Pier Paolo Pasolini, P.P.Pasolini, Pasolini, Arte Italia


	Pier Paolo PASOLINI

	A Revolutionary Alternative 1/3 by Giuseppe Zigaina

"...out of grief, or neurosis, or a holiday afternoon's
boredom - at last a man has come who has made
good use of death"
(P.P.P., Orgia [Orgy])
"Just because it's a holiday. And in protest I want to die
of humiliation. I want them to find me dead
with my penis sticking out, my trousers spotted with white
sperm, among the millet plants covered with blood-red liquid.
I am convinced that also the last acts, to which
I alone, the actor, am witness, in a river
that no one comes to - will, eventually,
acquire a meaning"
(P.P.P., Bestia da stile [Stylish Beast])
"Now the pain I feel in dying is just for the only
thing that I love: the often chewed and never
swallowed flesh of my mother. And yet, and yet,
this pain is not what matters most"
(P.P.P., Orgia [Orgy])

A Revolutionary Alternative
Pasolini's lifework is both simple and complex; it is simple if analyzed in accordance with the clues he himself indicated, but complex or even incomprehensible if investigated in accordance with traditional criteria. And this is due to the fact that the author - defined by some critics as a civic poet and by others as a decadent wooer of death - so radically subverted the literary tradition as to leap over even the avant-guarde at a single bound. It was no accident that he said of himself: "I am a force of the past [but also] more modern than any modern."
What does Pasolini's modernity consist of?
The scandalous modernity of this poet-director consists in having made his violent death - predicted, organized and theorized as language - the standpoint from which the unity of all his lifework can be seen. In other words, he gave his own sacrificial death the same stylizing function that editing has in the cinema: that of eliminating, choosing, and juxtaposing elements to produce meaning "until a life is transformed into a story"; or - we might affirm today - the life-work of an artist is transformed into a "lived story" (with a real body and real blood).
Therefore, Pasolini's death was neither a natural death nor a case of suicide nor an accidental violent death (this is the point of view of my research); it was called by Pasolini himself, in his Manifesto per un nuovo teatro (Manifesto for a New Theatre), a "cultural rite."
It is just as well to say at once that the archetype of this rite is the "death by value" analyzed by Ernesto de Martino in his book Morte e pianto rituale (Death and Ritual Weeping).
De Martino's main idea is that the primitive farmer "creates and manifests (for the first time) the cultural rule of a death governed by man" - and it is in reference to this archetype that Pasolini calls himself "a force of the past." Pasolini's idea, derived from this, is that it must be the subject who procures his own death in order to transform the archaic, natural, human sacrifice into a revolutionary and exclusive cultural rite - this is why the poet can say he is "more modern than any modern." However, in both cases the point of view always has a sacred origin. The primitive farmer sacrificed human lives to the god of vegetation in order to have enough of a harvest to live on; Pasolini, in order "to have life," sacrifices himself. This is both an existential and a cultural event, which the poet speaks of as being a myth of death and rebirth. He believed in the reality and effectiveness of this myth in the same way as a true Christian believes in the mystery of the Eucharist.
To sum up his faith (and his life) with an emblematic gesture, Pasolini took as his epigraph for a poem written in1944, and rewritten in 1974 with significant variants ("Il dì da la me muart", "The Day of My Death"), the verse of St. John (12:24) quoted by Dostoyevsky: "Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone; but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit."

Writer of Aphorisms
As can be seen, Pasolini expounds his theory of death (his death, not death in general) as language with extremely concise stylistic systems: (witty) formulas, aphorisms, titles of works (his own and others'), hendiadys (concepts expressed with two verbs or two nouns joined together by the conjunction "and"), verses by Dante, verses taken from the Apocalypse and the <7>Gospels, even using "the subtlest verbal element": that of brackets that leave the meaning suspended in midair. Indeed, the "suspended meaning" of some of his statements, which awaited his death to be confirmed, was part of his communicative strategy. It naturally meant that he was asking his spectators to suspend judgment in their turn with regard to some of his "prophecies." Thus he evoked both the epoché of sceptical philosophers and the putting of the world in brackets practiced by the phenomenological philosophy of Husserl.
Pasolini found the aphorism (or "formula") that in a certain sense establishes and sums up his linguistic-expressive theory in Paul Valéry, quoted by Jakobson: "Poetry is a prolonged hesitation between sense and sound."
If poetry, as Valéry says, is an indefinitely postponed choice between sense and sound ("between the lightning and the thunder" is Pasolini's symbolic mode of expression), this means that the poetic word is given substance - albeit in different, distant and variable ways - by sense and sound; that is to say, it cannot exist totally without these two elements. There are poems overflowing with music in which the meaning is like a barely perceptible shadow, and others in which the meaning of the words organized into verses prevails over their sound values, and still others where it is right to speak of a slow or sudden semantic resurrection.
In Pasolini's poetry, though entire collections (e.g., Trasumanar e organizzar) seem to be "traditionally hermetic," it is always the meaning that has priority, so that the reader's bewilderment is caused by the fact that the author expresses himself in a jargonish (individual) language or idiolect that must first be decoded. Nor is this all. The contradiction becomes even greater because, starting in the early 1960s, the communicative aspect of Pasolini's verses (with the exception of those written in 1970 for Maria Callas) takes on greater and greater importance, at the expense of expressiveness, until in the end the poem is pure communication - if not actually a Comunicato all'ANSA (Comuniqué to ANSA)."

The Interview
In an interview given 1969 to Jean Duflot, Pasolini himself "completed" (so to speak) Valéry's statement, expounding his linguistic-expressive theory based on (his own) death as a " bearing witness" (witness = martyr).
After having transcribed and corrected the interview, Pasolini added a preface ("absolutely essential reading") pointing out that in such cases the reader is obliged to decipher the system of written signs without - "unfortunately" - the semantic elements provided by the phonological context, the gestures, the expression in the eyes - in short, the physical presence of the interviewee. And he sums up all this in a formula: "A phoneme without the gesture is another semanteme:"
But here the word gesture replaces death; just as phoneme, in a relation of part to whole, stands for the whole work. Pasolini therefore puts the linguistically monstrous novelty of his death into the "hésitation prolongée entre le sens et le son" of Valéry. In short, the poet-director wants to assert that his work (the phoneme), redefined by the stylization brought about by death (by the gesture, or act), acquires another meaning (becomes another semanteme). We may therefore say that the Friulian poet's great revolution on the linguistic-expressive plane - his Empirismo eretico (Heretical Empiricism) - consists in affirming that "man expresses himself above all by his acts" (gestures).
Another of his aphorisms goes: " Even a saint speaks, in silence, with his body and with his blood.'' But he means, by "act," above all the last act of one's life, and he gives us a pedagogical example: " Kennedy, in dying, expressed himself with his last act." Yet Pasolini, in order here to be able to say the ultimate truth, used a "witty remark" and in particular the Freudian "slip" (Verschiebung). The "slip" is the vicarious figure of Kennedy (whom everybody attacks to discover his function): if we replace it with that of Pasolini, we can finally say: " Pasolini, in dying, expressed himself with his last act."
The aphorism by Pasolini that most completely sums up his theory of death as language is this: "Either express oneself and die or remain unexpressed and immortal." This ulterance means: "I, Pier Paolo Pasolini, will express myself with my death." The author himself calls it a "self-exhortation in the infinitive" but basically it is a formula (recherché and ambiguous) which, because of its strange make-up, has often led critics astray (see my preface to Hostia). It is, in fact, composed of two opposing instances of hendiadys: the second one ("or remain unexpressed and immortal") is the negative confirmation of the first. Hendiadys, as is well known, is the expression of a single concept by means of two terms - usually two nouns or two verbs - joined by the coordinating conjunction "and". In this case the first hendiadys utters (scandalously) a single action: "express oneself and die"; the second ("remain unexpressed and immortal"), besides being pleonastic, is a distraction, because the word "immortal" - which here stands for "not to die" - makes the reader think, mistakenly, of immortal poets such as Goethe, Dante or Shakespeare.

Express Oneself and Die
Pasolini himself clarifies the above formula in his 1970 essay entitled Il cinema impopolare (Unpopular cinema) (a title which, starting from the aphorism "cinema is the written language of reality", would mean "The written language of an unpopuar reality," or, simplifying still further, "Reality for the few"). He analyzes four words: "freedom," "liberation," "author," and "spectator." We shall deal with the word freedom.
Pasolini states that the really true and great freedom of man is "the freedom to choose death," since nature, he says, "besides the instinct of self-preservation, also provided us with the opposite instinct, viz. the death wish." And since the conflict between these two instincts takes place deep within our soul, "it is up to authors to make it manifest and explicit." The author's freedom therefore lies in organizing a self-destructive attack on a "Conservation" that sums up in itself the instinct of self-preservation and conservation in the social and cultural spheres. And, Pasolini points out, "This freedom cannot be manifested except by means of a great or small martyrdom. And every martyr makes himself a martyr by means of the conservative executioner."
He further writes, always using the plural: "Martyr directors, therefore, by their own decision, are always to be found, stylistically, on the firing line; that is to say, on the front line of linguistic transgressions. By repeatedly provoking the code (or the world that uses it), by dint of exposing themselves, they end up by obtaining what they aggressively want: to be wounded and killed with the same weapons they themselves offer to the enemy."
This is jargonish discourse, of course, but it gives one a perfect idea of what happened at Ostia in the night of November 1st and the morning of November 2nd, 1975.
But, to explain that word "stylistically," which would seem to relegate the discourse to the stylistic level, it should be said that Pasolini's martyrdom is a "biunitary" event. Besides being "an operation necessary for stylistic invention," it is also a victory over the instinct of self-preservation (as suicide is). This sacrifice by self-election could therefore be called the "staging" (theatrical rite) of the heretical empiricism of the author, that is, the practical-empirical demonstration of the validity of the theory of (his) death as language, indeed, as "the maximum transgression on the linguistic-expressive plane." Which would, of course, be a heresy.
What must therefore be understood is Pasolini's desire "to be a poet" even unto the farthest frontier of death; indeed, even turning his own death into a sign that bears witness to that heresy (just as the martyrdom of the early Christians bore witness to their faith in Christ).
I spoke of a linguistic-existential biunity. In Poema per un verso di Shakespeare (Poem for a Verse by Shakespeare), Pasolini had prophesied to himself: "...you will go off in a verse." When deciphered, these words mean: you will leave the world by making poetry. The verse from Shakespeare is the one that, in Othello, expresses Iago's last words: "...what you know, you know. From this time forth I never will speake word" (Act V, ii, 307-308). Pasolini explains that this is an ontological knowledge: knowing as being. Once we have stopped knowing, we have stopped existing (therefore, when the poet says "I shall know" he means: "I will live in the 'Time after History', in the New Life, in the 'New Prehistory'").

Homosexuality and the Death of his Brother Guido
But, apart from the original death drive (the "affection" that the spirit of Spinoza speaks of in the stage version of Porcile [Pigsty] ), there are other facts in Pasolini's life that strengthened this death drive: first of all, his remorse at having let Guido, his younger brother, go to die alone; and then his homosexuality, experienced as a tragedy and also as a gnostic form of asceticism ("Asceticism needs sex, the penis," he writes in Gerarchia [Hierarchy] ).
The "persecution" that Pasolini suffered from on account of his transgressions of the "common sense of decency" caused him traumas only after he was accused of the corruption of a minor in Friuli in 1949; this led to his lacerating expulsion from the Communist Party for "moral and political unworthiness." For the rest, he bore his frequent appearances in the law courts as a duty to be carried out, that is, as a way of communicating with the world. In this connection, we may say that the scandal aroused by his last film Salò o le cento venti giornate di Sodoma (Salò or the Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom) had the meaning and value of the operation that the alchemists called amplificatio, which consisted in poking the fire (under the crucible), as the time of fulfilment of the work came nearer.
Pasolini, this modern alchemist, exhibited his death, not only in the scandalous way we all know, but at the very moment when the most attention was concentrated on him. Salò, therefore, served as a monstruous semantic dilator: that of informing the world about the meaning of the "difficult amalgam" he achieved between the totality of his work and (his) death. Nor was this all; to give force to the privileged metaphor "death=montage," the end of the editing process of Salò coincided (not by accident) with the director's death.
I spoke above of the killing of Pasolini's brother and the consequences this event had on the writer's life. Guido was killed in the mountains of eastern Friuli by a commando of Communist partisans who were collaborating with Tito's Ninth Corps in the struggle against the Germans.
Briefly, this is the story. In 1944, after Guido had decided to join a group of resistance fighters in the mountains, Pier Paolo accompanied his brother to the station of Casarsa. He bade him goodbye for the last time and then took refuge in a small village in the countryside to devote himself to the things he loved best in life: poetry and his mother Susanna. But he felt a presentiment in his heart: he felt he would never see Guido again. Indeed, in that same year he anticipated Guido's death (which occurred only on February 12th, 1945) in his tragedy I Turcs tal Friul.
The odd thing is that Pasolini tells us that it was he who taught his brother the "meaning of the word freedom." This meaning was accepted and shared by all those who fought against Fascism during the Second World War, but then, fatally, out of fellow feeling - owing to that magical capability that things have to influence each other - took on, in both brother's lives, the meaning of "freedom to choose death."
Pasolini, in 1964, recalling Guido "with his head broken [...] lost in the golden peace of an interminable Sunday," closes his comment with what is almost a prophecy: "And yet, this is a day of victory." - Victory for whom? we may well ask. For Guido or for Pier Paolo? Thus, from this fusion of feelings stems not only the poet's will for expiation, but also an even stronger conviction of the truth of what he had written on April 23rd, 1962: "When the Sixties are lost like the year One Thousand, and my body is a skeleton, without any nostalgia for the world [...] I will be the one, after death, [...] who will win the bet." This serves to throw some small light on the Project conceived of by the author of Petrolio (Petroleum).

Part 2/3

Pasolini's Home Kara Art Home

		"...out of grief, or neurosis, or a holiday afternoon's boredom - at last a man has come who has made good use of death" (P.P.P., Orgia [Orgy]) "Just because it's a holiday. And in protest I want to die of humiliation. I want them to find me dead with my penis sticking out, my trousers spotted with white sperm, among the millet plants covered with blood-red liquid. I am convinced that also the last acts, to which I alone, the actor, am witness, in a river that no one comes to - will, eventually, acquire a meaning" (P.P.P., Bestia da stile [Stylish Beast]) "Now the pain I feel in dying is just for the only thing that I love: the often chewed and never swallowed flesh of my mother. And yet, and yet, this pain is not what matters most" (P.P.P., Orgia [Orgy])
	A Revolutionary Alternative Pasolini's lifework is both simple and complex; it is simple if analyzed in accordance with the clues he himself indicated, but complex or even incomprehensible if investigated in accordance with traditional criteria. And this is due to the fact that the author - defined by some critics as a civic poet and by others as a decadent wooer of death - so radically subverted the literary tradition as to leap over even the avant-guarde at a single bound. It was no accident that he said of himself: "I am a force of the past [but also] more modern than any modern." What does Pasolini's modernity consist of? The scandalous modernity of this poet-director consists in having made his violent death - predicted, organized and theorized as language - the standpoint from which the unity of all his lifework can be seen. In other words, he gave his own sacrificial death the same stylizing function that editing has in the cinema: that of eliminating, choosing, and juxtaposing elements to produce meaning "until a life is transformed into a story"; or - we might affirm today - the life-work of an artist is transformed into a "lived story" (with a real body and real blood). Therefore, Pasolini's death was neither a natural death nor a case of suicide nor an accidental violent death (this is the point of view of my research); it was called by Pasolini himself, in his Manifesto per un nuovo teatro (Manifesto for a New Theatre), a "cultural rite." It is just as well to say at once that the archetype of this rite is the "death by value" analyzed by Ernesto de Martino in his book Morte e pianto rituale (Death and Ritual Weeping). De Martino's main idea is that the primitive farmer "creates and manifests (for the first time) the cultural rule of a death governed by man" - and it is in reference to this archetype that Pasolini calls himself "a force of the past." Pasolini's idea, derived from this, is that it must be the subject who procures his own death in order to transform the archaic, natural, human sacrifice into a revolutionary and exclusive cultural rite - this is why the poet can say he is "more modern than any modern." However, in both cases the point of view always has a sacred origin. The primitive farmer sacrificed human lives to the god of vegetation in order to have enough of a harvest to live on; Pasolini, in order "to have life," sacrifices himself. This is both an existential and a cultural event, which the poet speaks of as being a myth of death and rebirth. He believed in the reality and effectiveness of this myth in the same way as a true Christian believes in the mystery of the Eucharist. To sum up his faith (and his life) with an emblematic gesture, Pasolini took as his epigraph for a poem written in1944, and rewritten in 1974 with significant variants ("Il dì da la me muart", "The Day of My Death"), the verse of St. John (12:24) quoted by Dostoyevsky: "Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone; but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit." Writer of Aphorisms As can be seen, Pasolini expounds his theory of death (his death, not death in general) as language with extremely concise stylistic systems: (witty) formulas, aphorisms, titles of works (his own and others'), hendiadys (concepts expressed with two verbs or two nouns joined together by the conjunction "and"), verses by Dante, verses taken from the Apocalypse and the <7>Gospels, even using "the subtlest verbal element": that of brackets that leave the meaning suspended in midair. Indeed, the "suspended meaning" of some of his statements, which awaited his death to be confirmed, was part of his communicative strategy. It naturally meant that he was asking his spectators to suspend judgment in their turn with regard to some of his "prophecies." Thus he evoked both the epoché of sceptical philosophers and the putting of the world in brackets practiced by the phenomenological philosophy of Husserl. Pasolini found the aphorism (or "formula") that in a certain sense establishes and sums up his linguistic-expressive theory in Paul Valéry, quoted by Jakobson: "Poetry is a prolonged hesitation between sense and sound." If poetry, as Valéry says, is an indefinitely postponed choice between sense and sound ("between the lightning and the thunder" is Pasolini's symbolic mode of expression), this means that the poetic word is given substance - albeit in different, distant and variable ways - by sense and sound; that is to say, it cannot exist totally without these two elements. There are poems overflowing with music in which the meaning is like a barely perceptible shadow, and others in which the meaning of the words organized into verses prevails over their sound values, and still others where it is right to speak of a slow or sudden semantic resurrection. In Pasolini's poetry, though entire collections (e.g., Trasumanar e organizzar) seem to be "traditionally hermetic," it is always the meaning that has priority, so that the reader's bewilderment is caused by the fact that the author expresses himself in a jargonish (individual) language or idiolect that must first be decoded. Nor is this all. The contradiction becomes even greater because, starting in the early 1960s, the communicative aspect of Pasolini's verses (with the exception of those written in 1970 for Maria Callas) takes on greater and greater importance, at the expense of expressiveness, until in the end the poem is pure communication - if not actually a Comunicato all'ANSA (Comuniqué to ANSA)." The Interview In an interview given 1969 to Jean Duflot, Pasolini himself "completed" (so to speak) Valéry's statement, expounding his linguistic-expressive theory based on (his own) death as a " bearing witness" (witness = martyr). After having transcribed and corrected the interview, Pasolini added a preface ("absolutely essential reading") pointing out that in such cases the reader is obliged to decipher the system of written signs without - "unfortunately" - the semantic elements provided by the phonological context, the gestures, the expression in the eyes - in short, the physical presence of the interviewee. And he sums up all this in a formula: "A phoneme without the gesture is another semanteme:" But here the word gesture replaces death; just as phoneme, in a relation of part to whole, stands for the whole work. Pasolini therefore puts the linguistically monstrous novelty of his death into the "hésitation prolongée entre le sens et le son" of Valéry. In short, the poet-director wants to assert that his work (the phoneme), redefined by the stylization brought about by death (by the gesture, or act), acquires another meaning (becomes another semanteme). We may therefore say that the Friulian poet's great revolution on the linguistic-expressive plane - his Empirismo eretico (Heretical Empiricism) - consists in affirming that "man expresses himself above all by his acts" (gestures). Another of his aphorisms goes: " Even a saint speaks, in silence, with his body and with his blood.'' But he means, by "act," above all the last act of one's life, and he gives us a pedagogical example: " Kennedy, in dying, expressed himself with his last act." Yet Pasolini, in order here to be able to say the ultimate truth, used a "witty remark" and in particular the Freudian "slip" (Verschiebung). The "slip" is the vicarious figure of Kennedy (whom everybody attacks to discover his function): if we replace it with that of Pasolini, we can finally say: " Pasolini, in dying, expressed himself with his last act." The aphorism by Pasolini that most completely sums up his theory of death as language is this: "Either express oneself and die or remain unexpressed and immortal." This ulterance means: "I, Pier Paolo Pasolini, will express myself with my death." The author himself calls it a "self-exhortation in the infinitive" but basically it is a formula (recherché and ambiguous) which, because of its strange make-up, has often led critics astray (see my preface to Hostia). It is, in fact, composed of two opposing instances of hendiadys: the second one ("or remain unexpressed and immortal") is the negative confirmation of the first. Hendiadys, as is well known, is the expression of a single concept by means of two terms - usually two nouns or two verbs - joined by the coordinating conjunction "and". In this case the first hendiadys utters (scandalously) a single action: "express oneself and die"; the second ("remain unexpressed and immortal"), besides being pleonastic, is a distraction, because the word "immortal" - which here stands for "not to die" - makes the reader think, mistakenly, of immortal poets such as Goethe, Dante or Shakespeare. Express Oneself and Die Pasolini himself clarifies the above formula in his 1970 essay entitled Il cinema impopolare (Unpopular cinema) (a title which, starting from the aphorism "cinema is the written language of reality", would mean "The written language of an unpopuar reality," or, simplifying still further, "Reality for the few"). He analyzes four words: "freedom," "liberation," "author," and "spectator." We shall deal with the word freedom. Pasolini states that the really true and great freedom of man is "the freedom to choose death," since nature, he says, "besides the instinct of self-preservation, also provided us with the opposite instinct, viz. the death wish." And since the conflict between these two instincts takes place deep within our soul, "it is up to authors to make it manifest and explicit." The author's freedom therefore lies in organizing a self-destructive attack on a "Conservation" that sums up in itself the instinct of self-preservation and conservation in the social and cultural spheres. And, Pasolini points out, "This freedom cannot be manifested except by means of a great or small martyrdom. And every martyr makes himself a martyr by means of the conservative executioner." He further writes, always using the plural: "Martyr directors, therefore, by their own decision, are always to be found, stylistically, on the firing line; that is to say, on the front line of linguistic transgressions. By repeatedly provoking the code (or the world that uses it), by dint of exposing themselves, they end up by obtaining what they aggressively want: to be wounded and killed with the same weapons they themselves offer to the enemy." This is jargonish discourse, of course, but it gives one a perfect idea of what happened at Ostia in the night of November 1st and the morning of November 2nd, 1975. But, to explain that word "stylistically," which would seem to relegate the discourse to the stylistic level, it should be said that Pasolini's martyrdom is a "biunitary" event. Besides being "an operation necessary for stylistic invention," it is also a victory over the instinct of self-preservation (as suicide is). This sacrifice by self-election could therefore be called the "staging" (theatrical rite) of the heretical empiricism of the author, that is, the practical-empirical demonstration of the validity of the theory of (his) death as language, indeed, as "the maximum transgression on the linguistic-expressive plane." Which would, of course, be a heresy. What must therefore be understood is Pasolini's desire "to be a poet" even unto the farthest frontier of death; indeed, even turning his own death into a sign that bears witness to that heresy (just as the martyrdom of the early Christians bore witness to their faith in Christ). I spoke of a linguistic-existential biunity. In Poema per un verso di Shakespeare (Poem for a Verse by Shakespeare), Pasolini had prophesied to himself: "...you will go off in a verse." When deciphered, these words mean: you will leave the world by making poetry. The verse from Shakespeare is the one that, in Othello, expresses Iago's last words: "...what you know, you know. From this time forth I never will speake word" (Act V, ii, 307-308). Pasolini explains that this is an ontological knowledge: knowing as being. Once we have stopped knowing, we have stopped existing (therefore, when the poet says "I shall know" he means: "I will live in the 'Time after History', in the New Life, in the 'New Prehistory'"). Homosexuality and the Death of his Brother Guido But, apart from the original death drive (the "affection" that the spirit of Spinoza speaks of in the stage version of Porcile [Pigsty] ), there are other facts in Pasolini's life that strengthened this death drive: first of all, his remorse at having let Guido, his younger brother, go to die alone; and then his homosexuality, experienced as a tragedy and also as a gnostic form of asceticism ("Asceticism needs sex, the penis," he writes in Gerarchia [Hierarchy] ). The "persecution" that Pasolini suffered from on account of his transgressions of the "common sense of decency" caused him traumas only after he was accused of the corruption of a minor in Friuli in 1949; this led to his lacerating expulsion from the Communist Party for "moral and political unworthiness." For the rest, he bore his frequent appearances in the law courts as a duty to be carried out, that is, as a way of communicating with the world. In this connection, we may say that the scandal aroused by his last film Salò o le cento venti giornate di Sodoma (Salò or the Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom) had the meaning and value of the operation that the alchemists called amplificatio, which consisted in poking the fire (under the crucible), as the time of fulfilment of the work came nearer. Pasolini, this modern alchemist, exhibited his death, not only in the scandalous way we all know, but at the very moment when the most attention was concentrated on him. Salò, therefore, served as a monstruous semantic dilator: that of informing the world about the meaning of the "difficult amalgam" he achieved between the totality of his work and (his) death. Nor was this all; to give force to the privileged metaphor "death=montage," the end of the editing process of Salò coincided (not by accident) with the director's death. I spoke above of the killing of Pasolini's brother and the consequences this event had on the writer's life. Guido was killed in the mountains of eastern Friuli by a commando of Communist partisans who were collaborating with Tito's Ninth Corps in the struggle against the Germans. Briefly, this is the story. In 1944, after Guido had decided to join a group of resistance fighters in the mountains, Pier Paolo accompanied his brother to the station of Casarsa. He bade him goodbye for the last time and then took refuge in a small village in the countryside to devote himself to the things he loved best in life: poetry and his mother Susanna. But he felt a presentiment in his heart: he felt he would never see Guido again. Indeed, in that same year he anticipated Guido's death (which occurred only on February 12th, 1945) in his tragedy I Turcs tal Friul. The odd thing is that Pasolini tells us that it was he who taught his brother the "meaning of the word freedom." This meaning was accepted and shared by all those who fought against Fascism during the Second World War, but then, fatally, out of fellow feeling - owing to that magical capability that things have to influence each other - took on, in both brother's lives, the meaning of "freedom to choose death." Pasolini, in 1964, recalling Guido "with his head broken [...] lost in the golden peace of an interminable Sunday," closes his comment with what is almost a prophecy: "And yet, this is a day of victory." - Victory for whom? we may well ask. For Guido or for Pier Paolo? Thus, from this fusion of feelings stems not only the poet's will for expiation, but also an even stronger conviction of the truth of what he had written on April 23rd, 1962: "When the Sixties are lost like the year One Thousand, and my body is a skeleton, without any nostalgia for the world [...] I will be the one, after death, [...] who will win the bet." This serves to throw some small light on the Project conceived of by the author of Petrolio (Petroleum). Part 2/3

	Pasolini's Home Kara Art Home