Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922–1975) has the dubious distinction of being the only great filmmaker who was murdered, possibly at the behest of a right-wing faction which loathed the openly gay, Marxist, atheist – and popular – artist. Whatever the facts of his death (conspiracy theories still abound), his reputation is based securely on his extraordinary legacy as an author and filmmaker.

Pasolini was one of the most prodigiously gifted artists of the twentieth century: poet, novelist, literary and political theorist, screenwriter, actor, cinematographer, editor, composer, producer, and the director of twenty-five films. His works continue to delight, enrage, and illuminate audiences around the world. 

Pasolini as Poet, Novelist, and Theorist

Pasolini considered himself primarily a poet, despite his acclaimed, albeit controversial, work as a novelist, a literary and political theorist and, of course, a filmmaker. His poetic vision informs his entire body of work, not to mention his private life. Sometimes with joy, sometimes with despair, but always with passion and insight, Pasolini focuses on people forced to live on the fringes of society, outside the bounds of law, and often in violent conflict with the majority. He also frequently turned to landmarks of world literature for inspiration. His range is enormous, from long-vanished cultures – mythic Greece (Oedipus Rex, Medea) to the Middle East (Arabian Nights) to Jesus's Judea (The Gospel According to Saint Matthew) to Boccaccio's Italy (Decameron) and Chaucer's England (Canterbury Tales) – to the Italy of his own day (Accattone, Mamma Roma, Love Meetings, Teorema). At his best, Pasolini has a genius for combining naturalistic performances, probing social and psychological insight, and luminous cinematography into films with enormous richness of both emotion and ideas.

He was born in Bologna in 1922, and grew up near his devoted mother's rural birthplace of Friuli in north-eastern Italy. His antagonism towards his father, a gung-ho Fascist officer, combined with his discovery of Rimbaud, showed Pasolini that poetry could be used to fight authoritarianism. Also during his youth, Pasolini abandoned all ties with organized religion (although he always respected his mother's heartfelt piety, and some see his Gospel According to Saint Matthew as a tribute to her).

In 1942 his first volume of verse, Poesie a Casarsa, written in the native Friulian dialect, was published to considerable acclaim, while he was still a student at the University of Bologna. Conscripted into the army, the Germans took him prisoner after the Italians surrendered to the Allied forces. In an episode worthy of Hollywood, Pasolini managed to escape, after which he hid out with his family. In many of his films, Pasolini explores themes of being on the run and hiding.

In 1945 he joined – and rose through the ranks of – a cell of the Communist party (although in the war they had shot his beloved brother Guido), while still working as a teacher in a local school. Four years later, after being caught in a tryst with three young men, Pasolini was thrown out of the school, not to mention the Communist party, for "corruption of minors."

In 1949 he moved to Rome, where he wrote both poems and the first two parts of a contemplated (but never completed) trilogy of painfully realistic books about the city's teeming slum life. Those novels, The Ragazzi (1955) and A Violent Life (1959), written in a style combining both Roman and rural dialects, showed that Pasolini had arrived as a major new literary voice. Of course, never too far removed from controversy, he was indicted on charges of "obscenity" for The Ragazzi. He continued writing fiction throughout his life, including Teorema (1968), which he debuted simultaneously as both a novel and film, and at his death left the unfinished epic novel, Petrolio.

He also continued to write poetry throughout his life. Perhaps the most acclaimed of his nine collections is The Ashes of Gramsci (1957), inspired by the theories and life of Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937), who co-founded Italy's Communist Party, and who died after spending ten years imprisoned by the Fascist. In these poems, as in many of his purely theoretical writings and even his films, Pasolini grapples with his simultaneous attraction towards and revulsion against Communism's world view.

This probing of received ideas, even those of fundamental importance to him, defines Pasolini's art and life. His Marxism outraged the Catholics; the Communists distrusted his fascination with Christianity; and most groups were aghast at his being openly gay, not to mention both socially subversive and wildly talented. Pasolini thrived on all of these swirling controversies.

Perhaps as a respite from his intellectual adventures, in the 1950s Pasolini turned more and more frequently to the film industry. He began as an actor, and then became fascinated with screenwriting. His most famous assignment came in 1957, when he served as a consultant, specializing in Rome's demimonde, to Federico Fellini on his classic, Nights of Cabiria.
 

Pasolini and Italian Cinema

Before examining Pasolini's own films, here is a brief look at their context. Pasolini turned to filmmaking at a time when Italian cinema was thriving, both artistically and commercially. That had not always been the case.

Italy's film industry began at one of its zeniths, with epic productions, such as Giovanni Pastrone's spectacular period piece Cabiria (1914), exerting a strong influence on international cinema (D.W. Griffith acknowledged the debt of his 1916 masterpiece Intolerance to Pastrone). Italian cinema remained vital until Mussolini co-opted it in 1935, for the production of propaganda. After the war, it rebounded strikingly with Neorealism, a highly influential style – which grew out of economic necessity – characterized by its rough technique, use of non-professional actors, and political emphasis. The movement began with Luchino Visconti's romantic thriller Ossessione (1942), and continued with such powerful works as Roberto Rossellini's Rome, Open City (1945) and Vittorio De Sica's The Bicycle Thief (1949).

In the 1950s, Italy's star system (its luminaries included Claudia Cardinale, Gina Lollobrigida, and Sophia Loren) became wedded to lavish international coproductions, which occasionally yielded a masterpiece like Visconti's The Leopard (1963). The 1960s saw the global popularity of modestly-budgeted films about monsters, such as Mario Bava's Black Sunday (1961); muscle men, including the many incarnations of Hercules and his mythic peers; and "spaghetti Westerns," beginning with Sergio Leone's A Fistful of Dollars (1964). This era also lionized such auteurs as Michelangelo Antonioni, whose pivotal L'Avventura opened in 1960, and Federico Fellini, whose La Dolce Vita (1960) presented an exuberant, satirical counterweight to Antonioni's ascetic but mesmerizing vision.

In the 1960s and '70s, Pasolini was perhaps the most compelling and influential of Italy's younger filmmakers, who were both politically more trenchant, and stylistically and psychologically more complex, than their predecessors. He excoriated what he saw as the crushing dominance of the church and of the patriarchal family, sometimes using ambiguity (Teorema), sometimes laughter (The Decameron), and sometimes unremitting horror (Salò).
 

Pasolini as Filmmaker

Pasolini's films – all of which I will review here as they become available on DVD – grew directly out of his poetry and fiction. His debut films as director were Accattone (1961), freely adapted from his own first novel, and Mamma Roma (1962). Both pictures explore, with brutal honesty, life in modern Rome.

His next feature, a naturalistic and pictorially exquisite version of The Gospel According to Saint Matthew (1964), managed to please both his Communist critics, who rejoiced in its portrayal of "the proletariat," and his Catholic antagonists, who were moved by its heartfelt depiction of Jesus (and who were happy that Pasolini lost the battle with his distributor, who demanded that "St." be included in the title). It was a major international success, both critical and popular, and firmly established Pasolini – already acclaimed as a poet, author, and theoretician – as one of the most important filmmakers of his generation.

After his documentary Love Meetings (1964), about sexual mores in contemporary Italy, and the satirical fable Hawks and Sparrows (1966), he made strikingly revisionist adaptations of two Greek tragedies, Oedipus Rex (1967) and Medea (1969; loosely based on Euripides, and starring opera diva Maria Callas in her only film role, albeit a non-singing one). In between those two mythic works, he created the sexual/political/spiritual allegory Teorema (1968; simultaneously with making he film he wrote a novel based on the same material), in which an angelically handsome Terence Stamp seduces everyone in a bourgeois household, both female and male. Pasolini then made the blackest of black comedies, Porcile (1969, Pigsty or Pigpen).

Pasolini's Trilogy of Life features ribald but luminous, and sometimes unsettling, adaptations of three classic medieval story collections from, respectively, Italy, England, and the Middle East: Boccaccio's Decameron (1970), Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (1971), and the Arabian Nights (1974). For some viewers, this Trilogy represents Pasolini's crowning achievement.

His last film is Salò, or The 120 Days of Sodom (1975), a caustic updating of the Marquis de Sade's 1780s novel to the final days of Mussolini's depraved inner circle. 

On November 2, 1975, shortly after the film was completed, Pasolini was found murdered on a soccer field in Ostia, near Rome – an abrupt and tragic end to an extraordinary artist.