From Neorealism to Sadism: Remembering Pier Paolo Pasolini

In principle, if Pasolini had been a Hollywood film director, he would have had a chance to gather friends and relatives around him today, as Kirk "Spartacus" Douglas did at 103. But the Italian film director was made of a completely different stuff - he did not pretend to be a tragic marginal hero, but was one in reality.

Pasolini, unlike many European film directors of all times, did not pretend to be a refined intellectual - he, again, was one. He not only made films, but also wrote novels and poems, which are now included in the Italian school curriculum. Pasolini's theoretical articles on literature and cinema were not written "in general", as everyone can do in our time of universal higher education, but on "technological" topics - for example, how certain famous directors built the frame and organized the movement of the camera during filming.

A theorist, which is extremely rare, was combined in him with one of the best practitioners in the history of cinema. Pasolini's first film, Accattone, about the life of the inhabitants of the Roman slums, shot in 1961 in the spirit of neorealism based on his own novel, can be called the pinnacle of this great cinematic movement.

Pasolini was generally an expert on the life of the Roman social underclass - for example, he wrote scenes for Fellini in his Nights of Cabiria and La Dolce Vita, for which it was necessary to know the specific language and behavior of Roman prostitutes. After all, Fellini was a pure theorist in this matter, unlike the "practitioner" Pasolini, who, due to his homosexual orientation, which was marginal for that time, was forced to use the services of paid street partners - which ultimately became the cause (at least in the official version) of his death.

That is why filmmakers still return to him - in 2014 and 2016, two feature films about the director's last days were shot, the most high-profile of which was "Pasolini" by the almost equally famous and scandalous Abel Ferrara. Pasolini was played by Willem Dafoe, who looked very much like him, and also had a reputation as an actor who starred in two, again, scandalous films in those years - "Antichrist" and "Nymphomaniac".

So Pasolini could not live to the age of Kirk Douglas - not the same character and not the same destiny.

Photo: Wikipedia