interest in the kind of aesthetics and physical theater represented by this American actor. On the contrary, I see it as Pasolini’s symbolic attempt to affirm his authorial aesthetics over the group’s antiauthorial approach by depriving Beck of all the traits that made him an ultimate representative of Gesture or Scream Theater. On the one hand, Pasolini subtracts Beck from the group dynamic that characterized the Living Theatre’s creative process and turns him into a prophet, “blind and lonely.” On the other, he deprives the actor almost entirely of movement and corporeality. In Oedipus Rex, Tiresias either sits like a statue, wearing an oversize, drapy tunic that hides his body entirely, or stands still. Pasolini symbolically cuts Beck’s body out of the frame through the use of close-ups, which diff use the importance of the actor’s physical performance and emphasize instead the relevance of the text

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he pronounces. Therefore, Pasolini is actually not “collaborating” with the cofounder of the Living Theatre but rather bending him to his own aesthetics. 6. The name “Nuovo Teatro” (New Theater) was given to a now famous conference in Ivrea in 1967, convened for the purpose of determining the characteristics of Italian avant-garde theater. The conference was anticipated by a special issue of the magazine Sipario, including a text entitled “Per un convegno sul Nuovo Teatro” (For a symposium on New Theater) that was signed by some of the main representatives of the Italian avant-garde theater, such as Leo de Berardinis, Carmelo Bene, and Carlo Quartucci. See William Van Watson, “The Contemporary Italian Theatre: An Historical Perspective,” in Pier Paolo Pasolini and the Theatre of the Word (Ann Arbor: Umi Research Press, 1989), 19–30. 7. Pier Paolo Pasolini, Manifesto for a New Theatre: Followed by Infabulation, trans. Thomas Simpson (Toronto, Calif.: Guernica, 2008), 8. 8. Alberto Moravia, “La chiacchiera a teatro,” Nuovi Argomenti 5 (1967): 3–21. Thomas Simpson translates the name “Teatro della Chiacchiera” as “Talk Theatre.” I have modified this translation and used the American spelling “theater.” Compare Pasolini, Manifesto for a New Theatre. 9. Pier Paolo Pasolini, “A teatro con Pasolini,” in Teatro, 347. 10. Pasolini, Manifesto for a New Theatre, 11. 11. Ibid., 8. 12. Pasolini, “The Unpopular Cinema,” 269. 13. For example, Lawrence Hooper writes about “the brief period of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s career between 1966 and 1969 when he dedicated a significant portion of his energy to the theater” (“ ‘Un estraneo in una terra ostile’: Exile and Engagement in Pasolini’s Verse Dramas,” Italica 89, no. 3 [2012]: 357). 14. For such stagings, see Stefano Casi, “Pasolini in scena,” in I teatri di Pasolini, 284–305. The most recent productions of Pasolini’s plays and theatrical adaptations of his work include Pylade, directed by Ivica Buljan (2015); Pocilga and Teorema, directed by John Romão in 2015 and 2014, respectively; and The 120 Days of Sodom, directed by Johann Kresnik in 2015. 15. Pier Paolo Pasolini, “[Intervento al congress del Partito radicale],” in Pier Paolo Pasolini, Saggi sulla politica e sulla società, ed. Walter Siti and Silvia De Laude (Milan: Mondadori, 1999), 715. 16. Pier Paolo Pasolini, “La rabbia prima poi la fiducia,” Il Giorno, December 8, 1968, reprinted in Teatro, 353. 17. Ibid. 18. Catherine Bell, Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 42.

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19. Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-structure (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), 95. 20. Pier Paolo Pasolini, “I cartelli della prima,” in Teatro, 316. 21. Michel Foucault, Le parole e le cose: Un’archeologia delle scienze umane (Milan: BUR, 1967). Foucault conceived of the essay “What Is an Author?” as a reevaluation of some aspects he underestimated in The Order of Things. He admits that while considering natural history, the analysis of wealth, and political economy in general terms, he “neglected a similar analysis of the author and his works” (“What Is an Author?” in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. Donald F. Bouchard [Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980], 113). 22. This aspect recalls the theme of the film The Ricotta, in which a director is making a film on the passion of Christ by reproducing Pontormo and Rosso Fiorentino’s works in cinematic tableaux vivants. See chapter 3. 23. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage, 1994), 4. 24. Pier Paolo Pasolini, “Esibizione di vitalità,” in Pier Paolo Pasolini, Tutte le poesie, 2 vols., ed. Walter Siti (Milan: Mondadori, 2003), 2:302. 25. Pasolini, Manifesto for a New Theatre, 28. 26. The conceptual importance of Las meninas in Pasolini’s play, as Armando Maggi has noted, is emphasized also in Giorgio Pressburger’s film adaptation of Calderón (1981), which received an Italian Golden Globe for best fi rst feature in 1983. Although Pressburger’s film embodies the idea of baroque conceptual and visual complexity that Pasolini wanted to achieve, Maggi points out, it also avoids “the ‘direct,’ ‘personal,’ even ‘corporeal,’ relationship” between actors, spectators, and author that Pasolini’s theater was meant to generate (“Calderón, Norman O. Brown, and the ‘Desengaño’ of the World,” Studi Pasoliniani 5 [2011]: 20). 27. Pier Paolo Pasolini to Franco Farolfi, June 1940, in Pier Paolo Pasolini, Lettere 1940–1954, ed. Nico Naldini (Turin: Einaudi, 1986), 5. 28. Pier Paolo Pasolini, “Cultura italiana e cultura europea a Weimar,” in Pier Paolo Pasolini, Saggi sulla letteratura e sull’arte, 2 vols., ed. Walter Siti and Silvia De Laude (Milan: Mondadori, 1999), 1:7. It is interesting to note that Pasolini’s recuperation of the Spanish artistic past is mediated by the quintessentially modernist authors Federico García Lorca and Pablo Picasso. García Lorca was shot and killed by Nationalist militia in 1936, the year Franco took control of Spain. Picasso, who painted his famous work Guernica the following year in response to the bombing of the Basque village by German and Italian warplanes, was regarded as an enemy of the Spanish regime as well. In 1937, his paintings were also included in the infamous Entartete Kunst (Degenerate art) exhibition held by

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the Nazis in Munich, and during the occupation of France several of his works were destroyed in a bonfire in Paris. In Italy, Picasso’s works were never shown during the Fascist ventennio, but in 1940 Carlo Bo translated and published a selection of García Lorca’s poems as well as the play Blood Wedding two years later. Pasolini was likely able to publish his positive remarks about the two artists only because after the spring of 1942 the editorial board of L’architrave —the official journal of the Bolognese Fascist University Groups—had assumed a critical position on Mussolini’s dictatorship and its isolationist cultural attitude. 29. By making Rosaura the figure who parallels Segismundo’s actions, Pasolini seems to share the theory of the British School of Calderonistas, which at the end of the 1960s proposed that Rosaura be regarded as a figure central to the work. See in particular the essays by E. M. Wilson, A. E. Sloman, and William M. Whitby in Bruce W. Wardropper, ed., Critical Essays on the Theater of Calderón (New York: New York University Press, 1965), 63–89, 90–100, 101–13. 30. Pasolini, Calderón, 666. 31. Ibid., 675. 32. Ibid., 680. 33. Foucault, The Order of Things, 20. 34. Maggi, “Calderón,” 21. 35. Pasolini, Calderón, 718. 36. Foucault, The Order of Things, 12. 37. Pasolini, Calderón, 680. 38. Ibid., 675. 39. Ibid., 672. 40. Roland Barthes, “Entretien avec Roland Barthes,” Cahiers du Cinéma 147 (1963): 20–30. The interview was translated in the first issue of the Italian journal Cinema and Film: Roland Barthes, “Cinema metaforico e cinema metonimico,” Cinema and Film 1, no. 1 (1966–1967): 9–14. 41. Pier Paolo Pasolini, “La fine dell’avanguardia,” in Saggi sulla letteratura, 1:1422–23. 42. Hervè Joubert-Laurencin, “Pasolini–Barthes: Engagement et suspension de sens,” Studi Pasoliniani 1 (2007): 55–67; Davide Luglio, “Pasolini e il ‘vaccino’ di Barthes,” in Pasolini e il teatro, ed. Stefano Casi, Angela Felice, and Gerardo Guccini (Venice: Marsilio, 2012), 230–42. 43. Pasolini, Manifesto for a New Theatre, 8. 44. Antonio Tricomi, “ ‘Lo so che è una mancanza di ingenuità, forse anche di amore,’ ” in Fratello selvaggio: Pier Paolo Pasolini tra gioventù e nuova gioventù, ed. Gian Maria Annovi (Massa: Transeuropa, 2012), 95–114. For a compelling analysis of the relationship between Pasolini and the youth movement (the ’68 Movement),

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see Simona Bondavalli, Fictions of Youth: Pier Paolo Pasolini, Adolescence, Fascism (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015). 45. Pier Paolo Pasolini, “Perché dicono che il mio Calderón non ha peso politico?,” Il Tempo, November 18, 1973, reprinted in Pasolini, Saggi sulla letteratura, 2:1931–36. 46. Michel Foucault, “Two Lectures on Power,” in Power/Knowledge, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon, 1980), 98. 47. Michel Foucault, “The Eye of Power,” in Power/Knowledge, 156. 48. Pasolini, Calderón, 752. 49. In an interview in 1968, Pasolini declared: “All the things that I couldn’t put in Uccellacci e uccellini I put in Terra vista dalla luna and Che cosa sono le nuvole?” (Pier Paolo Pasolini, “[Intervista rilasciata ad Adriano Aprà],” in Pier Paolo Pasolini, Per il cinema, 2 vols., ed. Walter Siti and Franco Zabagli [Milan: Mondadori, 2001], 2:2939). 50. Pier Paolo Pasolini, Che cosa sono le nuvole? in Per il cinema, 1:956, 959. 51. The song sung by Modugno, which he set to music based on lyrics by Pasolini, represents in itself a metanarrative because the lyrics are based on a series of quotations from Shakespeare’s play Othello (Hervè Joubert-Laurencin, Pasolini: Portrait du poète en cineaste [Paris: Diff usion Seuil, 1995], 117–18. 52. Maurizio Viano, A Certain Realism: Making Use of Pasolini’s Film Theory and Practice (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992), 171–72. 53. According to Marco Antonio Bazzocchi, the source of this scene in Paisà is an episode of Miguel de Cervantes’s novel Don Quixote (chapter 26), in which Master Peter puts on a puppet show for Don Quixote. The puppet show depicts a knight who goes to rescue his lady from foreign lands. Don Quixote becomes so convinced that the show is real that he attacks and destroys the entire set (I burattini filosofi: Pasolini dalla letteratura al cinema [Milan: Bruno Mondadori, 2007], 96–97). I would argue, however, that if Cervantes is certainly the model for Rossellini, the latter is most likely Pasolini’s inspiration. 54. Pier Paolo Pasolini, “The Written Language of Reality,” in Heretical Empiricism, 204. 55. From a TV interview, December 10, 1967, quoted in Viano, A Certain Realism, 162. 56. As Bazzocchi aptly argues in one of the most detailed analyses of the film, this scene refers to the beginning of Carlo Collodi’s novel The Adventures of Pinocchio (1881–1883) (I burattini filosofi, 88–89; cf. Joubert-Laurencin, Pasolini, 121). 57. Smandolinate was to star the Ninetto–Totò duo that was in Le avventure del Re magio randagio, a project that evolved into the more complex yet equally unrealized Porno-Teo-Kolossal (Porn-Theo-Colossal), which Armando Maggi suggests be read as a summation of Pasolini’s apocalyptic thought (“The Journey to Sodom

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and Gomorrah and Beyond: The Scenario Porn-Theo-Colossal,” in The Resurrection of the Body: Pier Paolo Pasolini from Saint Paul to Sade [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010], 107–56; see also Laura Salvini, I frantumi del tutto: Ipotesi e letture dell’ultimo progetto cinematografico di Pier Paolo Pasolini, Porno-Teo-Kolossal [Bologna: Clueb, 2004]). 58. Pier Paolo Pasolini, “Progetto di opere future,” in Tutte le poesie, 1:1254–55. 59. Ibid., 1:1246. 60. Pasolini quoted in Walter Siti, “L’opera rimasta sola,” in Pasolini, Tutte le poesie, 2:1902. 61. Pier Paolo Pasolini, “Versi sottili come righe di pioggia,” in Tutte le poesie, 2:512. 62. Slavoj Žižek, Enjoy Your Symptom: Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out (New York: Routledge, 2001), 127. 63. Slavoj Žižek, Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan Through Popular Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991), 125. 64. In 1966, Jacques Lacan devoted his thirteenth seminar on the object of psychoanalysis to Las meninas. The seminar is available in English at http://www.lacani nirland.com. 65. Pier Paolo Pasolini, “Incontro con Pasolini,” in Per il cinema, 2:2955. 66. Assistant director Fiorenza Infascelli remembers that “we shot a scene that was later not included, but it was originally meant to be the final scene. The whole fi lm crew was dancing, the libertines and the victims were dancing together. I remember that Pier Paolo cared very much about this scene. We all took dance classes. The scene was shot with the entire cast, the technicians; Pier Paolo danced with us, everybody danced. It was fun, the scene was supposed to be used for the closing credits. Maybe this scene was stolen along with other films. I don’t know why Pasolini didn’t edit it or mention it ever” (Fiorenza Infascelli, “Trent’anni dopo: Memorie di un set indimenticabile,” in Salò, mistero, crudeltà e follia, ed. Mario Sesti [Rome: L’erma, 2005], 29). 67. See Franco Citti, “Non abbiate paura della verità,” Diario, October 28, 2005. 68. Pasolini, Calderón, 755. 69. Ibid., 756. 70. Ibid., 757–58. 71. Maggi, “Calderón,” 18. 72. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998). 73. Pier Paolo Pasolini, “Femmes femmes” (review), in Saggi sulla letteratura, 2:2667.

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2. Dante 1. Rinaldo Rinaldi, L’irriconoscibile Pasolini (Rovigo: Marra, 1990), 198. 2. Pier Paolo Pasolini, interview by Lorenzo Mondo, La Stampa, January 10, 1975. 3. Pier Paolo Pasolini, “Quarta di copertina di La nuova gioventù,” in Pier Paolo Pasolini, Saggi sulla letteratura e sull’arte, 2 vols., ed. Walter Siti and Silvia De Laude (Milan: Mondadori, 1999), 2:2693. 4. See Jean Michel Gardair, Narciso e il suo doppio: Saggio su La nuova gioventù di Pasolini (Rome: Bulzoni, 1996). 5. See the interview by Senuccio Benelli in Il Punto, July 17, 1963, and the unattributed interview published in Il Corriere Lombardo, March 28, 1963. 6. Pier Paolo Pasolini, “Note e notizie sui testi,” in Pier Paolo Pasolini, Romanzi e racconti, 2 vols., ed. Walter Siti and Silvia De Laude (Milan: Mondadori, 1998), 2:1965. 7. Ibid., 2:1964. 8. For a careful discussion of Pasolini’s early novels, see David Ward, A Poetics of Resistance: Narrative and the Writings of Pier Paolo Pasolini (Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1995). 9. See Sabina Titone, Cantiche del novecento: Dante nell’opera di Luzi e Pasolini (Florence: Olschki, 2001). 10. English translations of the Inferno come from Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri: Inferno, trans. Robert Durling (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). Note that the names of the “ragazzi di vita” (Piattola, Riccetto, Alduccio, Bengalone, and so on), all of which are diminutives derived from physical and personal characteristics, correspond well with the names of Dante’s demons. 11. Pier Paolo Pasolini, “Dante e i poeti contemporanei,” in Saggi sulla letteratura, 1:1648. For the issue of realism and mimetic language see Manuela Patti, “From Dantean Realism to Postrealism: La divina mimesis and the Mimetic Project,” in Corpus XXX: Pasolini, Petrolio, Salò, ed. Davide Messina (Bologna: Clueb, 2012), 109–33. 12. Gianfranco Contini, “Al limite della poesia dialettale,” Corriere del Ticino, April 24, 1943, reprinted in Gianfanco Contini, Pagine ticinesi di Gianfranco Contini, ed. renata broggini (Bellinzona: Salvioni, 1981), 116. 13. Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (1946; reprint, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013). 14. Right after the opening credits in Accattone, Pasolini inserts an epigraph that refers to Buonconte da Montefeltro in Purgatorio, canto 5. Also, the prostitute Amore cites a verse from the Inferno: “Lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch’entrate” (3.9). In Mamma Roma, as Ettore is lying feverishly in the hospital, another patient recites

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a few lines from the Inferno: “Quivi venimmo; e quindi giù dal fosso / vidi gente attuffata in uno sterco / che dagli uman privati parea mosso” (18.112–14). 15. Pier Paolo Pasolini, “Progetto di opere future,” in Pier Paolo Pasolini, Tutte le poesie, 2 vols., ed. Walter Siti (Milan: Mondadori, 2003), 1:1251. 16. Pier Paolo Pasolini, interview by Alfredo de Barberis, Il Giorno, December 2, 1964, reprinted in Pasolini, “Note e notizie sui testi,” 2:1965. 17. Pier Paolo Pasolini, La divina mimesis, in Romanzi e racconti, 2:1075; subsequent page citations to this edition of Divine Mimesis are given parenthetically in the text. For a detailed outline of the Dante citations in Divine Mimesis, see Gilda Policastro, In luoghi ulteriori: Catabasi e parodia da Leopardi al novecento (Pisa: Giardini Editori e Stampatori, 2005), 129–52. 18. Gianfranco Contini, “Dante come personaggio-poeta della ‘Commedia,’ ” in Varianti e altra linguistica (Turin: Einaudi, 1970), 335–61. 19. Walter Siti, “Nota introduttiva,” in Pier Paolo Pasolini, La divina mimesis, ed. Walter Siti (Turin: Einaudi, 1993), vii. 20. Walter Siti, “Descrivere, narrare, esporsi,” in Pasolini, Romanzi e racconti, 1:cxiv. 21. Nico Naldini, “Introduzione,” in Pier Paolo Pasolini, Romans, ed. Nico Naldini (Parma: Guanda, 1994), 16. 22. Walter Siti, “Pasolini e Proust,” in Studi offerti a Luigi Blasucci dai colleghi e dagli allievi, ed. Lucio Lugnani, Marco Santagata, and Alfredo Stussi (Lucca: Pacini Fazzi, 1996), 519. 23. Ibid., 533. 24. Contini, “Dante come personaggio-poeta della ‘Commedia,’ ” 335. 25. Ibid., 341. 26. The series of contributions to Paragone devoted to Dante includes the essays “Come leggere Dante” by Cesare Garboli (no. 184); “Un’interpretazione di Dante” by Gianfranco Contini (no. 188); “Dante, scienza e innocenza” by Mario Luzi (no. 190); “Dante, Masaccio e gli aff reschi del Carmine” by Roberto Longhi (no. 190); and “Vetrina dantesca” by Aldo Rossi (no. 190). In a later issue, critics Cesare Garboli and Cesare Segre responded to Pasolini’s essay in a particularly polemical and vehement manner. It is interesting to note that Pasolini, as he was wont to do, evokes this disagreement among Dante scholars in Hawks and Sparrows (1966). The scene “First Conference of the Danteist Dentists” seems incomprehensible and grotesque outside of the context of this debate in Paragone. In reality, it is nothing more than Pasolini’s cinematic version of the obscene gesture that Dante attributes to Vanni Fucci, here addressed to the Italian Danteist establishment: “At the end of his words the thief / raised up his hands with both the figs” (Inferno, 25.1–2). As J. A. Burrow explains, “The fica or fig is an obscene gesture of

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contempt and insult, formed by the suggestive insertion of a thumb between the first and middle fingers” (Gestures and Looks in Medieval Narrative [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002], 170). “Vanni Fucci” is indeed the title that Pasolini chose, with clearly mocking intentions, for his response to the critiques leveled at him by Garboli and Segre (Pier Paolo Pasolini, “Vanni Fucci,” Paragone, no. 194 [April 1966], reprinted in Heretical Empiricism, trans. Ben Lawton and Louise K. Barnett [Washington, D.C.: New Academia, 2005], 113–20). 27. In a letter to Piergiorgio Bellocchio dated October 8, 1964, Pasolini writes that Gramsci’s Ashes “is endowed with my, however manualistic, ‘quidditas’ as a maker of verses” (in Pier Paolo Pasolini, Lettere 1955–1975, ed. Nico Naldini [Turin: Einaudi, 1988], 560). 28. “Of Lombard stock, / my parents both by patria were Mantuan. / And I was born, though late, sub Iulio. I lived at Rome in good Augustus’ day, / in times when all the gods were lying cheats. / I was a poet then” (Dante, Inferno, 1.68–73). 29. See also Robert C. S. Gordon’s remarkable analysis of Pasolini’s impulse to autobiography in his poetry (Pasolini: Forms of Subjectivity [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996], 91–114). 30. See Teodolinda Barolini, The Undivine Comedy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 14. 31. Manuele Gragnolati, Amor che move: Linguaggio del corpo e forma del desiderio in Dante, Pasolini e Morante (Milan: Saggiatore, 2013), 35–50. 32. Pier Paolo Pasolini, Petrolio, trans. Ann Goldstein (New York: Pantheon Books, 1997), 150. 33. Peter Kuon, Lo mio maestro e’l mio autore: Die produktive Rezeption del Divina commedia in der Erzählliteratur der Moderne (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1993), 321. 34. Angela Oster, Ästhetik der Atopie: Roland Barthes und Pier Paolo Pasolini (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag, 2006), 96. 35. For the concept of “spectacular authorship,” see Simona Bondavalli, “Charming the Cobra with a Ballpoint Pen: Liminality and Spectacular Authorship in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Interviews,” MLN 122, no. 1 (2007): 24–45. In The Ricotta, the director makes his own position of strength noticeable to the journalist interviewing him: “The producer of my film is also the owner of your newspaper” (Pier Paolo Pasolini, La ricotta, in Pier Paolo Pasolini, Per il cinema, 2 vols., ed. Walter Siti and Franco Zabagli [Milan: Mondadori, 2001], 1:338). 36. Pier Paolo Pasolini to Alfredo Bini, May 12, 1963, in Lettere 1955–1975, 514–15. 37. Gragnolati, Amor che move, 35. As Albert Russell Ascoli writes, Dante, in all of his work but especially in La vita nuova, “splits himself in two: there is one ‘Dante’ who analyzes, another ‘Dante’ who is analyzed, and these often correspond to

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an interpreting reader and an interpreted writer” (Dante and the Making of the Modern Author [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008], 176). 38. Pier Paolo Pasolini, “Intervista rilasciata a Ferdinando Camon,” in Pier Paolo Pasolini, Saggi sulla politica e sulla società, ed. Walter Siti and Silvia De Laude (Milan: Mondadori, 1999), 1585–86. 39. Aldo Rossi, “La divina mimesis e il dopo-Pasolini,” Paragone: Rivista Mensile di Arte Figurativa e Letteratura 27, no. 312 (1976): 147. 40. Quoted in Franco Grattarola, Pasolini: Una vita violenta. Pestaggi fi sici e linciaggi morali: Cronaca di una Via Crucis laica attraverso la stampa dell’epoca (Rome: Coniglio Editore, 2005), 218. 41. Pier Paolo Pasolini, Teorema, in Romanzi e racconti, 2:1009, my emphasis. 42. Ibid. 43. Pier Paolo Pasolini, “Come leggere nel modo giusto questo libro,” in Romanzi e racconti, 2:1978. 44. In a rather intelligent manner, to intensify this chromatic effect Pasolini decided to have Pietro wear a white shirt and a pair of dark pants, the same colors Pietro uses to paint. For this scene, Pasolini was most likely inspired by the French documentary film Le mystère Picasso (The Mystery of Picasso, 1956), in which director Henri-Georges Clouzot shows Pablo Picasso painting images on glass plates from the viewpoint of the camera on the other side of the plates. Another possible reference is Hans Namuth’s color film documentary Painting Pollock (1951), in which the filmmaker has abstract artist Jackson Pollock paint on a larger sheet of glass as he is filming from underneath the work. 45. Alberto Marchesini, Citazioni pittoriche nel cinema di Pasolini: Da Accattone al Decameron (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1995), 115. 46. Pasolini, Teorema, 2:1007, 1009, 1010. 47. Carla Benedetti, Pasolini contro Calvino: Per una letteratura impura (Milan: Bollati Boringhieri, 1998), 48. 48. See Pier Paolo Pasolini, “The Written Language of Reality,” in Heretical Empiricism, 197–222. 49. See Jack Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2011). 50. On the significance of the concepts of “queer performance” and “failure” in Pasolini, see Gragnolati, Amor che move, 35–67. 51. Pasolini, “Note e notizie sui testi,” 2:1965. 52. See Fabio Desideri and Antonella Giordano, “Il ‘Fondo Pier Paolo Pasolini’ dell’Archivio Contemporaneo ‘Alessandro Bonsanti,’ Gabinetto Vieusseux, Firenze,” Studi Pasoliniani 2 (2008): 105–19.

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53. The title Memorie pratiche (Practical memories) is a Pasolinian slip for Memorie barbariche (Barbaric memories). 54. Pier Paolo Pasolini to Livio Garzanti, January 1967, in Lettere 1955–1975, 624. 55. According to Pino Pelosi’s confession, which all the media reported on at the time, Pelosi, after having ducked away to a soccer field with Pasolini and then refusing to have penetrative sexual intercourse with him, picked up a stick from the ground to scare him. When Pasolini “came to him and when Pino tried to free himself, he [Pasolini] hit him in the head with the stick; Pino got away again, and the man hit him again. Then Pino saw a wooden slab on the ground and broke it over the man’s head” (Gianni Borgna and Carlo Lucarelli, “Così morì Pasolini,” Micromega, no. 6 [2005]: 83). At the time of the arrest, Pelosi showed no injuries to the head or traces of blood on his clothes, and it is by now certain that others took part in the crime. However, the details of the stick and the slab have in particular influenced the reading of Divine Mimesis and the interpretation of the “author clubbed to death.” 56. Robert C. S. Gordon, “Pasolini’s Strategies of Self-Construction,” in Pasolini Old and New, ed. Zygmunt G. Baranski (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1999), 41–76. 57. From the television program entitled Lavori in corso (Work in progress) that aired in 1969 on Rtsi, Radiotelevisione della Svizzera Italiana. 58. Siti, “Nota introduttiva,” vii. 59. Stefano Agosti, La parola fuori di sé: Scritti su Pasolini (Lecce: Manni, 2004), 83–94. 60. Pier Paolo Pasolini, “Osservazioni sul piano sequenza,” in Saggi sulla letteratura, 1:1561. 61. Pier Paolo Pasolini, “I segni viventi e i poeti morti,” in Saggi sulla letteratura, 1:1574. 62. Ibid., 1:1575. 63. Benedetti, Pasolini contro Calvino, 165. 64. Massimo Fusillo, L’altro e lo stesso: Teoria e storia del doppio (Florence: Nuova Italia, 1998), 173. 65. Guido Santato, Pier Paolo Pasolini: L’opera (Vicenza: Neri Pozza, 1980), 244. 66. Marco Antonio Bazzocchi, I burattini filosofi: Pasolini dalla letteratura al cinema (Milan: Mondadori, 2007), 51. 67. See Enzo Siciliano, “L’inferno postumo di Pasolini,” Il Mondo, December 25, 1975; Paolo Milano, “Nelle bolge di Pasolini,” L’Espresso, January 11, 1976; Vittorio Spinazzola, “L’inferno di Pasolini,” L’Unità, January 22, 1976; Rossi, “La divina mimesis e il dopo-Pasolini.” 68. Italo Calvino, “Ultima lettera a Pier Paolo Pasolini,” Il Corriere della Sera, November 4, 1975.

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69. Emblematic in this regard is the case of the painter Giuseppe Zigaina, who has reread all of Pasolini’s work in light of the idea that the author planned his own death down to the last detail. Zigaina’s theories are totally far-fetched but nevertheless have encountered a certain popularity. See Giuseppe Zigaina, Hostia: Trilogia della morte di Pier Paolo Pasolini (Venice: Marsilio, 1995). 70. Pier Paolo Pasolini, “Condannato a vivere: Il primo canto della Divina mimesis,” Il Mondo, September 26, 1974. 71. Emanuela Patti, “Mimesis: Figure di realismo e postrealismo dantesco nell’opera di Pier Paolo Pasolini,” Ph.D. diss., University of Birmingham, 2008, 71, http:// etheses.bham.ac.uk/190/. Patti is also the author of a new volume on Divine Mimesis, which I could not consider while revising this chapter: Pasolini After Dante: The “Divine Mimesis” and the Politics of Representation (Oxford: Legenda, 2016). 72. Gragnolati, Amor che move, 39–51. 73. According to Davide Luglio, “the . . . fragmentary character [of Divine Mimesis], unachieved and magmatic, its mixture of text and paratext, its literary and iconographic language, its subversion of chronology and of the rational order of speech, represent the best form available to the author in evoking reality” (“ ‘Anzichè allargare, dilaterai!’ Allegory and Mimesis from Dante’s Comedy to Pier Paolo Pasolini’s La divina mimesis,” in Metamorphosing Dante: Appropriations, Manipulations, and Rewritings in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries, ed. Manuele Gragnolati, Fabio Camilletti, and Fabian Lampart [Vienna: Turia + Kant, 2011], 351). 74. Gerard Genette, Paratexts: Threshold of Interpretation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 46. 75. Pier Paolo Pasolini, “[Risvolto di Trasumanar e organizzar],” in Saggi sulla letteratura, 2:2603. 76. Siti, “Nota introduttiva,” viii. 77. Sandro Bernardi, “L’allegoria e il ‘doppio strato’ della rappresentazione,” in A partire da Petrolio: Pasolini interroga la letteratura, ed. Carla Benedetti and Maria Antonietta Grignani (Ravenna: Longo, 1995), 69. 78. Andy Stafford, Photo-texts: Contemporary French Writing of the Photographic Image (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2010), 6. 79. Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes (Paris: Seuil, 1975). Aldo Rossi argues that Barthes’s volume even represents the “specular analogue” of Divine Mimesis (“La divina mimesis e il dopo-Pasolini,” 122). 80. Roland Barthes, Sade, Fourier, Loyola (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989), 9. 81. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (New York: Hill and Wang, Noonday Press, 1981), 30.

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82. Stafford, Photo-texts, 9. 83. Pier Paolo Pasolini, “Trilogy of Life Rejected,” in Lutheran Letters, trans. Stuart Hood (New York: Carcaner Press, 1987), 51.

3. Celebrit y 1. Simona Bondavalli, “Charming the Cobra with a Ballpoint Pen: Liminality and Spectacular Authorship in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Interviews,” MLN 122, no. 1 (2007): 24–45. 2. Marcia Landy, Stardom, Italian Style: Screen Performance and Personality in Italian Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008), 186. 3. David Scott and Keyan G. Tomaselli, Cultural Icons (Walnut Creek, Calif.: Left Coast Press, 2009), 17. 4. Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle (1967; reprint, New York: Zone Books, 1994). 5. Franco Fortini, Attraverso Pasolini (Turin: Einaudi, 2001), 43. 6. Paolo Valesio, “Pasolini as Symptom,” in Gabriele d’Annunzio: The Dark Flame (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 171. 7. Enzo Siciliano, Pasolini: A Biography (New York: Random House, 1982), 205. 8. Pier Paolo Pasolini, “De Sade e l’universo dei consumi,” in Pier Paolo Pasolini, Per il cinema, 2 vols., ed. Walter Siti and Franco Zabagli (Milan: Mondadori, 2001), 2:3021–22. 9. Pier Paolo Pasolini, “1964,” in Pier Paolo Pasolini, Saggi sulla politica e sulla società, ed. Walter Siti and Silvia De Laude (Milan: Mondadori, 1999), 1025. 10. Pier Paolo Pasolini, “Terza B facciamo l’appello,” in Pier Paolo Pasolini, Interviste corsare sulla politica e sulla vita (1955–1975), ed. Michele Gulinucci (Rome: Atlantide Editoriale, 1995), 197. For interesting discussions of the relationship between Pasolini and television, see Gabriele Policardo, Schermi corsari: Pasolini in televisione (Rome: Bulzoni, 2008), and Angela Felice, ed., Pasolini e la televisione (Venice: Marsilio, 2011). 11. Barth David Schwartz, Pasolini Requiem (New York: Pantheon Books, 1992), 613. For interesting analyses of Pasolini’s newspaper articles, see Jennifer Burns, Fragments of Impegno: Interpretation of Commitment in Contemporary Italian Narrative (Leeds, U.K.: Maney, 2002); Robert C.  S. Gordon, Pasolini: Forms of Subjectivity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996); and Antonio Tricomi, Sull’opera mancata di Pasolini: Un autore irrisolto e il suo laboratorio (Rome: Carocci, 2005). 12. On fascism and Italian virility, see Barbara Spackman, Fascist Virilities: Rhetoric, Ideology, and Social Fantasy in Italy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), and Lorenzo Benadusi, The Enemy of the New Man: Homosexuality in Fascist Italy, trans. Suzanne Dingee and Jennifer Pudney (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2012).

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13. John Woodhouse, Gabriele d’Annunzio: Defiant Archangel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 283–380. 14. See Anna Tonelli, Per indegnità morale: Il caso Pasolini nell’Italia del buon costume (Rome: Laterza, 2015). 15. The bibliography of works on Pasolini’s trials is quite extensive. In Pasolini: Cronaca giudiziaria, persecuzione, morte (Milan: Garzanti, 1977), Laura Betti collects some of the trial documents and numerous anonymous contributions by various intellectuals and writers; in Una strategia del linciaggio e delle mistifi cazioni: L’immagine di Pasolini nelle deformazioni mediatiche (Bologna: Centro Studi—Archivio Pier Paolo Pasolini della Cineteca di Bologna, 2006), Roberto Chiesi reproduces many of the articles on Pasolini’s trials and the controversies surrounding his death; in Pasolini, una vita violenta. Pestaggi fisici e linciaggi morali: Cronaca di una Via Crucis laica attraverso la stampa dell’epoca (Rome: Coniglio Editore, 2005), Franco Grattarola includes copies of articles from the period and a reconstruction of the trials contextualized within Pasolini’s entire body of work; and in “Imputato Pasolini, un caso di ‘diritto e letteratura,’ ” in Pier Paolo Pasolini: In Living Memory, ed. Ben Lawton and Maura Bergonzoni (Washington, D.C.: New Academia, 2009), 237–56, Barbara Castaldo deals with the question of Pasolini’s trials through studies on law and literature. 16. “Hanno battuto le mani a ‘Mamma Roma’ sulla faccia di Pasolini” (Instead of putting their hands together for ‘Mamma Roma,’ they smacked Pasolini) was the Lo Specchio cover title the day after September 23, 1962, when at the end of a screening of Mamma Roma, Pasolini was assaulted by students from the far-right associations Giovane Italia and Avanguardia Nazionale. 17. See Adalberto Baldoni and Gianni Borgna, Una lunga incomprensione: Pasolini fra destra e sinistra (Florence: Vallecchio, 2010). The term pasolinidi was used in a flyer that the members of the Movimento Sociale Italiano, a postfascist political group, distributed in March 1966. 18. A note from the Fert press agency dated July 14, 1960, states: “Fert is aware that the Honorable Togliatti advised the heads of the cultural and press sections of the party to proceed carefully in considering Pasolini a supporter of the party and in defending him. Togliatti’s action, which met with much opposition, derives from two considerations. Togliatti does not, in his personal judgment, consider Pasolini a great writer, and in fact his judgment on this matter is rather harsh. Finally, he deems it bad publicity for the PCI, especially for the base, to consider Pasolini a Communist because the public’s attention, more than on the writer’s novels, is polarized over certain unseemly situations he found himself involved in that led to the magistrate’s need to intervene. The reprobate defenders within the PCI

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are nonetheless many, and it seems that representatives Alicata and Ingrao are of the opinion to keep Pasolini in the PCI” (in Betti, Pasolini, 253). 19. Pasolini, “1964,” 1025–26. 20. Edgar Morin, The Stars, trans. Richard Howard (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), 8. 21. Pier Paolo Pasolini, “Le pallottole d’oro,” L’Espresso, June 1965, quoted in Schwartz, Pasolini Requiem, 560. 22. In regard to Pasolini’s appearance in his film, Carlo Lizzani writes: “Perhaps different elements were at play in him, pushing him to appear on the screen: first, a certain narcissism; second, a love for those urban characters whom he had depicted so well in his novel—the idea of dressing like them, of becoming, though a doubling that he had already forecast, a true Roman boy” (“Il mio attore Pier Paolo Pasolini,” in Pasolini sconosciuto, ed. Fabio Francione [Alessandria: Falsopiano, 2010], 149). Pasolini also played the role of the revolutionary priest Don Juan in Lizzani’s film Requiescant (1966), a spaghetti Western. 23. Pier Paolo Pasolini, “Nei panni di un ragazzo di vita,” in Per il cinema, 2:2765. 24. According to Paul Barolsky, “the modern idea of the artist as an individual who demonstrates manual skill or poetic imagination has its origins . . . in the history of literature, above all in the work of Dante” (“Dante and the Modern Cult of the Artist,” Arion: A Journal of Humanities and the Classics 12, no. 2 [2004]: 2). 25. Alberto Moravia, “L’uomo medio sotto il bisturi,” L’Espresso, March 3, 1963. 26. Landy, Stardom, Italian Style, 187. 27. “The idea for the fi lm was suggested to me by a news story. During the solar eclipse in 1961, a crucifi xion scene was shot for a film that had not yet started fi lming [Barabba]. One of the crucified men felt ill aft er catching a chill” (Pier Paolo Pasolini, “Non ho offeso il cattolicesimo,” Avanti!, March 6, 1963). 28. Gian Piero Brunetta, Forma e parola nel cinema (Padua: Liviana, 1970), 47–48. 29. Tomaso Subini, Pier Paolo Pasolini: La ricotta (Turin: Lindau, 2008), 177–78. 30. Pier Paolo Pasolini, “Una discussione del ’64,” in Pier Pasolini nel dibattito culturale contemporaneo, ed. Giuliana Callegari  and Nuccio Lodato (Pavia: Amministrazione Provinciale di Pavia, Comune di Alessandria, 1977), 759. 31. Roberto Longhi, “Ricordo dei manieristi,” L’Approdo, no. 1 (January–March 1953), reprinted in Longhi’s book Da Cimabue a Morandi (Milan: Mondadori, 1973), 733. 32. Bondavalli, “Charming the Cobra with a Ballpoint Pen,” 39–44. 33. Pier Paolo Pasolini, “Una visione del mondo epico-religiona,” in Per il cinema, 2:2857. 34. Pier Paolo Pasolini, “Wordly Poems,” in The Selected Poetry of Pier Paolo Pasolini: A Bilingual Edition, trans. Stephen Sartarelli (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 312.

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35. Ibid., 312–13. 36. Pier Paolo Pasolini, La ricotta, in Per il cinema, 1:338. 37. The first five of the seven texts that compose the poetic series “Poesie mondane” (“Wordly Poems”) were published under the title “Le poesie di Mamma Roma” (Mamma Roma’s poems) in Pier Paolo Pasolini, Mamma Roma (Milan: Rizzoli, 1962). 38. Pasolini, “Worldly Poems,” 307, emphasis added. 39. Quoted in Antonio Bertini, “Sacralità e manierismo della macchina da presa,” in Teoria e tecnica del film in Pasolini, ed. Antonio Bertini (Rome: Bulzoni, 1977), 21, emphasis in original. 40. Sandro Bernardi, “L’allegoria e il ‘doppio strato’ della rappresentazione,” in A partire da Petrolio: Pasolini interroga la letteratura, ed. Carla Benedetti and Maria Antonietta Grignani (Ravenna: Longo, 1995), 63. 41. Oriana Fallaci, “L’uomo che sarà presidente,” L’Europeo, February 4, 1962, 29. 42. Quoted in ibid., 33. 43. See Alberto Anile, Orson Welles in Italy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013). 44. See Andrew Sarris, The American Cinema: Director and Directions, 1929–68 (New York: Dutton, 1968). 45. Edward Buscombe, “Ideas of Authorship,” Screen 14, no. 3 (1973): 76. 46. Pier Paolo Pasolini, “L’anno del Generale Della Rovere,” in Pier Paolo Pasolini, Saggi sulla letteratura e sull’arte, 2 vols., ed. Walter Siti and Silvia De Laude (Milan: Mondadori, 1999), 2:2240. 47. Pier Paolo Pasolini, “Le ambigue forme della ritualità narrativa,” in Saggi sulla letteratura, 2:2653. 48. Pier Paolo Pasolini, “Pasolini su Pasolini,” in Saggi sulla politica, 1306. For an English version of this interview, which for some reason Halliday published under the name “Oswald Stack,” see Jon Halliday: Pasolini on Pasolini: Interviews with Oswald Stack (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1969). 49. Pier Paolo Pasolini, “Il sogno del Centauro: Incontri con Jean Duflot,” in Saggi sulla politica, 1435. 50. See Cecilia Sayad, Performing Authorship: Self-Inscription and Corporeality in the Cinema (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 38–47. 51. Pier Paolo Pasolini, “A Desperate Vitality,” in Selected Poetry, 335. 52. John Rodden, Performing the Literary Interview: How Writers Craft Their Public Selves (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001), 1, 11. For a detailed analysis of the poem “A Desperate Vitality,” see Bondavalli, “Charming the Cobra with a Ballpoint Pen.” 53. Pasolini, “A Desperate Vitality,” 355. 54. Ibid., 337, suspension points in the original.

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55. See two collections of interviews: Pier Paolo Pasolini, Povera Italia: Interviste e interventi, 1949–1975, ed. Angela Molteni (Rome: Kaos Edizioni, 2013), and Pasolini, Interviste corsare. 56. Halliday, Pasolini on Pasolini; Jean Duflot, Entretiens avec Pier Paolo Pasolini (Paris: Éditions Pierre Belfond, 1970). Of particular interest is also a recent volume that includes the conversations that the American film director and journalist Gideon Bachmann had with Pasolini between 1961 and 1974: Pier Paolo Pasolini, Polemica politica potere: Conversazioni con Gideon Bachmann, ed. Riccardo Costantini (Milan: Chiarelettere, 2015). 57. Robert S. C. Gordon notes that Pasolini performs a similar strategy in his journalism when he replies to his readers: “On an autobiographical level, several replies consist of narratives of Pasolini’s own past, often in contradiction with his other versions of the same events or period” (Pasolini, 49). 58. Halliday, Pasolini on Pasolini, 22. 59. Pier Paolo Pasolini, “Il sesso come metafora del potere,” in Per il cinema, 2:2067. 60. Pasolini, La ricotta, 1:335. 61. Rodden, Performing the Literary Interview, 16. 62. Pasolini, La ricotta, 338. 63. Ibid., 336. 64. Quoted in John Francis Lane, “Pasolini’s Road to Calvary,” Film and Filming 9, no. 6 (1963): 68. 65. Subini, Pier Paolo Pasolini, 183. 66. As Peter Bondanella writes, “After the international success of La strada and Le notti di Cabiria, Fellini’s international reputation was firmly established as one of Europe’s most brilliant young superstar directors who could also deliver at the box office” (The Films of Fellini [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002], 68). 67. Pier Paolo Pasolini, “Pier Paolo Pasolini ritira la firma dal film ‘La rabbia,’ ” Paese Sera, April 14, 1963, reprinted in Per il cinema, 2:3067. 68. Ibid. 69. Ibid. 70. See George Didi-Huberman, “Film, essai, poème: La rabbia de Pier Paolo Pasolini,” Cahiers du Musee National d’Art Moderne 124 (2013): 22–23, and Survivance des lucioles (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 2009). 71. Walter Benjamin, “Surrealism,” in Selected Writings, 2 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005), 1:217. 72. Didi-Huberman, “Film, essai, poème.” 73. David P. Marshall, Celebrity and Power: Fame in Contemporary Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 47.

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74. Morin, The Stars, 21. 75. Marco Antonio Bazzocchi, L’Italia vista dalla luna: Un paese in divenire tra letteratura e cinema (Milan: Mondadori, 2012), 57–58. 76. George Didi-Huberman, Quand les images prennent position: L’oeil de l’histoire (Paris: Minuit, 2009), 256. 77. Pier Paolo Pasolini, “Note e notizie sui testi,” in Pier Paolo Pasolini, Romanzi e racconti, 2 vols., ed. Walter Siti and Silvia De Laude (Milan: Mondadori, 1998), 2:1964. 78. Pasolini, “Pasolini su Pasolini,” 1327. 79. Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001), 154. 80. Ibid., 159. 81. Reni Celeste, “Screen Idols: The Tragedy of Falling Stars,” Journal of Popular Film and Television, no. 33 (Spring 2005): 32. 82. Florence Jacobowitz and Richard Lippe, “Performance and the Still Photograph: Marilyn Monroe,” Cineaction 44 (1997): 13, 14. 83. Pier Paolo Pasolini, La rabbia, in Pier Paolo Pasolini, Per il cinema, 1:398, 399. 84. Ibid. 85. See Richard Dyer, Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society (Basingstoke, U.K.: Macmillan Press, 1986), 42. 86. Quoted in ibid., 62. 87. Ara H. Merjian, “Mascots & Muses,” Frieze 155 (May 2013): 175. 88. Pier Paolo Pasolini, “Ladies and Gentlemen,” in Andy Warhol, Andy Warhol: Ladies and Gentlemen (New York: Skarstedt Gallery, 2009), 5. 89. See Jonathan E. Schroeder, “The Artist in Brand Culture,” in Marketing the Arts: A Fresh Approach, ed. Daragh O’Reilly and Finola Kerrigan (Oxford: Routledge, 2010), 18–30; see also Cella Lury, Brands: The Logos of the Global Economy (London: Routledge, 2004). 90. Morin, The Stars, 22. 91. Celeste, “Screen Idols,” 35. 92. Pasolini, “Ladies and Gentlemen,” 7. 93. Andy Warhol, “Andy Warhol: The True Story,” quoted in Kynaston McShine, Robert Rosenblum, Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, and Marco Livingstone, eds., Andy Warhol: A Retrospective (exhibition catalog) (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1989), 457. 94. The publicity photo of Marilyn Monroe taken by Gene Korman and used by Andy Warhol for his Marilyn series was the subject of a private settlement with the Andy Warhol Foundation on the claim of misappropriation of the image copyright by the late Andy Warhol. 95. See Dyer, Heavenly Bodies, 23.

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96. Pasolini, La rabbia, 398–99. 97. Ibid., 399. 98. Colleen Ryan-Scheutz, Sex, the Self, and the Sacred: Women in the Cinema of Pier Paolo Pasolini (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007), 36. 99. “That subset of oxymoron, which classical rhetoric called synoeciosis, and which expresses due opposites of a single subject” (Fortini, Attraverso Pasolini, 22). 100. Pasolini, “Wordly Poems,” 313. 101. See Hervè Joubert-Laurencin, “Perdere un fratello: Il fantasma di Guido,” in Fratello selvaggio: Pier Paolo Pasolini tra gioventù e nuova gioventù, ed. Gian Maria Annovi (Massa: Transeuropa, 2013), 35–48. 102. Marco Antonio Bazzocchi, “Pasolini: Ritratto in forma di poesia,” in Autobiografie in versi: Sei poeti allo specchio, ed. Marco Antonio Bazzocchi (Bologna: Pendragon, 2002), 117. 103. Pier Paolo Pasolini, La divina mimesis, in Romanzi e racconti, 2:1093. 104. Pasolini, “A Desperate Vitality,” 356. 105. Andrea Zanzotto, “Pasolini poeta,” in Aure e disincanti nel novecento letterario (Milan: Mondadori, 1994), 157. 106. Pier Paolo Pasolini, Gramsci’s Ashes, in Selected Poems, 169. 107. See, for example, Wallace P. Sillanpoa, “Pasolini’s Gramsci,” MLN 96, no. 1 (1981): 120–37; Maurizio Viano, “The Left According to the Ashes of Gramsci,” Social Text 18 (Winter 1987–1988): 51–60; and Zygmut G. Baranski, “Pier Paolo Pasolini: Culture, Croce, Gramsci,” in Culture and Conflict in Postwar Italy: Essays on Mass and Popular Culture, ed. Zygmunt G. Baranski and Robert Lumley (London: MacMillan, 1990): 139–59. 108. Andrea Miconi, Pier Paolo Pasolini: La poesia, il corpo, il linguaggio (Genoa: Costa & Nolan, 1998), 9. 109. Sandro Bernardi, “Pasolini and Marilyn: The Gods’ Departure from the Earth,” in Marilyn, ed. Stefania Ricci and Sergio Risaliti (Milan: Skira Editore, 2012), 157. 110. See Randy Rassmussen, Orson Welles: Six Films Analyzed, Scene by Scene (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2006), 216. 111. Pasolini, La rabbia, 399. 112. Ibid.

4. Self-P ortr ait 1. The first, Self-Portrait with the Old Scarf, dates back to the previous year. In 1947, Pasolini presented his self-portraits in an exhibition in Udine, receiving a special mention from the jury.

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2. Zeri used this expression during a television special entitled Pasolini e noi (Pasolini and us) that aired in 1995 on Canale 5. 3. Mario De Micheli mentions a “noted Van Gogh painting” entitled Autoritratto con il fiore in bocca in “Introduzione,” in Pier Paolo Pasolini: I disegni 1941–1975, ed. Giuseppe Zigaina (Milan: Scheiwiller, 1978), 7. Achille Bonito Oliva also mentions it in his essay “La difficoltà dell’essere e la grazia dell’apparire,” in Pasolini e noi: Relazioni tra arte e cinema, ed. Laura Cherubini (Milan: Silvana, 2005), 136. In reality, there is no self-portrait by Van Gogh with that title or corresponding to that description. However, Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear (1889), which shows the Dutch painter next to his easel and with a Japanese print behind him, could have acted as a model for the composition of Pasolini’s portrait. 4. André Chastel, Fables, Formes, Figures (Paris: Flammarion, 1978), 79. 5. Pasolini documented his practice of varying a preexisting image in 1942 as well with his version of a drawing by Fabio Mauri, another of Pasolini’s childhood friends, who would eventually become a renown avant-garde artist. In his version, Pasolini adds a figure on the right. See figures 76 and 77 in Zigaina, Pier Paolo Pasolini. 6. On the relationship between Federico De Rocco and Pasolini, see Nico Naldini, Pier Paolo Pasolini: Dipinti / Gemaltes (Vienna: Prokurist, 1991), 12–13, and Giorgio Ganis, “P. P. Pasolini: Amico e collaboratore,” in Germälde Federico de Rocco pittore, ed. Giorgio Ganis (Udine: Ridotto, 2015), 26–30. 7. Precisely due to this friendship, Zigaina devoted the last thirty years of his life to the diff usion of Pasolini’s work and to proving that the poet himself had planned his death as a ritual, leaving clues of this plan through a complex system of alchemical symbols within his works. 8. Pier Paolo Pasolini, “La pittura di De Rocco,” in Pier Paolo Pasolini, Saggi sulla letteratura e sull’arte, 2 vols., ed. Walter Siti and Silvia De Laude (Milan: Mondadori, 1999), 2:586. 9. Dario Trento, “Metamorfosi dei ragazzi pasoliniani,” in Desiderio di Pasolini: Omosessualità, arte e impegno intellettuale, ed. Stefano Casi (Turin: Edizioni Sonda, 1990), 99–118. Amado mio was published posthumously in 1982. See David Ward, “The Friulan Novels,” in A Poetics of Resistance: Narrative and Writings of Pier Paolo Pasolini (Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson Press, 1995), 26–52. 10. Pier Paolo Pasolini, Amado mio, in Pier Paolo Pasolini, Romanzi e racconti, 2 vols., ed. Walter Siti and Silvia De Laude (Milan: Mondadori, 1998), 1:215–16, with the first set of ellipses indicating elided material, the second indicating suspension points. 11. Rinaldo Rinaldi, Pier Paolo Pasolini (Milan: Mursia, 1982), 7, 10.

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12. “Mirrored boy” from Pier Paolo Pasolini, “Cansoneta,” in Pier Paolo Pasolini, Tutte le poesie, 2 vols., ed. Walter Siti (Milan: Mondadori, 2003), 1:57. On Pasolini and narcissism, see Ward, A Poetics of Resistance; Robert C. S. Gordon, Pasolini: Forms of Subjectivity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996); Francesca Cadel, La lingua dei desideri: Il dialetto secondo Pasolini (Lecce: Manni, 2002); and Rinaldi, Pier Paolo Pasolini. 13. Pasolini also wrote the poem “Narciso” in 1947, so it is contemporary with the series of self-portraits discussed here. 14. Pier Paolo Pasolini to Silvana Mauri, August 15, 1947, in Pier Paolo Pasolini, Lettere 1940–1954, ed. Nico Naldini (Turin: Einaudi, 1986), 315. 15. Derek Duncan, Reading and Writing Italian Homosexuality (Hampshire, U.K.: Ashgate, 2006), 90. 16. Pasolini was prosecuted for having had sexual encounters with two or three teenage boys near the village of Ramuscello on September 30, 1949. The boys’ parents did not file a report, but the Carabinieri of Corcovado, having heard rumors, investigated the allegation of corruption of minors and obscene acts in a public place. 17. Pier Paolo Pasolini, Teorema, in Romanzi e racconti, 2:1006, 1007. 18. Franco Zabagli, Pier Pasolo Pasolini: Dipinti e disegni dall’Archivio Contemporaneo del Gabinetto Vieusseux (Florence: Edizioni Polistampa, 2000), 10. 19. Francesco Galluzzi, Pasolini e la pittura (Rome: Bulzoni, 1994), 153. 20. Giulio Carlo Argan, preface to Zigaina, Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1. 21. Marcelin Pleynet, “Pasolini—Autographe,” in Pasolini: Séminaire dirigé par Maria Antonietta Macciocchi, ed. Maria Antonietta Maccicchi (Paris: Bernard Grasser, 1980), 122. 22. Pier Paolo Pasolini, “Dal laboratorio (Appunti en poète per una linguistica marxista),” in Saggi sulla letteratura, 2:1317. 23. Quoted in Zabagli, Pier Pasolo Pasolini, 22. 24. Quoted in ibid. 25. Galluzzi, Pasolini e la pittura, 166. 26. Stefano Ferrari, Lo specchio dell’Io: Autoritratto e psicologia (Rome: Laterza, 2002), 181. 27. For a detailed description of Longhi’s course, see Dario Trento, “Pasolini, Longhi, Francesco Arcangeli tra la primavera del 1941 e l’estate 1943: I fatti di Masolini e Masaccio,” in Pasolini a Bologna, ed. Davide Ferrari and Gianni Scalia (Bologna: Pendragon, 1998), 47–66. 28. Alberto Marchesini, Citazioni pittoriche nel cinema di Pasolini: Da Accattone al Decameron (Florence: Nuova Italia, 1995). 29. Pier Paolo Pasolini, Mamma Roma, in Pier Paolo Pasolini, Per il cinema, 2 vols., ed. Walter Siti and Franco Zabagli (Milan: Mondadori, 2001), 1:153.

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30. Pier Paolo Pasolini, “Le pause di Mamma Roma: Diario al registratore,” in Romanzi e racconti, 2:1846. 31. Marco Vallora, “Pier Paolo Pasolini tra manierismo e metaletteratura,” in Per conoscere Pasolini, ed. Franco Brevini (Rome: Bulzoni, 1978), 120. 32. Pier Paolo Pasolini, “Roberto Longhi, Da Cimabue a Morandi,” in Saggi sulla letteratura, 2:1978. 33. Pier Paolo Pasolini, L’hobby del sonetto, in Tutte le poesie, 2:1117–234. See also Carlo Alberto Petruzzi, Introduzione a L’hobby del sonetto di Pier Paolo Pasolini (Venice: Damocle, 2011). In 1971, right after The Decameron was filmed, Davoli told Pasolini that he intended to propose to a girl by the name of Patrizia. The news cast Pasolini into a state of deep depression. In a letter to Paolo Volponi from August 1971, he wrote: “I am almost crazy with pain. Ninetto is over. After almost nine years, no more Ninetto. I’ve lost a sense of my life. I only think of dying or things like that” (in Pier Paolo Pasolini, Lettere 1955–1975, ed. Nico Naldini [Turin: Einaudi, 1988], 707). 34. “This is the first letter like this I’ve ever written, perhaps because I’ve fallen in love recently, or suffer from nervous gastritis” (Pier Paolo Pasolini to Ennio Flaiano, n.d. [c. 1963], in Lettere 1955–1975, 517). 35. Pier Paolo Pasolini, “Una discussione del ’64,” in Pier Paolo Pasolini, Saggi sulla politica e sulla società, ed. Walter Siti and Silvia De Laude (Milan: Mondadori, 1999), 753. 36. Pier Paolo Pasolini, “Poema per un verso di Shakespeare,” in Tutte le poesie, 1:1174. 37. Pier Paolo Pasolini, “La Guinea,” in Tutte le poesie, 1:1089. 38. Pier Paolo Pasolini, “La ricerca di una casa,” in Tutte le poesie, 1:1103. 39. Pier Paolo Pasolini, “Una disperata vitalità,” in Tutte le poesie, 1:1183. 40. Marco Antonio Bazzocchi, I burattini filosofi: Pasolini dalla letteratura al cinema (Milan: Mondadori, 2007), 159. 41. Sara Ugolini, Nel segno del corpo: Origini e forme del ritratto ferito (Naples: Liguori, 2009), ix. 42. Zabagli, Pier Paolo Pasolini, 11. 43. Galluzzi, Pasolini e la pittura, 178. 44. Giuseppe Zigaina, Hostia: Trilogia della morte di Pier Paolo Pasolini (Venice: Marsilio, 1995), 43–44. 45. Michael Semff, “A Dialect of the ‘Language of Poetry’: On the Drawings of Pier Paolo Pasolini,” in P.P.P.: Pier Paolo Pasolini and Death, ed. Bernhart Schwenk, Michael Semff, and Giuseppe Zigaina (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2005), 125. 46. Pier Paolo Pasolini, “Risposta ad un ‘insoddisfatto,’ ” in Saggi sulla politica, 1021. 47. Pier Paolo Pasolini, La rabbia, in Per il cinema, 1:400. 48. Pier Paolo Pasolini, “La beltà (appunti),” in Saggi sulla letteratura, 2:2570–74.

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49. Fabien S. Gérard, “Una passione per le immagini,” in Corpi / Körper: Körperlichkeit und Medialität im Werk Pier Paolo Pasolinis, ed. Peter Kuon (Bern: Peter Lang, 2001), 35–63. 50. As Barbara Castaldo has mentioned, drawing on the sociological category of “moral panic,” films such as Il Decameron and I racconti di Canterbury triggered hundreds of denunciations from private citizens: “The progressive intensification of the reports filed by private parties and the accumulation of lawsuits can be interpreted as the result of waves of irrational and instinctive panic: thinking of some of Pasolini’s fi lms, ‘preventively’ reported by citizens who had not even seen them yet, but who indicated ‘things they had heard from friends.’ . . . This does not necessarily correspond to a conscious intent to persecute when it is also the result .  .  . of a mechanism of communicative distortion and collective phenomena characterized by strong emotional impact” (“Imputato Pasolini, un caso di ‘diritto e letteratura,’ ” in Pier Paolo Pasolini: In Living Memory, ed. Ben Lawton and Maura Bergonzoni [Washington, D.C.: New Academia, 2009], 244). We should also notice that in discussing the negative reception of Teorema, Pasolini claimed that the critics’ attacks were like “objects that physically wounded” (Pier Paolo Pasolini, “Incontro con Pasolini,” in Per il cinema, 2:2966–67). 51. For a parallel between the artists of Viennese Actionism and Pasolini, see Christa Steinle, “Pier Paolo Pasolini ovvero la massima trasgressione,” in Pier Paolo Pasolini oder die Grenzüberschreitung, ed. Giuseppe Zigaina and Christa Steinle (Venice: Marsilio, 1995), 13–19. 52. Ugolini, Nel segno del corpo, 13. 53. Anne Collins Goodyear, “A ‘Made-up’ History: Self-Portrayal and the Legacy of Marcel Duchamp,” in Inventing Marcel Duchamp: The Dynamics of Portraiture, ed. Anne Collins Goodyear and James W. Mcmanus (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2009), 83. 54. Pier Paolo Pasolini, “Goodbye and Best Wishes,” in The Selected Poetry of Pier Paolo Pasolini: A Bilingual Edition, trans. Stephen Sartarelli (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 447, extra line space in the original. 55. Pier Paolo Pasolini, “Appendice a ‘La nuova gioventù,’ ” in Tutte le poesie, 2:323.

5. A c ting 1. Roland Barthes, “Inaugural Lecture, Collège de France,” in A Barthes Reader, ed. Susan Sontag (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982), 460. 2. Pier Paolo Pasolini, “The Unpopular Cinema,” in Heretical Empiricism, trans. Ben Lawton and Louise K. Barnett (Washington, D.C.: New Academia, 2005), 274. 3. Pier Paolo Pasolini, “Incontro con Pasolini,” in Pier Paolo Pasolini, Per il cinema, 2 vols., ed. Walter Siti and Franco Zabagli (Milan: Mondadori, 2001), 2:2962.

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4. Pier Paolo Pasolini, “Tetis,” in Pier Paolo Pasolini, Saggi sulla politica e sulla società, ed. Walter Siti and Silvia De Laude (Milan: Mondadori, 1999), 262. 5. Michel Foucault, “Utopian Body,” in Sensorium: Embodied Experience, Technology, and Contemporary Art, ed. Caroline A. Jones (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT List Visual Arts Center, 2006), 233. 6. The gross revenue for Decameron was approximately five million dollars in Italy alone (Barth D. Schwartz, Pasolini Requiem [New York: Pantheon Books, 1992], 807). 7. See Marcello Garofalo, “Decameron n. 2,” Segnocinema, no. 71 (January–February 1995): 78–79. 8. On these films, see Daniele Aramo and Michele Giordano, La commedia erotica italiana: Vent’anni di cinema sexy made in Italy (Rome: Gremese Editore, 2000). 9. Barthes, “Inaugural Lecture,” 468. 10. Pier Paolo Pasolini, “Abiura dalla Trilogia della vita,” in Saggi sulla politica, 600–601. 11. Barthes, “Inaugural Lecture,” 478. 12. See Agnès Blandeau, Pasolini, Chaucer, and Boccaccio: Two Medieval Texts and Their Translation to Film (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2006); Simone Villani, Il Decameron allo specchio: Il film di Pasolini come saggio sull’opera di Boccaccio (Rome: Donzelli, 2004); and Millicent Marcus, Filmmaking by the Book: Italian Cinema and Literary Adaptation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 111–55. 13. Alberto Marchesini, Citazioni pittoriche nel cinema di Pasolini: Da Accattone al Decameron (Florence: Nuova Italia, 1995), 136. 14. Jill M. Ricketts, Visualizing Boccaccio: Studies on Illustrations of The Decameron, from Giotto to Pasolini (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 115. 15. Pier Paolo Pasolini, “Io e Boccaccio,” in Per il cinema, 2:1645. 16. Ibid., 2:1647. 17. Boccaccio, Il Decameron, book 5, day 6. 18. Pasolini, “Io e Boccaccio,” 2:1648. 19. Ibid., 2:1649. 20. Quoted in N. Reda Mahaini, “Decameron: Intervista con Pier Paolo Pasolini,” Cinema 60 12, nos. 87–88 (1972): 66. 21. Linda Haverty Rugg, Self-Projection: The Director’s Image in Art Cinema (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), 9, 2. 22. Pier Paolo Pasolini to Franco Rossellini, spring 1970, in Pier Paolo Pasolini, Lettere 1955–1975, ed. Nico Naldini (Turin: Einaudi, 1988), 671. 23. “The lenses were also without exception 50 and 75: lenses that weigh down the material, enhance the three dimensional, the chiaroscuro, give the figures the seriousness and often unpleasantness of corroded wood or soft stone” (Pier Paolo Pasolini, “Confessioni tecniche,” in Per il cinema, 2:2769).

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24. Pier Paolo Pasolini, “Pietro II,” in Pier Paolo Pasolini, Tutte le poesie, 2 vols., ed. Walter Siti (Milan: Mondadori, 2003), 1:1150, ellipses indicate elided material at the end of the last line. 25. Pier Paolo Pasolini, Il Decameron, in Per il cinema, 1:1383. 26. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage, 1994), 5. 27. Dziga Vertov, “The Birth of Kino-Eye,” in Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov, ed. Annette Michelson and Kevin O’Brien (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984), 41. 28. Haverty Rugg, Self-Projection, 141. 29. Elizabeth Bruss, “An Eye for an Eye: Making and Unmaking Autobiography in Film,” in Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical, ed. James Olney (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), 309. 30. Baldessari stressed the importance of Giotto when I interviewed him in 2010: “From the time I was a student and later an artist, Giotto’s work always struck me for its simplicity, especially the frescoes at the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua. Giotto has a narrative style that almost resembles that of comics: it’s very easy to read. More generally, he is an artist who, at least in my opinion, embodies something that is almost impossible to obtain in art, but that I keep searching for: the union of simplicity and depth. These are two apparently antithetical things. Giotto seems simple but he is actually extremely profound” (in Gian Maria Annovi, “Baldessari il provocatore,” Il Manifesto, December 10, 2010). 31. In the script, this sentence is absent, and the painter limits himself to contemplating the finished work with a smile. Pasolini might have developed the idea of film as dream or vision from Sandro Penna, whom he initially wanted for the role of Giotto. In a letter to Pasolini, Penna wrote in 1970: “I cried with enthusiasm like at Bicycle Thieves or [illegible]. But those things are now colorless in comparison to the stupendous vision (did you dream it?) of Porcile. It’s good even if you can’t understand or explain it” (in Pasolini, Lettere 1955–1975, 666). 32. Pasolini, Il Decameron, 1:1383. 33. See Fabien S. Gérard, “Entre Boccace et Giotto, le Décameron de Pier Paolo Pasolini,” Annales d’Historie de l’Art ed d’Archéologie, Université Libre de Bruxelles 4 (1982): 78 n. 34. Maurizio Viano, A Certain Realism: Making Use of Pasolini’s Film Theory and Practice (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992), 279. 35. Pier Paolo Pasolini, “Pasolini mille e uno,” interview by Marco Giovannini, Panorama, May 30, 1974. 36. Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 1.

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37. Pier Paolo Pasolini, I racconti di Canterbury, in Per il cinema, 1:1416. 38. Pier Paolo Pasolini, “Pasolini su Pasolini: Conversazioni con Jon Halliday,” in Saggi sulla politica, 1387. 39. Alexandre Astruc, “The Birth of a New Avant-Garde: ‘La Caméra-Stylo,’ ” in The New Wave, ed. Peter Graham (London: Secker & Warburg, 1968), 17–23. 40. Naomi Greene, Pier Paolo Pasolini: Cinema as Heresy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 187. 41. Maria Caterina Paino, “La trilogia della vita tra sogno e letterarietà,” in Contributi per Pasolini, ed. Giuseppe Savoca (Florence: Olschki, 2002), 111–28. 42. Pasolini, I racconti di Canterbury, 1:1415. 43. Ibid., 1:1447. 44. Haverty Rugg, Self-Projection, 96. 45. Ibid., 19. 46. Janet Staiger, “Authorship Approaches,” in Authorship and Film, ed. David A. Gerstner and Janet Staiger (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), 47. 47. Pier Paolo Pasolini, Salò, o le 120 giornate di Sodoma, in Per il cinema, 2:3158. 48. Gary Indiana, “The Written Movie,” commentary on Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom, DVD, Criterion Collection (New York: Criterion, 2008). 49. Carlo Giovetti, “Pasolini parla delle ‘Mille e una notte’: Tra polvere e stracci le facce del Terzo Mondo,” Il Giorno, May 19, 1973. 50. See Roberto Chiesi, “Destini e anomalie: Nel laboratorio del film Il fiore delle Mille e una notte (1973–1974),” Studi Pasoliniani 5 (2011): 47–59. 51. Pasolini, Il fiore delle Mille e una notte, in Per il cinema, 1:1575–76. 52. On “transnational subproletariat” space, see Fabio Vighi, “Pasolini and Exclusion: Žižek, Agamben, and the Modern Sub-proletariat,” Theory, Culture, and Society 20, no. 5 (2003): 99–121. 53. Pasolini, Il fiore delle Mille e una notte, 1:1577. 54. Ibid., 2:1797, 1798. 55. Ibid., 2:1798. 56. Ibid., 2:1799, suspension points in the original. 57. Michel Foucault, “What Is an Author?” in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. Donald F. Bouchard (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980), 102. 58. Pier Paolo Pasolini, “L’idea delle Mille e una notte,” Il Mondo, May 31, 1973. 59. Pier Paolo Pasolini, “Condannato a vivere: Il primo canto della Divina mimesis,” Il Mondo, September 26, 1974. 60. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (New York: Routledge, 2008), xv.

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61. For more on “Note 55,” see Manuele Gragnolati, Amor che move: Linguaggio del corpo e forma del desiderio in Dante, Pasolini e Morante (Milan: Saggiatore, 2013), 51–67. 62. Joseph Allen Boone, The Homoerotics of Orientalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), 421, 417. 63. John David Rhodes, “Watchable Bodies: Salò’s Young Non-actors,” Screen 54, no. 4 (2012): 455. 64. Pasolini, “The Unpopular Cinema,” 268. 65. Sergio Rigoletto, “Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Erotic Imagery and the Significance of the Male Body,” in Masculinity and Italian Cinema: Sexual Politics, Social Conflict, and Male Crisis in the 1970s (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014), 105, 119.

6. Voice 1. First published for the Istituto Nazionale del Dramma Antico (National Institute of Ancient Drama) in 1960, Pasolini’s translation of the Oresteia was republished that same year as Eschilo [Aeschylus], L’Orestiade (Turin: Einaudi, 1960). 2. On the Indian film, see Luca Caminati, Orientalismo eretico: Pier Paolo Pasolini e il cinema del terzo mondo (Milan: Mondadori, 2007). 3. The recording of Costa’s interview with Pasolini in 1969 is housed at the Centro Studi—Archivio Pier Paolo Pasolini at Cineteca di Bologna. 4. Pier Paolo Pasolini, Petrolio, trans. Ann Goldstein (New York: Pantheon Books, 1997), 358. 5. Nico Naldini, Pasolini, una vita (Turin: Einaudi, 1989), 341. 6. Pier Paolo Pasolini, The Savage Father, trans. Pasquale Verdicchio (Toronto: Guernica, 1999). 7. See Giovanna Trento, Pasolini e l’Africa, l’Africa di Pasolini: Panmeridionalismo e rappresentazioni dell’Africa postcoloniale (Milan: Mimesis, 2010). 8. Pier Paolo Pasolini, “Frammento alla morte,” in Pier Paolo Pasolini, Tutte le poesie, 2 vols., ed. Walter Siti (Milan: Mondadori, 2003), 1:1050. 9. Alessia Ricciardi, “Umanesimo e ideologia: Pasolini e la genealogia intellettuale del fi lm Appunti per un’Orestiade africana,” Forum Italicum: A Journal of Italian Studies 34, no. 2 (2000): 509. Several critics have shown that Notes Toward an African Orestes refuses the moment of synthesis and presents in its place nothing but irreconcilable contrasts. Manuele Gragnolati, for example, has compared these contrasts to the multistable figure of the Kippbild, “a figure that oscillates between distinct aspects without mediation or synthesis,” like the famous “duck–rabbit” image Ludwig Wittgenstein discusses in Philosophical Investigations (“Analogy and Difference: Multistable Figures in Pasolini’s Appunti per un’Orestiade africana,” in

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The Scandal of Self-Contradiction: Pasolini’s Multistable Subjectivities, Geographies, Traditions, ed. Luca di Blasi, Manuele Gragnolati, and Christoph F. E. Holzhey [Vienna: Turia + Kant, 2012], 119–34; see also Fabio Vighi, “Beyond Objectivity: The Utopian in Pasolini’s Documentaries,” Textual Practice 16, no. 3 [2002]: 491–510). 10. Pier Paolo Pasolini, Appunti per un’Orestiade africana, in Pier Paolo Pasolini, Per il cinema, 2 vols., ed. Walter Siti and Franco Zabagli (Milan: Mondadori, 2001), 2:1178. 11. Ricciardi, “Umanesimo e ideologia.” In “Beyond Objectivity,” Vighi doesn’t problematize the notion of documentary and conceives of Notes Toward an African Orestes as a “notebook documentary.” 12. Donatella Maraschin, “Pasolini: Cinema e antropologia,” Italian Modernities 19 (2014): 256. 13. Caminati, Orientalismo eretico, 69. 14. See Maurizio Viano, A Certain Realism: Making Use of Pasolini’s Film Theory and Practice (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992), 251. 15. Pasolini, Appunti per un’Orestiade africana, 2:1177. 16. Sam Rodhie, The Passion of Pier Paolo Pasolini (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 97. 17. Pier Paolo Pasolini, Calderón, in Pier Paolo Pasolini, Teatro, ed. Walter Siti and Silvia De Laude (Milan: Mondadori, 2001), 718. 18. See Roland Barthes, The Grain of the Voice: Interviews, 1962–1980 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1985). 19. Kaja Silverman, The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 57. 20. Ibid., 62. 21. Keith Richards, “Export Mythology: Primitivism and Paternalism in Pasolini, Hopper, Herzog,” in Remapping World Cinema: Identity, Culture, and Politics in Film, ed. Stephanie Dennison, Song Hwee Lim (New York: Wallflower Press, 2006), 55–72. 22. Gragnolati, “Analogy and Difference,” 130. 23. Viano, A Certain Realism, 253. 24. See Giacomo Manzoli, La voce e il silenzio nel cinema di Pier Paolo Pasolini (Bologna: Pendragon, 2001). 25. Pier Paolo Pasolini, “Pasolini su Pasolini,” in Pier Paolo Pasolini, Saggi sulla politica e sulla società, ed. Walter Siti and Silvia De Laude (Milan: Mondadori, 1999), 1384. 26. Pier Paolo Pasolini, “Il sogno del centauro,” in Saggi sulla politica, 1513. 27. Pier Paolo Pasolini, “Il cinema secondo Pasolini,” in Per il cinema, 2:2899. 28. “Characters are always composites. When a writer creates a character, he always puts together the memory of various characters; what he makes is a synthesis of

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human experiences” (Pier Paolo Pasolini, “Sul doppiaggio,” in Per il cinema, 2:2786). 29. Pier Paolo Pasolini, Edipo re, in Per il cinema, 1:1014. 30. Pier Paolo Pasolini, “Note e notizie sui testi,” in Per il cinema, 2:2929. 31. See Valérie K. Orlando, Francophone Voices of the “New” Morocco in Film and Print: (Re) Presenting a Society in Transition (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), and Screening Morocco: Contemporary Film in a Changing Society (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2011). 32. See Massimo Fusillo, La Grecia secondo Pasolini: Mito e cinema (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2007). 33. Franz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (1963; reprint, New York: Grove, 2002), 223. 34. Pasolini, “Pasolini su Pasolini,” 1362. 35. Ibid., 1367. 36. Pier Paolo Pasolini, “[Intervista rilasciata a Maurizio Ponzi],” in Per il cinema, 2:2888. In 1975, however, when his debt to Hitchcock appears strongest, especially in the final scene of Salò that I briefly analyzed in chapter 1, Pasolini wrote, “I don’t love any of the Cahiers du Cinéma myths: Hawks, Hitchcock, Ford. And I hate Eisenstein” (“[Quasi un testamento],” in Saggi sulla politica, 866). 37. Thomas Leitch, Find the Director and Other Hitchcock Games (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1991), 3. Hitchcock appears in thirty-nine of his fift y-two films. 38. Pasolini, “Notizie e notizie sui testi,” 2:3059. 39. On the responses to The Ricotta, see the untitled material on pages 154–63 in the critical anthology Laura Betti, ed., Pasolini: Cronaca giudiziaria, persecuzione, morte (Milan: Garzanti, 1977). 40. Carl R. Plantinga, “Voice and Authority,” in Rhetoric and Representation in Nonfiction Film (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 101. 41. Silverman, The Acoustic Mirror, 51. 42. Pasolini, “Pasolini su Pasolini,” 1368. 43. Pier Paolo Pasolini to Jean-Luc Godard, October 1967, in Pier Paolo Pasolini, Lettere 1955–1975, ed. Nico Naldini (Turin: Einaudi, 1988), 629. Unfortunately, the original footage of these opening titles has been lost. 44. John David Rhodes, Stupendous, Miserable City: Pasolini’s Rome (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 150. 45. Pasolini, “Pasolini su Pasolini,” 1368–69. 46. “That’s why for now cinema is an artistic language, not a philosophical one. It can be a parable, never a direct conceptual expression” (Pier Paolo Pasolini,

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“Il ‘cinema di poesia,’ ” in Pier Paolo Pasolini, Saggi sulla letteratura e sull’arte, 2 vols., ed. Walter Siti and Silvia De Laude [Milan: Mondadori, 1999], 1:1468). 47. Ibid., 1:1462. 48. Pier Paolo Pasolini, “La lingua scritta della realtà,” in Saggi sulla letteratura, 1:1514. 49. Pier Paolo Pasolini, “Appendice: Battute sul cinema,” in Saggi sulla letteratura, 1:1547. 50. Pier Paolo Pasolini, “Essere è naturale?” in Saggi sulla letteratura, 1:1563. 51. Marco Antonio Bazzocchi, “I riccioli di Ninetto,” in Fratello selvaggio: Pier Paolo Pasolini tra gioventù e nuova gioventù, ed. Gian Maria Annovi (Massa: Transeuropa, 2012), 24. 52. See Pasolini, “Appendice,” 1:1546. 53. Pier Paolo Pasolini, “Osservazioni sul piano-sequenza,” in Saggi sulla letteratura, 1:1560. 54. Pier Paolo Pasolini, La sequenza del fiore di carta, in Per il cinema, 1:1095. 55. “There [in Accattone] I chose two or three motifs from Bach: one was the ‘love motif’ that always comes on when Accattone and Stella are together; another, which was ‘The St. Matthew Passion,’ represented the death motif and was the dominant motif (a death more or less redeemed)” (Pier Paolo Pasolini, “Mamma Roma, ovvero dalla responsabilità individuale alla responsabilità collettiva,” in Per il cinema, 2:2826). 56. Bazzocchi, “I riccioli di Ninetto,” 25. 57. Pasolini, “La lingua scritta della realtà,” 1:1507. 58. Pier Paolo Pasolini, Comizi d’amore, in Per il cinema, 1:421. 59. These documentaries include: Ugo Gregoretti, I nuovi angeli (1962); Enzo Biagi, Italia proibita (1961); Virgilio Sabel, In Italia si chiama amore (1962); Alberto Caldana, I ragazzi che si amano (1963). See Viano, A Certain Realism, 120–21. 60. Viano, A Certain Realism, 122. 61. Michel Foucault, “Les matins gris de la tolerances,” Le Monde, March 23, 1977. 62. Pasolini, “Pasolini su Pasolini,” 1324. 63. Miguel Andrés Malagreda, Queer Italy: Context, Antecedents, and Representation (New York: Peter Lang, 2007), 92. 64. Pasolini, Comizi d’amore, 1:427, 453, 441, 439, 447. 65. Malagreda, Queer Italy, 92. 66. See Joseph Boone, “Rubbing Aladdin’s Lamp,” in Negotiating Lesbian and Gay Subjects, ed. Monica Dorenkamp and Richard Henke (New York: Routledge, 1994), 159. A few years later, in one of his dialogues with readers, Pasolini himself wrote: “I too have in me a moment, which has been surpassed in my consciousness but remained in me by the fatal mechanism of upbringing, in which I have a pang of racist aversion toward homosexuality. I have the impression, at least for a

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fraction of a second, that homosexuality designates in another a character of human and civil inferiority” (Pier Paolo Pasolini, I dialoghi, in Pier Paolo Pasolini, Saggi sulla politica e sulla società, ed. Walter Siti and Silvia De Laude [Milan: Mondadori, 1999], 510). 67. Pasolini, Comizi d’amore, 1:442, 441, 443, 446, 447. 68. Ibid., 444. 69. Thomas Waugh, The Fruit Machine: Twenty Years of Writing on Queer Cinema (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2000), 255. 70. In a letter to his friend Silvana Mauri, one of the few people Pasolini spoke to explicitly and in particularly intimate terms about his homosexuality, it is precisely the image of physical doubling that identifies in the gendered body a body other than itself, an antibody: “I’ve suffered the sufferable, I’ve never accepted my sin, I have never come to terms with my nature, and I’m not even used to it. I was born to be calm, balanced, and natural: my homosexuality was extra, it was outside, it had nothing to do with me. I always saw it beside me like an enemy; I never felt it inside me” (February 10, 1950, in Pier Paolo Pasolini, Lettere 1940–1954, ed. Nico Naldini [Turin: Einaudi, 1986], 391–92). 71. Pasolini, Comizi d’amore, 1:442. 72. Ibid., 1:443. 73. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990), 68. 74. Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1997), 132. 75. Derek Duncan, Reading and Writing Italian Homosexuality (Hampshire, U.K.: Ashgate, 2006), 88. 76. Pier Paolo Pasolini, “Chi rifiuta il piacere di essere scandalizzato è un moralista: 31 ottobre 1975,” in Pier Paolo Pasolini, Interviste corsare sulla politica e sulla vita (1955–1975), ed. Michele Gulinucci (Rome: Atlantide Editoriale, 1995), 287. 77. Pasolini, Comizi d’amore, 1:442, suspension points in the original.

E pil o gue: B ody 1. Pier Paolo Pasolini, Petrolio, trans. Ann Goldstein (New York: Pantheon Books, 1997), v; subsequent page citations to this translation are given parenthetically in the text. 2. Armando Maggi, The Resurrection of the Body: Pier Paolo Pasolini from Saint Paul to Sade (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 21. See also Stefania Benini, “The Pauline Model,” in Pasolini: The Sacred Flesh (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015), 187–220.

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3. See Simona Consoni, Sul “Petrolio” di Pier Paolo Pasolini (Rome: Prospettiva Editrice, 2008). 4. For a detailed account of Petrolio’s plot, see Maggi, The Resurrection of the Body, 157–255. 5. Carla Benedetti, Pasolini contro Calvino: Per una letteratura impura (Milan: Bollati Boringhieri, 1998), 162. 6. Pier Paolo Pasolini, La divina mimesis, in Pier Paolo Pasolini, Romanzi e racconti, 2 vols., ed. Walter Siti and Silvia De Laude (Milan: Mondadori, 1998), 2:1119. 7. Aurelio Roncaglia, “Nota fi lologica,” in Pier Paolo Pasolini, Petrolio (Turin: Einaudi, 1992), 578. 8. Pier Paolo Pasolini, interview by Lorenzo Mondo, La Stampa, January 10, 1975. 9. Franco Fortini, Attraverso Pasolini (Turin: Einaudi, 2001), 246. 10. Carla Benedetti, The Empty Cage: Inquiry Into the Mysterious Disappearance of the Author (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005), 13. 11. Stefano Agosti, La parola fuori di sé: Scritti su Pasolini (Lecce: Manni, 2004), 66–82. 12. Renato Nisticò, La biblioteca (Rome: Laterza, 1999), 16–17. 13. To confirm the link between the content of the suitcase and the novel, the first page of the original manuscript of Petrolio contains a handwritten list of the same book titles and authors. For Ferenczi, Schreber, and Sollers, see Maggi, Resurrection of the Body. For Appollonius Rhodious, see Paolo Lago, L’ombra corsara di Menippo: La linea culturale menippea fra letteratura e cinema da Pasolini a Arbasino e Fellini (Florence: Le Monnier, 2007), and Massimo Fusillo, “From Petronius to Petrolio: Satyricon as a Model Experimental Novel,” in The Ancient Novel and Beyond, ed. Stelios Panayotakis, Maaike Zimmerman, and Wytse Keulen (Leiden: Brill Academic, 2003), 413–42. For Strindberg, see Franco Perrelli, “L’inferno delle passioni di Pasolini e Strindberg,” in L’inferno dei sensi: Da Euripide a Oshima, ed. Roberto Alonge (Bari: Edizioni Pagina, 2009), 181–216. For Pound, see Rinaldo Rinaldi, “ ‘Ubi amor ibi oculus est’: Pasolini e Pound,” Studi Pasoliniani 1 (2007): 37–54, and Francesca Cadel, La lingua dei desideri: Il dialetto secondo Pasolini (Lecce: Manni, 2002). 14. Octavio Paz, Marcel Duchamp o El castillo de la pureza (Mexico City: Era, 1968), 15. 15. Rosalind Krauss, L’amour fou: Photography and Surrealism (New York: Corcoran Gallery of Art, 1985), 70. 16. Pier Paolo Pasolini, interview by Gian Luigi Rotondi, in Pier Paolo Pasolini, Per il cinema, 2 vols., ed. Walter Siti and Franco Zabagli (Milan: Mondadori, 2001), 2:3158. 17. Mario Soldati, “Sequestrare Salò?” La Stampa, January 30, 1976. 18. Pier Paolo Pasolini, Salò, o le 120 giornate di Sodoma, in Per il cinema, 2:2043. 19. Maggi, Resurrection of the Body, 321–28.

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20. Alessia Ricciardi, “Rethinking Salò After Abu Ghraib,” Postmodern Culture 21, no. 3 (2011), http://muse.jhu.edu/article/475120. 21. Pasolini, Salò, o le 120 giornate di Sodoma, 2:2055. 22. Massimo Fusillo, “L’incipit negato di ‘Petrolio’: Modelli e rifrazioni,” in Contributi per Pasolini, ed. Giuseppe Savoca (Florence: Olschki, 2002), 40. 23. Krauss, L’amour fou, 79. 24. Pier Paolo Pasolini, “Il poeta delle ceneri,” in Pier Paolo Pasolini, Tutte le poesie, 2 vols., ed. Walter Siti (Milan: Mondadori, 2003), 2:1271. 25. Naomi Greene, Pier Paolo Pasolini: Cinema as Heresy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 178. See also Maggi, Resurrection of the Body, 21–106. 26. See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 424–73. 27. Marco Belpoliti, Pasolini in salsa piccante (Parma: Guanda, 2010), 72–73. 28. Walter Siti, “Pasolini’s ‘Second Victory,’ in Pier Paolo Pasolini: Contemporary Perspectives, ed. Patrick Rumble and Bart Testa (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994), 68. 29. Giuseppe Zigaina, Hostia: Trilogia della morte di Pier Paolo Pasolini (Venice: Marsilio, 1995), 300–302. 30. W. J. T. Mitchell, Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). 31. Walter Siti, “Descrivere, narrare, esporsi,” in Pasolini, Romanzi e racconti, 1:cxl. 32. Michel Foucault, Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault (Boston: University of Massachussetts Press, 1988), 43. 33. Marco Antonio Bazzocchi, “Pasolini ritratto da Dino Pedriali,” Doppiozero, n.d., http://www.doppiozero.com/materiali/recensioni/pasolini-ritratto-da-dino -pedriali (accessed May 20, 2016). 34. Pier Paolo Pasolini, “Trilogy of Life Rejected,” in Lutheran Letters, trans. Stuart Hood (New York: Carcaner Press, 1987), 49. 35. Stephen Barber, Performance Projections: Film and the Body in Action (London: Reaktions Book, 2014), 100. 36. Barth David Schwartz, Pasolini Requiem (New York: Pantheon Books, 1992), 59. 37. Pier Paolo Pasolini, “The Unpopular Cinema,” in Heretical Empiricism, trans. Ben Lawton and Louise K. Barnett (Washington, D.C.: New Academia, 2005), 268. 38. Belpoliti, Pasolini in salsa piccante, 69. 39. See Gian Maria Annovi, “Salò After Salò: Expanded Readings of Pasolini’s Last Film,” in Corpus XXX: Pasolini, Petrolio, Salò, ed. Davide Messina (Bologna: Clueb, 2012), 173–76.

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40. Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” in Visual and Other Pleasures (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 77. 41. Slavoj Žižek, Interrogating the Real, ed. Rex Butler and Scott Stephens (London: Continuum, 2005), 162. 42. Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text (New York: Hill and Wang, 1975), 27. 43. Roland Barthes, Sade, Fourier, Loyola (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989), 8. 44. Barthes, Pleasure of the Text, 88. 45. Jane Gallop, The Deaths of the Author: Reading and Writing in Time (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2011), 38. 46. Barber, Performance Projections, 7. 47. Fabio Mauri, “Intellettuale (1975),” n.d., http://www.fabiomauri.com/it/proiezioni /intellettuale.html (accessed May 20, 2016). 48. Luca Caminati, Il cinema come happening: Il primitivismo pasoliniano e la scena artistica italiana degli anni Sessanta (Milano: PostmediaBooks, 2011), 7. 49. Barber, Performance Projections, 102. 50. Elisabetta Benassi, “I maestri vanno mangiati in salsa piccante: In viaggio con Maurizio Cattelan,” Alfabeta2, no. 31 (July–August 2013): 16.

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Staiger, Janet. “Authorship Approaches.” In Authorship and Film, edited by David A. Gerstner and Janet Staiger, 27–57. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988. Steinle, Christa. “Pier Paolo Pasolini ovvero la massima trasgressione.” In Pier Paolo Pasolini oder die Grenzüberschreitung, edited by Giuseppe Zigaina and Christa Steinle, 13–19. Venice: Marsilio, 1995. Subini, Tomaso. Pier Paolo Pasolini: La ricotta. Turin: Lindau, 2009. Titone, Sabina. Cantiche del Novecento: Dante nell’opera di Luzi e Pasolini. Florence: Olschki, 2001. Toffolo, Davide. Pasolini. Bologna: Coconino Press, 2005. Tonelli, Anna. Per indegnità morale: Il caso Pasolini nell’Italian del buon costume. Rome: Laterza, 2015. Trento, Dario. “Metamorfosi dei ragazzi pasoliniani.” In Desiderio di Pasolini: Omosessualità, arte e impegno intellettuale, edited by Stefano Casi, 99–118. Turin: Edizioni Sonda, 1990. ——. “Pasolini, Longhi, Francesco Arcangeli tra la primavera del 1941 e l’estate 1943: I fatti di Masolini e Masaccio.” In Pasolini a Bologna, edited by Davide Ferrari and Gianni Scalia, 47–66. Bologna: Pendragon, 1998. Trento, Giovanna. Pasolini e l’Africa, l’Africa di Pasolini: Panmeridionalismo e rappresentazioni dell’Africa postcoloniale. Milan: Mimesis, 2010. Tricomi, Antonio. “ ‘Lo so che è una mancanza di ingenuità, forse anche di amore.’ ” In Fratello selvaggio: Pier Paolo Pasolini tra gioventù e nuova gioventù, edited by Gian Maria Annovi, 95–114. Massa: Transeuropa, 2012. ——. Sull’opera mancata di Pasolini: Un autore irrisolto e il suo laboratorio. Rome: Carocci, 2005. Turner, Victor. The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-structure. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977. Ugolini, Sara. Nel segno del corpo: Origini e forme del ritratto ferito. Naples: Liguori, 2009. Valesio, Paolo. Gabriele d’Annunzio: The Dark Flame. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992. Vallora, Marco. “Pier Paolo Pasolini tra manierismo e meta letteratura.” In Per conosce Pasolini, edited by Franco Brevini, 117–33. Rome: Bulzoni, 1978. Vanhove, Pieter. “Gray Mornings of Tolerance: Pasolini’s Calderón and the Living Theatre of New York (1966–1969).” Studi Pasoliniani 5 (2011): 31–46. Van Watson, William. Pier Paolo Pasolini and the Theatre of the Word. Ann Arbor: Umi Research Press, 1989. Vertov, Dziga. “The Birth of Kino-Eye.” In Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov, edited by Annette Michelson and Kevin O’Brien, 40–42. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984.

246 bibliogr aphy

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Index

“Abiura dalla Trilogia della vita” (Abjuration of The Trilogy of Life) (Pasolini), 127–28 abstraction: of Callas portrait, 122, 219n50; for neocapitalism, 120–21; of Zanzotto portrait, 121–22 Accattone: Alighieri influence on, 52, 203n14; Cipriani in, 83–84; Citti in, 83–84, 85; La ricotta and, 83–84 action pause. See stasima Adagio in G Minor (Albinoni), 103 Affabulazione (Affabulation) (Pasolini), 20 Africa, 147–52 Agamben, Giorgio, 47, 81, 187 agens and auctor, 53–54 Agosti, Stefano, 65, 173 Alfa Romeo GT Veloce (Benassi), 187, 188, 189 Alighieri, Dante: Accattone influenced by, 52, 203n14 La divina mimesis and, 1 4,

54–56, 63–65; Inferno by, 50–51, 203n10; Mamma Roma influenced by, 52, 203n14; Marxism and, 50–51; La mortaccia and, 50, 52; Proust and, 53; Ragazzi di vita and, 51; Vita nuova, 56–57, 205n37 Amado mio (My Amado) (Pasolini), 109–10 Amore e rabbia (Love and Anger), 159–60 Anger, The. See rabbia, La Antonioni, Michelangelo, 72, 182 Aoulad-Syad, Daoud, 154–57 Appunti per un’Orestiade Africana (Notes Toward an African Orestes): 132, 150, 223n9; cinéma vérité and, 163; essay fi lm and, 149; as documentary, 149, 224n11; as film da farsi, 3, 147–48, 223n1; vocal performance in, 16, 149–53, 159, 161 Appunti per un poema sul Terzo Mondo (Notes Toward a Poem on the Third World), 148–49

248

Arabian Nights. See fiore delle mille e una note, Il Argan, Giulio Carlo, 113 Astruc, Alexandre, 136 Auerbach, Eric, 52 Art Informel, 121–22 audience, 7–10, 20–27, 30–33, 36–39, 59, 66, 76, 123, 126–27, 139–40, 152–53, 158, 162, 182–83. See also ideal audience auteur, 19, 72, 86–87, 137; Welles as, 15, 86, 90. author: in Appunti per un’Orestiade Africana, 150; book list by, 174–75, 228n13; death of, 64–67, 208n69; in “A Discovery at Porta Portese,” 173–74; high priest as, 153–54; in Las meninas, 26–27; role of, 141–42; vocal performance of, 157–58; “What Is an Author?” on, 7–8, 199n21 authorial inscription, 14, 50, 78, 82–84, 173, 151, 177–78 authorial performance: in La divina mimesis, 49, 52, 59–60, 67–68; in Che cosa sono le nuvole?, 36, 38; in Il Decameron, 129–30, 137; in La divina mimesis, 64, 67–68, 208n73; and dubbing, 153, 157, 224n28; in Fi ntidhar Pasolini, 154, 157; homosexuality and, 166–67; as interview, 88–89, 213nn56– 57; in Petrolio, 171, 177–79; politics of, 33–34; power of, 77, 211n22; in I racconti di Canterbury, 139, 142–43; in Salò, o le 120 giornate di Sodoma, 44; as self-portrait, 109, 112–13, 122–23; of Teorema, 60–61, 67; and voice, 154, 157–58 authorship: branding of, 14–15; of Calderón, 14, 20, 31; by Chaucer, 138–39; of Che cosa sono le nuvole?, 37–38; “The Death of the Author” on, 6; debates on, 13–14; discourse of, 184–85; “Editor’s Note” on, 62–63; The Empty Cage: Inquiry Into the Mysterious Disappearance of the Author on, 172; Il fiore delle mille e una note and, 15–16; homosexuality and, 143; ideal audience and, 19–20; Intellettuale

index

and, 185; and mass culture, 4–5; Il mondo non mi vuole più e non lo sa and, 123–24; obituaries for, 6–7, 194n22; in I racconti di Canterbury, 135–36; radio interview and, 8–9; of La ricotta, 14–15; of spectator, 40; La trilogia della vita and, 15–16; “The Unpopular Cinema” on, 9–10, 19–20. See also spectacular authorship autobiography, 133, 157, 205n29. Autoritratto con la febbre (Self-Portrait with a Fever), 117, 118, 119 avant-garde film, 159–60. Baldessari, John, 132, 133, 221n30 Barber, Stephen, 182, 185 Barolsky, Paul, 211n24 Barthes, Roland: Camera Lucida by, 69–70, 102; for “canone sospeso,” 32, 58; “The Death of the Author” by, 5–9, 67, 172, 184; The Pleasure of the Text by, 184; on Pasolini, 5; on power, 125–26; on corporeality and temporality, 128–29; on voice, 151. Bazin, André, 37–38 Bazzocchi, Marco Antonio, 66, 94–95, 102, 119, 161–62, 181–82, 201n53, 201n56. Beck, Julian, 197n5 Bell, Catherine, 24–25 Bellocchio, Marco, 159, 205n27 Belpoliti, Marco, 179–82 Benassi, Elisabetta: Alfa Romeo GT Veloce by, 187, 188, 189; in Timecode, 1, 2, 3 Benedetti, Carla, on biography, 6–7; on authorship, 66, 170, 172 Benjamin, Walter, 92 Bernardi, Sandro, 69, 82, 84, 103 Bersani, Leo, 12–13, 195n46 Bertolucci, Bernardo, 159, 161 Bestia da stile (Style beast) (Pasolini), 20, 22 Best of Youth, The. See meglio gioventù, La Betti, Laura, 25, 36, 95 bibliography, as biography, 54; and Salò, o le 120 giornate di Sodoma, 139–40, 184

index

Bini, Alfredo, 56–59 biographemes, 69–70, 102. biography, 6–7, 58, 66, 69–70, 88, 169, 173 Blow-up (Antonioni), 182 Boccaccio, Giovanni, 123, 125, 129–30, 137–38 Bondavalli, Simona, 71–72, 80, 89 book list, 174–75, 228n13 Boone, Joseph Allen, 144 borgate, 51–52, 76, 126, 140 Boy with Flower: Davoli as, 115–16, 116, 218nn33–34; by Pasolini, 111 branding, 14–15 Breathless, 86–88 Brecht, Bertolt, 32–33, 36, 94 Briganti, Giuliano, 80 brother (fictional character): Gramsci as, 103; mythopoeic function of, 102 Bruss, Elizabeth, 133 Burke, Seàn, 6 Butler, Judith, 143, 166 Cairo, 140–41 Calderón: and author’s performance, 14, 20, 31; Calderón de la Barca influence on, 28; Foucault influence on, 30–31; last scene of, 45–46; Las meninas in, 28–31, 48, 199n26; as metawork, 38–40p; power in, 34–35; Pressburger adaption of, 199n26; Salò, o le 120 giornate di Sodoma and, 45–46; Sofri’s critique against, 33–34; Speaker in, 31–32; staging of, 27 Calderón de la Barca, Pedro, 14, 28, 31 Callas, Maria, 122, 219n50 Calvino, Italo, 66 Caminati, Luca, 149, 185 Camera Lucida (Barthes), 69–70 caméra-stylo (camera pen), 136–37 “canone sospeso” (suspended meaning), 32, 58, 65 cantastorî (singers of tales), 37–38 Canterbury Tales, The. See racconti di Canterbury, I

249

caricature, 81, 89, 130, 158 Carpaccio, Vittore, 114–15 Casi, Stefano, 197n4 Ceccarelli, Filippo, 192n8 celebrity: culture industry and, 72, 76, 92; as commodity, 92–93, 96–97; d’Annunzio as, 72–73; homosexuality and, 74–76; Pasolini on, 72, 74, 76–78, 81, 92, 96, 101; as persecution, 74–75, 119, 210n15; Warhol and, 99–101, 214n94; of Welles, 84, 86, 90 celebrity culture: Monroe and, 94–96, 101; in La rabbia, 14–15, 92–93 Celeste, Reni, 95, 100 Chat Theater. See Teatro della Chiacchiera Chaucer, Geoff rey: and authorship, 136, 138–39; Boccaccio influence on, 138; Pasolini as, 136–139, 152, 158, 182; in I racconti di Canterbury, 15–16, 135–36 Che cosa sono le nuvole? (What Are the Clouds?), 35–36, 39; authorial performance in, 14, 37–38, 40; Las meninas in, 38–39, 39, 83; Modugno in, 35–36, 201n51; multimedia of, 36–37; Othello in, 35–37; New Theater and, 35–36; Totò in, 35–36; Chiesa, Adolfo, 50 Chiesi, Roberto, 140, 210n15 Christ, 78–80, 169; Pasolini’s identification with, 13, 51, 102, 187 Christian confession, 181–82 cinegiornale (newsreel) Mondo Libero, 91 cinéma d’auteurs, 136–37 cinema verité, 16, 162–63 ciociara, La (Two Women), 92, 94 Cipriani, Mario, 83–84, 85 Citti, Franco, 83–84, 85 Citti, Sergio, 84, 130 Collins Goodyear, Anne, 123 colonialism, 92, 151–52 Comizi d’amore (Love Meetings): Foucault on, 163; homosexuality and, 164–66, 226n66; vocal performance in, 16, 162–66, 227n70

250

commedia erotica all’italiana (sex comedy, Italian style), 127–28 Communist Party (PCI), 74, 201n18; Pasolini’s expulsion from, 44, 89 communitas, 24–25 consumerism, 29, 126–27 Contini, Gianfranco: on agens and auctor, 53–54; “Dante come personaggio-poeta della ‘Commedia’ ” by, 52–53; on Poesie a Casarsa, 50–51; “Preliminari alla lingua del Petrarca” by, 52 corporeality: 15, 126, 128, 133, 177n5, 185 corporeal performance: in Petrolio, 16–17, 178–79; in La trilogia della vita, 126, 128; Corriere della Sera, Il, 8, 74–75, 89, 127 crisis: Autoritratto con la febbre as, 117, 118, 119; and authorship, 55–57, 61, 80, 116, 119; and ideology, 20, 33, 62–63; in La divina mimesis, 52–53, 61; in Poesia in forma di rosa, 116–17; and self-portrait, 119–20; of writer, 55–56 cultural ritual, 24–26, 36, 38 Dada, 47, 176 d’Annunzio, Gabriele, 72–75 “Dante come personaggio-poeta della ‘Commedia’ ” (Dante as poet-character in the Comedy) (Contini), 52–53 da Perugia, Andreuccio (fictional character), 116–17, 117 Davoli, Ninetto: in Che cosa sono le nuvole?, 35–36; in Il Decameron, 116–17, 117; in Edipo Re, 157; in La sequenza del fiore di carta, 116, 116, 161–62, 218nn33–34; in Uccellacci e uccellini, 3 death: of Accattone, 84, 162, 226n55; of author, 5–7, 19, 67, 142, 172, 184, 208n69; and authorship, 9–11, 22, 63, 65–67, 104; of Ettore, 1, 83; in La divina mimesis, 63–67, 70, 207n55; in Il fiore delle mille e una notte, 142–43; of Monroe, 15, 95, 103–4; as montage, 4–5, 65, 95–96, 161–62; of Pasolini, 3–5, 66–67, 156, 189,

index

191n6, 192n8, 207n55, 208n69, 210n15, 216n7 Death and Return of the Author, The (Burke), 6 death drive: 12–13, 22; Edelman on, 195n46; by suicide, 103–4 “Death of the Author, The” (Barthes), 5–9, 67, 172, 184 Debord, Guy, 72 Decameron, Il (The Decameron): 15–16, 125–127, 129–135; Boccaccio and, 137–38; nudity in, 127, 220n6; in I racconti di Canterbury, 137, 137–38; trial of, 75, 219n50 Deleuze, Gilles, 179 Delli Colli, Tonino, 87 De Micheli, Mario, 121, 216n3 démonter (demontage), 90 De Pisis, Filippo, 110 Deposition, 79, 79 De Rocco, Federico, 108, 109, 216n5 De Sica, Vittorio: 72, 94 “Desperate Vitality, A.” See “disperata vitalità, Una” dialect, 50–51, 113–14 diary, 57–58 Didi-Huberman, George: 3, 92, 94–95 director: as actor, 44, 132–33, 135–38, 141–44, 153–54; as celebrity, 72–73, 78; as interviewer, 162–64; in La ricotta, 15, 78–84, 90–91; performance by, 15, 149–152; and self-projection, 130–32, 138, 141, 157–58; and theater, 22–26; voice of, 149–53, 161–66; See also Italian star directors “disperata vitalità, Una” (“A Desperate Vitality”) (Pasolini): Barthes on, 5; Godard influence on, 87–88; death in, 102; La ricotta and, 87–88; self-interview in, 89–90; as self-portrait, 117, 119 divina mimesis, La (Divine Mimesis) (Pasolini): Dante influence on, 14, 49, 54–55; authorial performance in, 64, 67–68, 208n73; autobiography in, 58; cantos of, 56–57; and author’s crisis,

index

52–53, 61; death of the author in, 63–65, 207n55; as diary, 57–58; “Editor’s Note” of, 62–63, 170–71; guide of, 54–55, 205n27; identity in, 54–55, 205n28; “Note n. 1” of, 57; and Petrolio, 170–171; phases of, 49–50; “Yellowed Iconography” of, 68–70. Divine Comedy (Alighieri): La divina mimesis influenced by, 14, 49, 54–55; “La volontà di Dante a essere poeta” on, 54, 204n26 Divine Mimesis. See divina mimesis, La Don Quixote, 201n53 dubbing: authorial performance and, 153, 157, 224n28; in Edipo re, 16, 153 Duchamp, Marcel, 175, 179, 180 Duflot, Jean, 87, 89, 153 Duncan, Derek, 166 Dyer, Richard, 99 dysposition (dys-placement), 94–95 Earth Seen from the Moon. See terra vista dalla luna, La Edelman, Lee, 195n46 Edipo re (Oedipus Rex): Beck in, 197n5; dubbing in, 16, 153; and Waiting for Pasolini, 154–57, 156 “Editor’s Note” (Pasolini): on authorship, 62–63; of La divina mimesis, 62–63, 170–71; frustrations of, 64 “Essere è naturale?” (Is being natural?) (Pasolini), 160–61 Ettore (fictional character): death of, 1, 83, 203n14; in motorbike scene, 2 exemologesis, 181–82 failure: 14, and Orgia, 22–23; and Divina Mimesis, 49, 61–62, 67–68; Halberstam on, 62, 67; performance of, 112, 122, 128, 150 Fallaci, Oriana, 84 Fanon, Frantz, 156 fascism: and Salò, o le 120 giornate di Sodoma, 41, 47, 73; d’Annunzio and, 74

251

Fellini, Federico, 90–91, 213n66 Femmes femmes (Women Women), 46–48 Ferrari, Stefano, 114 fico innocente, Il (The Innocent Fig Tree), 159–60 film da farsi (film to be made), 3, 147–48, 223n1 film industry, 72 filming, 130–31, 220n23 films: auteur of, 87–88; by d’Annunzio, 73; on Pasolini death, 192n8; See also avant-garde film film to be made. See film da farsi Fi ntidhar Pasolini (Waiting for Pasolini) (Aoulad-Syad), 154; high priest in, 155–57 fiore delle mille e una note, Il (Arabian Nights): authorship in, 15–16; Foucault and, 142–43; in Cairo setting for, 140–41; death in, 142–43; homosexuality in, 143–44, 144; masturbation in, 140–41; mise-en-scène of, 15–16; Pasolini in, 140–42; queer agenda of, 144–45; transmedia artist of, 142; Fortini, Franco, 72–73, 102, 171, 215n99 Foucault, Michel: Calderón influenced by, 30–31; on Comizi d’amore, 163; on en abyme, 26–27; Les mots et les choses by, 26; on power, 34; on spectator dialectic, 26–27, 199n22; “What Is an Author?” by, 7–8, 142–43, 199n21 four libertines, 176–77 framing gaze, 132, 132 fresco: authorial performance and, 135–136; Judgment as, 134 Fusillo, Massimo, 66, 177 Gallop, Jane, 184 Galluzzi, Francesco, 119, 121 García Lorca, Federico, 28, 199n28 Gardner, Ava, 92, 93, 94 Garofalo, Ettore, 83–84 Genette, Gerard, 68 Gennariello (fictional character), 8–9

252

Gesture or Scream Theater. See Teatro del Gesto o dell’Urlo Giotto: Baldessari and, 133, 221n30; as painter, 129–31; Penna for, 221n31 Giotto’s pupil (fictional character): in Il Decameron, 15–16; framing gaze by, 132, 132; Pasolini as, 129–31, 132 gobbo, Il (Hunchback of Rome, The), 77 God, voice of, 158, 160–62 Godard, Jean-Luc, 78, 86–88, 159 Gold Marilyn Monroe (Warhol), 99 Gordon, Robert C. S., 63, 191n6, 205n29, 213n57 Gospel According to Saint Matthew, The. See vangelo secondo Matteo, Il Gragnolati, Manuele, 13, 55, 62, 67, 152, 223n9 Greenblatt, Stephen, 136 Green, Naomi, 137, 178 Gramsci, Antonio, 33, 55, 59, 103, 126, 215n107 Gruppo 63, 64, 69 “Guerra civile” (Civil war) (Pasolini), 11 Halberstam, Jack, 62, 67 Halliday, Jon, 87, 89, 159–60, 212n48 Haverty Rugg, Linda, 130, 132, 138 Hawks and Sparrows. See Uccellacci e uccellini high priest (fictional character): as author, 153–54; in Fi ntidhar Pasolini, 155–56; Pasolini as, 153, 155; Thami as, 155–57, 156 Hitchcock, Alfred, 84, 86, 157–58, 183–84, 225n36–37 homophobia, 164–76 homosexuality: adolescent male figures and, 109–10 in Affabulazione, 20; authorial performance and, 166–67; by authorship, 143; celebrity from, 74–76; in Comizi d’amore, 164–65, 226n66; in Il fiore delle mille e una note, 143–44, 144; invisibility of, 165; living protest influenced by, 11–12, 76, 166–67, 195n42;

index

martyrdom and, 196n48; Rumble on, 11–12; in Self-Portrait with a Flower in His Mouth, 112; silence and, 166–167; St. Sebastian and, 196n48; in La trilogia della vita, 126, 144–45 Hooper, Lawrence, 198n13 Hunchback of Rome, The. See gobbo, Il icon, 4, 192n8 ideal audience: authorship and, 19–20; intellectuals as, 22–23, 26; and Orgia, 22–23; ideal reader, 59 identity, 54–55, 205n28 imago mundi, 119–20 Indiana, Gary, 139 Infascelli, Fiorenza, 202n66 Inferno (Alighieri), 50–51, 203n10 innocence, 101, 116, 126–27, 141, 182 Innocent Fig Tree, The. See fico innocente, Il Intellectual. See Intellettuale intellectuals, 22–23, 26; and power, 125 Intellettuale (Intellectual): by Mauri, 16–17; Pasolini’s performance in, 185, 186, 187, 187; “Velázquez effect” of, 185, 187 interview: authorial performance by, 88–89, 213nn56–57; in Comizi d’amore, 162–66, 227n70; of La ricotta, 80–81, 89–90; “Worldly Poems” in, 81–82. See also radio interview; self-interview “Is the Rectum a Grave?” (Bersani), 12, 195n46 Italian avant-garde theater: “Nuovo Teatro” of, 198n6; “Teatro di Parola” of, 21 Italian Communist Party (PCI), 76, 110, 112, 210n18, 217n16 Italian star directors, 72, 78 Jacobowitz, Florence, 96 Joubert-Laurencin, Hervè, 32, 201n51 jouissance (passive pleasure), 12, 141 Judgment (Giotto), 134 Kinoglaz (kino-eye), 132

index

Krauss, Rosalind, 175, 177 Kuon, Peter, 55 Lacan, Jacques, gaze theory by, 42, 102n64; mirror stage by, 110 Landy, Marcia, 72, 78 Large Glass, The. See mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, meme, La legal charges, 75–77, 210n15; and Ramuscello, 76, 112, 217n16; and celebrity, 119 Life Is a Dream. See vida es sueño, La Listri, Massimo, 105, 107, 109, 123–24, 129, 142, 182, 215n1 living protest: 11–12, 68, 76, 84, 92, 104, 122, 150, 166–67, 182. Living Theatre: 21, 24, 197n5 Lizzani, Carlo: collaboration of, 159; Il gobbo by, 77, 211n22 Location Hunting in Palestine. See Sopralluoghi in Palestina Longhi, Roberto, 29, 80, 114–15, 180 Loren, Sofia, 92, 94, 94 Lotta Continua: 33–34, 75 Love and Anger. See Amore e rabbia Love Meetings. See Comizi d’amore Luglio, Davide, 32, 208n73 Maggi, Armando, 30, 31, 46, 176, 199n26, 201n57 Magnani, Anna, 1, 2, 78, 82–83 Malagreda, Miguel Andés, 164 Mamma Roma: Dante influence on, 52, 203n14; authorial poetics of, 3–4, 114; for Longhi, 114–15; Magnani in, 1, 78; motorcycle scene in, 1, 2, 3; in La ricotta, 82–84, 83; about “Worldly Poems,” 83 maniera italiana, La (The Italian manner) (Briganti), 80 “Manifesto per un nuovo teatro” (“Manifesto for a New Theater”) (Pasolini): authorial performance and, 14, 21–23, 25–26; against Brecht, 32–33; in Nuovi Argomenti, 21

253

Mannerism, 80, 87 Manzoli, Giacomo, 152 Maraschin, Donatella, 149 Marchesini, Alberto, 38, 61, 114, 129 mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, meme, La (The Large Glass) (Duchamp), 175, 179, 180 Marilyn Diptych (Warhol), 99–100, 100 Marshall, P. David, 92 martyrdom, 196n48 Marxism, 34, 50–51, 81. See also Marxist talking crow Marxist talking crow, 1, 3, 191n2 Masaccio, 114–15, 131 masochism, 12–13, 20 mass culture, 4–5, 23–24, 28, 33, 62, 91, 127, 150 masturbation, 140–41 Mattei, Enrico, 192n8 Mauri, Fabio, 16–17, 185–87, 186, 187, 189, 216n5 Mauri, Silvana, 112, 227n70 Medea, 78, 82 meglio gioventù, La (The Best of Youth) (Pasolini), 13, 123–24 meninas, Las: author in, 26–27; in Calderón, 29, 199n26; in Che cosa sono le nuvole?, 38–39, 39; Les mots et les choses on, 26; and Salò, o le 120 giornate di Sodoma, 41; spectator and, 26; by Velázquez, 26–27, 29, 38–39, 39, 41, 42, 199n26; “Velázquez effect” of, 40–41 “Merda, Il” (The Shit) (Pasolini), 171–72 Merjian, Ara H., 99 metalinguistic work: and cinema, 19, 78, 130–32, 136, 148; and La sequenza del fiore di carta, 159–62; and Petrolio, 16, 171–72; and Salò, o le 120 giornate di Sodoma, 44, 48; and Velázquez, 26–28 Miconi, Andrea, 103 mirrors: in Salò, o le 120 giornate di Sodoma, 41–42, 43; Žižek on, 41–44 mise-en-abyme: of book list, 174–75; La ricotta as, 86

254

mise-en-scène: of Il fiore delle mille e una note, 15–16; of self-portrait, 114; “Teatro di Parola” lack of, 24 Mitchell, W. J. T., 181 Modugno, Domenico, 35–36, 201n51 mondo non mi vuole più e non lo sa, Il (The world doesn’t want me anymore and doesn’t know it): authorship of, 123–24; by Pasolini, 119, 119–20 Monroe, Marilyn: blond hair of, 98–99; celebrity culture and, 101; Gold Marilyn Monroe (Warhol), 99; Marilyn Diptych (Warhol), 99–100, 100; Monroe sequence of (Warhol), 95–96, 97, 98; neutralizing sexuality of, 101; in La rabbia, 95–96, 97; as sex symbol, 98–99; suicide of, 95, 103–4; as victim, 101–2 montage, death as, 4–5, 65, 95–96, 161–62; in La rabbia, 15, 92, 96; in La Ricotta, 80, 115; in Petrolio, 170–71; signifying power of, 91, 161 Moravia, Alberto, 21, 78, 178, 180 Morin, Edgar, 76, 92, 99, 163–64 mortaccia, La (The ugly death) (Pasolini): Dante in, 52; Inferno and, 50; Monroe in, 95; realism of, 50–51 mots et les choses, Les (The Order of Things) (Foucault), 26–27, 199n21 multimediality, 14–15, 36–37, 87, 130, 172 Mulvey, Laura, 183 My Amado. See Amado mio “My Ex-Life” (Pasolini), 13–14 myth, of Narcissus, 110–11; of Monroe, 95; Pasolini as, 4, 11, 66, 72, 74–77, 84, 103, 113, 139 mythopoeic function, 102 Naldini, Nico, 53, 112, 192n7 Narcissus, 110–112, 217n13 neo-avant-garde, 64. See also Gruppo 63 neocapitalism, 20, 28, 52, 101, 141, 195n46; and abstraction, 120–21 neocolonialism, 149

index

neorealism: of Paisà, 37–38, 201n53; of Uccellacci e uccellini, 191n2 New Criticism, 6 newsreel. See cinegiornale New Theater. See “Nuovo Teatro” New Youth, The. See nuova gioventù, La Nightingale of the Catholic Church, The. See usignolo della Chiesa cattolica, L’ “Note 6 Bis” (Pasolini), 183 “Note n. 1” (Pasolini): of La divina mimesis, 57; Teorema and, 58–60 Notes Toward an African Orestes. See Appunti per un’Orestiade Africana Notes Toward a Poem on the Third World. See Appunti per un poema sul Terzo Mondo nouvelle vague, 77–78, 86 nude portraits: Belpoliti on, 179–82; by Pedriali, 16–17, 179–82, 184 nudity, 127, 220n6 nuova gioventù, La (The New Youth) (Pasolini): on definitive word, 50; La meglio gioventù and, 123–24 Nuovi Argomenti, 21 “Nuovo Teatro” (New Theater), 198n6 Oedipus Rex. See Edipo re Order of Things, The. See mots et les choses, Les Oresteia, 148–49 Orgia (Orgy) (Pasolini): audience of, 23; ideal audience for, 22–23; sadomasochism in, 20; staging of, 25 orientalism, 143 Orlando, Valérie K., 154 Othello, 35–37, 201n51 Othello (fictional character), 35–38, 40 painter: Giotto as, 129–31; Pasolini as, 113–14, 131; Pietro as, 60–61, 62, 206n44 painting: filming and, 130–31, 220n23; La ricotta and, 115–16; Zigaina for, 109, 216n7 Paisà (Paisan): Don Quixote influence on, 201n53; neorealism of, 37–38, 201n53; by Rossellini, 36–37 Paolo, 177–78

index

Pasolini, Carlo Alberto, 173 Pasolini, Guido, 102, 215n101 Pasolini, Pier Paolo, 23, 46, 107, 132, 137, 155, 186 –87; as artiste maudit, 63–64; and Christ, 13, 51, 102, 187; murder of, 3–5, 66–67, 156, 189, 191n6, 192n8, 207n55, 208n69, 210n15, 216n7; expulsion from the Communist Party, 44, 89; legal charges against, 75–77, 210n15; as myth, 4, 11, 66, 72, 74–77, 84, 103, 113, 139; and Ramuscello, 76, 112, 217n16; and celebrity, 119. See also specific topics Pasolini, Susanna, 81, 186, 187 pasolinidi, 75–76, 210n17 Pasquale (fictional character), 183 passive pleasure. See jouissance Patti, Emanuela, 67, 203n11 Pedriali, Dino, 17, 179–82, 184 penitence, 181–82 Penna, Sandro, 69, 130, 135, 221n31 persecution: for celebrity, 74–75, 210n15; from press, 75–76, 210n16 petit bourgeoisie, 9–10, 195n31 Petrolio (Oil) (Pasolini): “artistic sublimation” in, 13; authorial inscription in, 177; authorial performance in, 171, 178; corporeal performance in, 16–17, 178–79; “Discovery at Porta Portese, A” (Pasolini), 173–74; as “final work,” 169; genre of, 171–72; as metawork, 39; narrator of, 183; “Note 6 Bis” of, 183; as oral report, 183; Pasolini in, 173–75; penitence by, 181–82; politics in, 169; as summa, 169, 175–76, 182; unpublished text of, 170, 175–76; Vallecchi of, 170, 173; Vas title for, 181; Picasso, Pablo, 28, 199n28, 206n44 pictorial technique, 60 Pier 18: Hands Framing New York Harbor, 132, 133 Pietro (fictional character), 59–62, 62, 112–13, 122, 179, 206n44 Pigsty. See Porcile Pilade (Pylades) (Pasolini), 20 Pleasure of the Text, The (Barthes), 184

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Poem in the Shape of a Rose. See Poesia in forma di rosa Poems in Casarsa. See Poesie a Casarsa Poesia in forma di rosa (Poem in the Shape of a Rose) (Pasolini): 9–10, 57–58; “The Beautiful Flags” in, 13; on crisis, 116–17; “Desperate Vitality” in, 88; as diary, 57; “Plan for Future Works” in 39, 50; and The Ricotta, 69, 82 Poesie a Casarsa (Poems in Casarsa) (Pasolini), 51, 110, 113 Porcile (Pigsty) (Pasolini), 20, 196n48 Portrait of Pasolini (Listri), 105, 108, 109, 216n5 portraits: of author, 82, 87, 102, 137, 142, 158, 182; as erotic sublimation, 110; of Monroe, 96, 98–100, 103; by Pasolini, 15, 116, 121–22; in Theorem, 112–13; by Warhol, 100–1; See also nude portraits; self-portrait posthumous work, 66 Postmortem Miracles of Saint Francis, 134 power: and authorial performance, 11, 23, 77, 89, 211n22; Barthes on, 125–26; in Calderón, 28–31, 34–35; Foucault on, 27, 34; and massmedia, 71–74, 90, 98; in Petrolio, 169–70; in Salò, o le 120 giornate di Sodoma, 44, 47–48; utopian body against, 126–27 “Preliminari alla lingua del Petrarca” (Contini), 52 press, 75–76, 210n16 Pressburger, Giorgio, 199n26 Proust, Marcel, 53, 196n48 puppet show, 35–38, 201n53 Pylades. See Pilade queer agenda, 144–45; and authorship, 7, 11–12, 165, 184–85; Edelman on, 195n46; Halberstam on, 62, 67; and movement, 195n42; performance, 16, 166–67 rabbia, La (The Anger): Adagio in G Minor for, 103; celebrity culture in, 14–15, 92–93; and cinegiornale Mondo Libero, 91;

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rabbia, La (The Anger) (continued) Didi-Huberman on, 92; exhumed bones, 92, 93, 94; Monroe in, 95–96, 97; as “The Unpopular Cinema,” 91–92 racconti di Canterbury, I (The Canterbury Tales): authorship in, 135–36; Chaucer in, 15–16, 135–36; Il Decameron in, 137, 137–38 radio interview, 8–9 Ragazzi di vita (The Ragazzi), 50–51, 203n10 Rainer, Arnulf, 122 realism, 14, 37, 64, 123, 126; of Dante, 51–52, 55, 203n11; in painting, 131 Rear Window, 183–84 remonter, 92 resistance, authorial performance as, 11, 15, 33, 103–4; agaist mass culture, 127, 150 Rhodes, John David, 145, 159 Ricciardi, Alessia, 149, 177, 195n46 Ricketts, Jill M., 129–30 ricotta, La (The Ricotta): 77–78; Accattone and, 83–84; authorship in, 14–15; Cipriani in, 83–84, 85; color in, 79–80; director in, 90–91; “Una disperata vitalità” and, 87–88; Fellini in, 90–91, 213n66; Garofalo in, 83–84; interview scene of, 80–81, 89–90; Mamma Roma in, 82–84, 83; La maniera italiana influence on, 80; as mise-en-abyme, 86; painting and, 115–16; plot of, 78–79, 211n27; poetry of, 86, 130–31; as transition work, 79–80; “Velázquez effect” of, 82–83; vocal performance in, 158; Welles in, 55–56, 78, 205n35 Rinaldi, Rinaldo, 49, 110 Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice (Bell), 24–25 Rome, 50–51 Rosaura (fictional character): as protagonist, 28–29, 200n29; Theresa and, 29–30 Rossellini, Roberto, 36–38, 72, 78, 201n53 Rossi, Aldo, 5

index

Rouch, Jean, 162–63 Rumble, Patrick, 11–12 Sade, Marquis de, 41, 46, 139, 140 sadomasochism, 20 Saiwa ads, 73–74 Salò, o le 120 giornate di Sodoma (Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom): authorial performance in, 44; Barthes influence on, 5; bibliography of, 139–40; Calderón influence on, 45–46; on fascism, 73–74; Femmes femmes in, 46–48; lost last scene of, 46, 202n66; Las meninas for, 41; mirrors of, 41–42, 43; power in, 44, 47–48; self-interview of, 89–90; shot reverse shots in, 40–44, 45; “Velázquez effect” in, 41, 43 scandal, 75–76, 119, 122; authorship as, 10–12, 103–04, 145, 166, 182 “segni viventi e i poeti morti, I” (Living signs and dead poets) (Pasolini), 65–66 self-interview, 89–90 self-portrait: authorial performance of, 112–13; crisis by, 119–20; “Una disperata vitalità” as, 117, 119; mise-en-scène of, 114; by Pasolini, 105, 106, 107, 109–10, 116–17, 118, 119–120, 122–23, 215n1, 216n3; “Velázquez effect” of, 114; work as, 124; “Worldly Poems” as, 81–82 Self-Portrait with a Fever. See Autoritratto con la febbre Self-Portrait with a Flower in His Mouth: homosexuality in, 112; by Pasolini, 105, 106, 107, 109, 216n3 sequence. See sequenza Sequence of the Paper Flower, The. See sequenza del fiore di carta, La sequenza del fiore di carta, La (The Sequence of the Paper Flower): as avant-garde film, 159–60; voice-over in, 16, 159, 161–62 sex comedy, Italian style. See commedia erotica all’italiana sex symbol, 98–99

index

shot reverse shots, 40–44, 45, 149 Schwartz, Barth David, 74, 179, 182 silence, 152, 166–67 Silverman, Kaja, 151, 158 singers of tales. See cantastorî Siti, Walter, 5, 53, 68, 99, 181 skull, 92, 93, 94 slums. See borgate Smandolinate, 38, 201n57 Sofri, Adriano, 33–34 Sontag, Susan, 95, 196n48 Sopralluoghi in Palestina (Location Hunting in Palestine), 147–48 Speaker (fictional character), 31–32, 151 spectacular authorship: Bondavalli on, 71–72, 80, 205n35; Fortini against, 72–73 spectator: authorship of, 40; dialectic of, 26–27, 199n22; Las meninas and, 26; stardom: 94–95; by Italian star directors, 78; Landy on, 78; by Warhol, 99–100 stasima (action pause), 31–32 Storia interiore (Inner history) (Pasolini), 20 St. Sebastian, 196n48 Subini, Tomaso, 79, 90 Subproletariat, 51, 69, 79–80, 128, 131, 141, 162 subtitles, 163–64 suspended meaning. See “canone sospeso” tableaux vivants, 79, 79 Teatro del Gesto o dell’Urlo (Gesture or Scream Theater), 21 Teatro della Chiacchiera (Chat Theater), 21–22 “Teatro di Parola” (Word Theater): 21, 24 television, 72, 74, 75, 88 Teorema (Theorem) (Pasolini): authorial performance and, 60–61, 112, 122, 179; Divina mimesis and, 58–60; two paradises of, 58–59; Pietro in, 59–62, 62, 112–13, 122, 179, 206n44

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terra vista dalla luna, La (Earth Seen from the Moon): closing sentence of, 3; Uccellacci e uccellini and, 36, 201n49 Thami (fictional character): of Edipo re, 154–55, 156; as high priest, 155–57, 156 Theorem. See Teorema Theresa, Margaret, 29–30 Third World, 128, 148–49, 154 Timecode, 1, 2, 3 Totò: in Che cosa sono le nuvole?, 35–36; in Uccellacci e uccellini, 3, 59, 201n57 transmedia artist, 142 Trento, Dario, 109, 148 Tricomi, Antonio, 34 trilogia della vita, La (The Trilogy of Life): authorship and, 15–16, 123, 129, 133, 154, 179; Barthes on, 5; corporeal performance in, 126, 128; homosexuality in, 126, 144–45, 166 Truffaut, François: on auteur, 85–86; critique of, 86–87 Turcs tal Friul, I (The Turks in Friuli), 20 two paradises, 58–59 Two Women. See ciociara, La Uccellacci e uccellini (Hawks and Sparrows): theatrical adaption of, 24; authorial performance in, 40, 59; authorial poetics of, 3–4; Davoli in, 1, 3; neorealism of, 191n2; La terra vista dalla luna and, 36, 201n49; Totò in, 1, 3 Ugolini, Sara, 119 usignolo della Chiesa cattolica, L’ (The Nightingale of the Catholic Church), 13–14 “Unpopular Cinema, The” (Pasolini): 9–11, 22, 76, 104, 182 utopian body, 126–27 Vallecchi, Carlo (fictional character), 170, 172–76, 183–84 vangelo secondo Matteo, Il (The Gospel According to Saint Matthew): 16–17, 56, 80, 162 corporeal performance and, 185, 187

258

Vas title, 181 Velázquez, Diego: Che cosa sono le nuvole? influenced by, 38; Las meninas by, 26–27, 29, 38–39, 39, 41, 42, 199n26 “Velázquez effect”: in Intellettuale, 185, 187; in Las meninas, 40–41; in La ricotta, 82–83; in Salò, o le 120 giornate di Sodoma, 41, 43; and self-portrait, 114 Vertov, Dziga, 132 Viano, Maurizio, 36, 134–35, 152, 163 victim, 101–2 vida es sueño, La (Life Is a Dream) (Calderón), 14, 28 Viennese Actionism, 122 Visconti, Luchino, 72, 78 Visualizing Boccaccio (Ricketts), 129–30 Vita nuova (Dante), 56–57, 205n37 vocal performance: as Africa, 152; in Appunti per un’Orestiade Africana, 16, 151–52; of author, 157–58; in Comizi d’amore, 16; in fi lms, 16; in La ricotta, 158; subtitles influence on, 163–64 “Vocations and Techniques” (Pasolini), 60 voice-over, 16, 159, 161–62 “volontà di Dante a essere poeta, La” (Pasolini), 54, 204n26 Waiting for Pasolini. See Fi ntidhar Pasolini Warhol, Andy: celebrity and, 100–101, 214n94; Gold Marilyn Monroe by, 99;

index

Marilyn Diptych by, 99–100, 100; stardom by, 99–100 Welles, Orson: celebrity of, 84, 86; for living protest, 84; in La ricotta, 55–56, 78, 205n35 What Are the Clouds?. See Che cosa sono le nuvole? “What Is an Author?” (Foucault): on author, 7–8, 199n21; Il fiore delle mille e una note, 142–43 What Is Cinema? (Bazin), 37–38 Widiss, Benjamin, 7 Women Women. See Femmes femmes Word Theater. See “Teatro di Parola” world doesn’t want me anymore and doesn’t know it, The. See mondo non mi vuole più e non lo sa, Il “Worldly Poems” (Pasolini): in interview scene, 81–82; about Mamma Roma, 83; as self-portrait, 81–82 “Yellowed Iconography” (Pasolini): as biographemes, 69–70; in La divina mimesis, 68–69 young bodies, 128–29 Zabagli, Franco, 119 Zanzotto, Andrea, 103, 121–22 Zeri, Federico, 105, 109, 216n2 Zigaina, Giuseppe, 109, 120–21, 181, 208n69, 216n7 Žižek, Slavoj, 42–43, 184 zoophilia, 20, 196n48