Pier Paolo Pasolini’s cinema is deeply embedded in Italian culture: hence the confusion that many British and American critics have felt when confronted with his work. This is not only because many of the important influences on Pasolini (1922-1975)—Pascoli, Gramsci, Rossellini—are little known in the United States and the United Kingdom, but also because Italian culture itself is full of contradictory traits and components, which Pasolini’s films reflect. The most obvious of these contradictions, of course, is that between Catholicism and Marxism, the two commanding ideologies that dominate Italian intellectual life, both of which have left their stamp on Pasolini. The restlessness and eclecticism of Pasolini’s career, which shifted incessantly from one genre to another—painting, poetry, criticism, short stories, novels, feature films, reportage, and the theater—and from one style and subject matter to another, reflect a search for some appeasement of the multiplicity of incompatible contradictions that formed his view of the world and of art.
Pasolini’s Marxism itself is far from being a unifying system: in his thought it is but one of many conflicting strands, now surfacing, now submerging. If there is one constant, one invariable, it is Pasolini’s uncritical attachment to the peasantry, an attachment that can be presented in the light of Marxism, but more consistently in the light of a backward- looking romanticism. He took from Gramsci, for example, the emphasis on the potentially revolutionary role of the Italian peasantry and the need,in Italian conditions, for a national-popular movement. Thus was Pasolini able to absorb Marxism partially without permitting it to overwhelm in its totality other aspects of his thought.
When Pasolini started directing films he had already worked on a number of scripts, for directors like Fellini and Bolognini. This was on the strength of his Roman novels, Ragazzi di vita and Una vita violenta. Many of his scripts were set in the same Roman sub-proletarian milieu, and these led directly to his first films as a director, Accattone and Mamma Roma, which should be seen as part of his “Roman” period, including novels and screenplays as well as his work as a director in his own right. It is misleading to divorce Pasolini’s work in the cinema from his other work, particularly his writing: poetry, novels, criticism. Like Robbe-Grillet and Kluge, Pasolini was a writer before he was a director, and his writing continued unabated throughout his career. Theorem, for example, appeared as a book as well as a film.
After Mamma Roma, Pasolini’s next major work was The Gospel According to St. Matthew, in which the influence of Rossellini, especially his film Francesco, giullare di Dio, first became prominent. Pasolini’s cinema is clearly in the tradition not only of Rossellini but also of Dreyer and Mizoguchi, in its juxtaposition of natural and supernatural elements, though it lacks the purity and coherence of the work of these masters. In The Gospel, for instance, a traditional Christology, drawn from sacred music and painting, is superimposed on the brusque and literal, Rossellinian treatment of a popular and anecdotal text, and the result is to deliver the film into the hands of the Catholic Church. Yet The Gospel is the film of Pasolini’s that least betrays his drive towards eclecticism and pastiche. In Uccellacci e uccellini, for instance, different levels, styles, and allusions—to Rossellini, Fellini, Lukács, Togliatti, even the Pope—jostle against each other in hopeless confusion.
Despite the lack of any consistent drive, either in form or content, one underlying tendency can be discerned in Pasolini’s career: his emphasis on the need to restore an epic and mythological dimension to life, a sense of awe and reverence to the world—a sense, he believed, that the peasantry still sustain, though the bourgeoisie itself has done all in its power to destroy it.
The following extract is from an interview with Pasolini in Rome in 1968.
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| The Gospel According to St Matthew (Directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini) |
Q: In “The Cinema of Poetry” you mention the importance of making the audience aware of the camera as a criterion of poetic cinema. There has been some confusion as to whether you meant that the cinema is naturally poetry and, if so, first, how has prose cinema—like the aforementioned Gideon of Scotland—managed on the whole to impose itself?; and, second, if the cinema is naturally poetry, in what way does making people aware of the camera determine whether or not it is poetry?
P.P.P.: In my view the cinema is substantially and naturally poetic, for the reasons I have stated: because it is dreamlike, because it is close to dreams, because a cinematic sequence and a sequence of memory or of a dream—and not only that but things in themselves, in reality—are profoundly poetic: a tree photographed is poetic, a human face photographed is poetic because physicality is poetic in itself, because it is an apparition, because it is full of mystery, because it is full of ambiguity, because it is full of polyvalent meaning, because even a tree is a sign of a linguistic system. But who talks through a tree? God, or reality itself. Therefore the tree as a sign puts us in communication with a mysterious speaker. Therefore the cinema, by directly reproducing objects physically, is substantially if paradoxically poetic at the same time. This is one aspect of the problem, let’s say a pre-historic, almost pre-cinematographic one. After that we have the cinema as a historical fact, as a means of communication, and as such it too is beginning to develop into different subspecies, like all communications media. Just as literature has a language for prose and a language for poetry, so does the cinema. That’s what I was saying. In this case you must forget that the cinema is naturally poetic because it is a type of poetry, which, I repeat, is pre-historic, amorphous, unnatural. If you see a bit of the most banal western ever made or any old commercial film, if you look at it in a non-conventional way, even a film like that will reveal the dreamlike and poetic quality which exists physically and naturally in the cinema; but this is not the cinema of poetry. The cinema of poetry is the cinema that adopts a particular technique just as a poet adopts a particular technique when he writes verse. If you open a book of poetry, you can see the style immediately, the rhyme-scheme and all that: you see the language as an instrument, or you count the syllables in the verse. The equivalent of what you see in a text of poetry you can also find in a cinematic text, through the stylemes—i.e., through the camera movements and the montage. So to make films is to be a poet.
– An Interview with Pier Paolo Pasolini. In After New-Realism, Ed. Bert Cardullo.
P.P.P.: In my view the cinema is substantially and naturally poetic, for the reasons I have stated: because it is dreamlike, because it is close to dreams, because a cinematic sequence and a sequence of memory or of a dream—and not only that but things in themselves, in reality—are profoundly poetic: a tree photographed is poetic, a human face photographed is poetic because physicality is poetic in itself, because it is an apparition, because it is full of mystery, because it is full of ambiguity, because it is full of polyvalent meaning, because even a tree is a sign of a linguistic system. But who talks through a tree? God, or reality itself. Therefore the tree as a sign puts us in communication with a mysterious speaker. Therefore the cinema, by directly reproducing objects physically, is substantially if paradoxically poetic at the same time. This is one aspect of the problem, let’s say a pre-historic, almost pre-cinematographic one. After that we have the cinema as a historical fact, as a means of communication, and as such it too is beginning to develop into different subspecies, like all communications media. Just as literature has a language for prose and a language for poetry, so does the cinema. That’s what I was saying. In this case you must forget that the cinema is naturally poetic because it is a type of poetry, which, I repeat, is pre-historic, amorphous, unnatural. If you see a bit of the most banal western ever made or any old commercial film, if you look at it in a non-conventional way, even a film like that will reveal the dreamlike and poetic quality which exists physically and naturally in the cinema; but this is not the cinema of poetry. The cinema of poetry is the cinema that adopts a particular technique just as a poet adopts a particular technique when he writes verse. If you open a book of poetry, you can see the style immediately, the rhyme-scheme and all that: you see the language as an instrument, or you count the syllables in the verse. The equivalent of what you see in a text of poetry you can also find in a cinematic text, through the stylemes—i.e., through the camera movements and the montage. So to make films is to be a poet.
– An Interview with Pier Paolo Pasolini. In After New-Realism, Ed. Bert Cardullo.
