Pasolini Poster
by H.S. Bayer
“I lived that page of a novel, the only one of my life as far as the rest —
what can I say I have been living inside a poem, like every obsessive.”
Pier Paolo Pasolini
“In search of the death, of the last poet, only to find, the killer inside me… sharpening his tools of ignorance on the memories, of never forgotten acts of kindness. In words and deeds, ideas impossible to comprehend — those, who weave their spell in silver, are forever bound, to the lithe body of Giotto, constantly in search, of the creation of the winning goal, forever offside, forever in the lead of the faithful, of which I am one.”
Abel Ferrara, Rome 2014 – from his Director’s Statement
Abel Ferrara’s Pasolini premiered in the U.S., at the New York Film Festivalin its 52nd rendition, after opening at Venice’s 71st, followed by San Sebastian (its 62nd) and going to market at the 39th Toronto Film Festival. Abel and Willem Dafoe were on hand and in fine form.
The Synopsis:
One day, one life – Rome, the night of November 2, 1975, the great Italian poet and filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini is murdered. Pasolini is the symbol of an art that is fighting against power. His writings are scandalous, his films persecuted by the censors – many people love him and many hate him. The day of his death, Pasolini spends his last hours with his beloved mother and later on, with his dearest friends, before finally going out, into the night, in his Alfa Romeo, in search of adventure in the Eternal City. At dawn, Pasolini is found dead on a beach, in Ostia on the outskirts of the city. In a film dreamlike and visionary, a blend of reality and imagination, Abel Ferrara reconstructs the last day in the life of this great poet with frequent collaborator Willem Dafoe as Pier Paolo Pasolini.
A labour of love and a huge amount of research, Pasolini is a serious, stylistically and structurally creative homage to the great poet, novelist, journalist, newspaper columnist, screenwriter, filmmaker and seminal activist/political thinker and philosopher who epitomized Italy’s post WWII artistic and intellectual renaissance. Pasolini, at 53, had more than 50 screenwriting credits, had directed 16 narrative films and 9 documentaries, written 6 plays and had published 6 novels and 8 volumes of poetry, with several more works appearing posthumously – a painter and composer as well… at the peak of his creative powers, and thereby the great tragedy of his premature passing. The existential uncertainty and unfinished business associated with Pasolini’s untimely, unsettling and unnecessary violent demise still remains unresolved… considered in tandem with a score of his contemporaries – cultural game changers, who suffered similar fates… buried in the collective unconsciousness of post industrial, post atomic, techno-materialistic society. Therefore, his ideas and the direction and themes, of his work, are characters themselves.
Pasolini prophetically stated, in his last interview, with journalist Furio Colombo (played in the film byFrancesco Siciliano), and published in La Stampa, a week after his death as (Siamo tutti in pericolo) –We are all in danger! We exist in a society, spiritually and cognitively unprepared, to confront the problems of a world, driven by rampant consumerism and corrupted by pyramidal power structures in nearly every nation, whatever the ostensible economic social system in place. Among the symptoms: manufactured economic and physical wars, constant meaningless stress and behavioral excess increasingly fully monitored and selectively harshly punished… dependence on uncontrollable technology, reliance on one-dimensional thinking… subject to punitively manipulative, dysfunctional governance. We are thus distracted from or oblivious to, the end of Language and Ethics, the resulting globalized chaos and inhumanity, extinction of regional, ethnic and older cultures, destabilization of the physical environment and marginalization or extreme loss of individual autonomy. One could easily quadruple this list of day-to-day problems and long-term disasters already in various states of finality. Yet, we’re informed that we’re all in Paradise – fully updated. Resistance is futile. Pasolini stood in opposition to all this and used his art and writings to shock, to blaspheme… eloquent and eternally radical on multiple fronts. The political, philosophical and societal tensions and challenges Pasolini identified and wrote about 40 years ago have simply further intensified simultaneous with the steady disappearance and corresponding dispiriting, of oppositional political and philosophical thinkers and radical artists of true intellect – like Pasolini.
Pier Paulo Pasolini (1961)
PPP (From this last interview): I see that wonderful troop of intellectuals, sociologists, experts and journalists with the most noble of intentions. Things happen here, and their heads are turned in the opposite direction. And this desire ties us together as sinister brothers, of the sinister failure, of an entire social system. I too would like it if it were easy to isolate the black sheep. I too see the black sheep. I see quite a lot of them. I see all of them. That’s the problem, as given the life I lead, I pay a price… it’s like a descent into hell. But when, I come back – if I come back – I’ve seen other things, more things. I’m not asking you to believe me. I’m saying you always, find yourselves changing topic to avoid facing the truth. My nostalgia is for those, poor and real people who struggled to defeat the landlord without becoming that landlord. Since they were excluded, from everything, they remained uncolonized. I am afraid of the revolutionaries, who are the same as their landlords, equally criminal, who want everything, at any cost. This gloomy ostentation toward total violence makes it hard to distinguish to which “side” one belongs. Whoever, might be taken to an Emergency Ward close to death is probably more interested in, what the doctors have to tell him about, his chances of living than what the police might have to say, about the mechanism of the crime. Be assured that, I am neither condemning intentions nor am I interested in the chain of cause and effect – them first, him first, or who is the primary guilty party. I think we have defined the “situation.” It’s like it rains, in the city, and the gutters are backed up. The water rises, but the water is innocent, it’s rainwater. It has neither the fury of sea, nor the rage of river current. But, for some reason, it rises instead of falling. It’s the same water of the cutesy songs like “singing in the rain” – but it rises and it drowns you. If that’s where we are, I say, let’s not waste time placing name tags here and there. Let’s see then how we can unplug this tub before we all drown.
As Bob Dylan, (who did much of his best work in Pasolini’s era) sang: If you go down in the flood, it will be your own fault.
Abel put it this way in an interview with Nick Pinkerton in Film Comment: Pasolini was saying, Don’t think that you’re gonna be immune. If you’re on earth, and this is what’s happening to the world, don’t think that somehow you’re gonna save yourself because you’re living in a gated community, or you have something that’s supposed to protect you. You’re not gonna avoid it. We’re all in this together. What he was talking about specifically – to him the worst tragedy, which hit mankind, was Consumerism.
The term, Consumerism, Abel refers to, doesn’t fully correspond to America’s concept in translation. Although, Pasolini technically identifies the term as “the second industrial revolution”, the Italian implies more than just numbers of refrigerators or cars sold, housing starts or holiday sales figures. More salient… the immortal corporation… or the western ROI equation, in which depreciation of a machine, always trumps the negative cost assigned to human beings… interpretation of success, of enterprises, almost exclusively by quarterly results. Choosing 10 years of ‘profits and jobs’, from a questionable fracking location, over destruction of the water table for 2-3 generations, apparently is a no-brainer for the corporate mindset. Pasolini’s perception, of this “ism” – evolved through higher level thinking comparable to chess grandmasters or Nobel Prize winners – capable of simultaneous synthesis of strategic or theoretical conception with tactical or practical action.
In the 1960s, Italy experienced an economic consumer boom, offering new freedoms and aspirations, symbolically represented by films such as Fellini’s La Dolce Vita (1960 on which, Pasolini, received an “uncredited” writing credit). Pasolini, an ardent Communist, nearly his entire adult life, gradually observed this materialism taking root in the lives and thinking of, the proletariat and sub- proletariat (the marginal working class), whose daily existence is theoretically antithetical to the bourgeois materialists, in the class struggle critical to distinguishing Communism from Capitalism.
Geoff Andrews (in a 2005 essay written for the 30th anniversary of PPP’s death): He despaired at the emergence of a neo-capitalist empire set on destroying popular culture. He no longer believed that Gramsci’s, {Antonio Gramsci, the Sardinia – born Marxist who wrote his major works fromMussolini’s prison cell and the major influence in inspiring Pasolini’s socialist philosophy}, reconciliation between traditional culture and political change was possible. For Pasolini, the kind of mass hedonism that emerged during the 1960s, and which, by the 1970s, shattered his belief in working-class innocence.
PPP: My films were not for mass consumption. I could imagine nothing worse than producing something, for an alienated mass culture, for which I had no sympathy.
Andrews: Pasolini concluded that the kind of purity seen in the pre-industrial popular culture was rapidly vanishing, replaced with bourgeois ambitions. He described consumeristic culture as “unreal”, imposed by economic power and replacing Italy’s traditional peasant culture – something that not even fascism had been able to do.
PPP: I hate with particular vehemence, the current power, the power of 1975, which is a power that manipulates bodies in a horrible way – a manipulation that has nothing to envy to that performed by Himmler or Hitler.
By 1968 Pier Paolo moved away from Communism to a radical political philosophy, aligning with the Radical Party (Partito Radicale), left-libertarian, liberal and anti-clerical, led by his friend Marco Pannella. In October 1975, at his second to last interview, Pasolini declared to his Swedish audience:
Pasolini identified himself primarily as a writer
PPP: There are no more Marxists in Italy — there are no more Catholics in Italy. There is this contradiction — all those who consider themselves either Marxists or Communists are consumerists, too. Even the Italian Communist Party has accepted this development. Italian {Marxist} hardliners plant bombs and then watch TV in the evening.
Pasolini’s analysis considered the anti-humanistic core, the universal imposition of materialistic valuation, of all individual activity, in the same vein as modern social philosophers as disparate as Herbert Marcuse orJohn Trudell. Pasolini possessed the unique ability to discern, unmask and oppose the mechanisms of power and underlying structural and socio-economic forces that underpin the various ruling elites. In an interview scene in the film, Pasolini observes… that everyone’s a victim and everyone’s guilty in a violent life built on principles of acquisition and destruction.
His thinking essentially projected, how the resulting negative scenarios, if unchecked could prove to be suicidal, or at least, pervert or destroy our collective historical cultures and search for knowledge and truth, freedom of thought and personal life, spirituality, meaningful intellectual development and artistic creation and even the natural physical world. This made him dangerous to authoritarian power, no matter how elegantly cloaked in ‘popular democracy’ and slick PR enabled, in Italy then, by nearly complete media control. Consider the FBI on John Trudell – whose file said: He is very eloquent and therefore quite dangerous. The conspiracy theories that arose, from PPP’s murder, are rather logical and one of them may be true, but just as ultimately improvable as in the JFK assassination.
Dafoe/Pasolini cruising in his custom Alpha Romeo
Thus, the particulars, of Pasolini’s death and his very public homosexuality, transpire on screen in real time, artistically lensed and graphically intense, but not overemphasized or intended as paramount. Those ‘hot button’ subjects are counter balanced, by moments of tongue-in-cheek absurdity, serious cerebral and creative concerns, and passionate political polemics… from driving around, in his custom painted Alpha Romeo… to attending a formal political reception… to his ‘regular’ film director’s social life… to his ‘influential’ writer’s work life… to PPP’s words and images coming alive on the screen. Pasolini lyrically delves into a groundbreaking Auteur’s intellectual soul, grappling simultaneously with Faustian forces – writing a novel within a creative structure that’s yet to exist… attempting to evolve a humanistic politic for a chaotic world which continually censures him for making that attempt. Ferrara, the Auteur-Director, and Dafoe, the Actor-Auteur, raced into the abyss after Pasolini and survived the unpredictable process required to bring this film home. So, Abel did not make the epic attempt to resolve the controversial issue of PPP’s murder, in the film, despite having said he knew who killed Pasolini, in interviews, prior to its release. To do so, would have taken the film’s viewers out of Pasolini’s mind and into the brutal depths of late 20th century Italian politics, where the puppeteers behind the crime reside – probably never to be unmasked. Both Abel and screenwriter, Maurizio Braucci, address their approach further on in this article. A summary of various theories advanced on the murder case, accompanied by publicly known details and the historical context and event sequences, is in the epilogue, at the end of this piece.
The film often has a disjointed feel to it, in the way the lives and studios, of artists and filmmakers, working on multiple projects, usually appear to the outside world – a quality consistent with the intended structure and subject matter. Characterized as dreamlike, in the producer’s synopsis… yet not like a “Hollywood dream sequence;” it feels more like real dreams where characters linger in scenes with incomplete dialogue, in different languages. Then it jumps to other moments, with other characters in different locations… somehow ineffably connected, to the main, continually, changing persona – without certainty, as to the meaning or what exactly happened. This mood derives from, the film’s depiction of, Pasolini obsessively moving between working films and writings and dryly conducted media interviews – the true impact, of their international importance, off screen, in another time and place. His career activities, interspersed with views of his family… supper with Ninetto Davoli… sexual adventures… vivid hypothetical, fully staged scenes, from an unproduced movie and an unfinished book, and fragments from the day’s events… render a typical 40 hour day for PPP, which ends horribly abruptly. The film, sensitively encapsulates, the essence of Pasolini. It successfully brings his legacy to a world, which has mostly forgotten, both the man and the stakes involved – in many artistic and intellectual issues of the 60’s and 70’s (and even the 80’s and 90’s, since PPP was, at least, 20 years ahead of his time)… those matters not yet settled properly, to this day – several flaring up, at this very moment.
Ninetto Davoli (RT. Foreground) & Riccardo Scamarcio