Point Lobos

Pier Paolo Pasolini

"I do not believe in a metaphysical god. I am religious because I have a natural identification between reality and God. Reality is divine. The motivation that unites all of my films is to give back to reality its original sacred significance."
Pier Paolo Pasolini

Pasolini's work is open to a number of different readings, but it is his iconoclastic religious vision that most intrigues me - a sense of the sacred which is rooted in both the physical dimension (the body, the natural-supernatural world) and in the image as primary process. It is a transgressive position, defying both the Right and the Left, the Catholic church and the Marxist-intellectual vanguard of post-war Europe, seizing the irrational heart of the former and planting it in the bloodless, exhausted-because-too-rational discourse of the latter. It also calls into question the humanist background of his early education and mocks the pretensions of the bourgeoisie. Needless to say, his films and essays provoked all but the most independent of thinkers to great shows of disdain during his brief lifetime, but forty years along, now that the terms of the debate have shifted and a new audience has emerged, we can approach the work with fresh eyes, that is, if we are not too encumbered with prepackaged theories.

Watching a film like The Gospel According to St. Matthew, or Teorema, or Oedipus Rex is a blissful experience for the viewer whose first allegiance is to the aesthetic, especially for those who associate the image with a sense of the sacred. And there is a text-based infusion of the poetic as well, with whole sections of gospel lifted intact from the New Testament and used instead of dialogue in the Gospel, or quotations from Barthes, Klossowski, and Nietzsche in Salo; there is also an experimental use of silence in long segments of Porcile and Medea, where cinematic image alone carries the narrative seamlessly from one meaning to the next.

It isn't surprising that such an artist should be drawn to the ancient world of myth as being best able to articulate this sense of the real, the visible, and the physical as holy. As his friend Alberto Moravia pointed out, Pasolini had a Dionysian anthropological view of the world, a view which was able to contain his irrationality, his rejection of the dominant ideology, both capitalist and socialist, his fierce homosexual desire, his passionate love of the land and belief in the natural, 'pre-proletarian' people of southern Italy, where he spent his youth, and of the Third World in general. He was always a Marxist (despite being expelled from the Communist Party for"moral and political unworthiness") but he brought to Marxism a strong critique of its failings and consequently forged a new ideology which conflated the spiritual and the physical and fought for a world in which people and land, the roots of unschooled knowledge, ancient belief and human desire could prevail against the forces of pure reason, mechanization, and mass-consumption. It sounds like a lot, but he manages, with brilliant use of documentary-style footage, to bring a powerful sense of contemporary relevance to what would otherwise be a wildly exotic vision of humanity. It's not his best film (that honor goes to Teorema) but it's never less than beautiful to watch, and the first 10 minutes of the film alone contain a lot of the visual signs -integration of people and land, fertility rites, 'natural' faces of local, non-actors, elaborate costumes and stark symbols - which act as signs for his mythic-realist ideology, an ideology he developed throughout his career and never abandoned, not even with Salo, his most despairing and disillusioned effort. Salo evokes the ideal by virtue of its absence - the 'pleasure palace' of the neo-fascist modernists is Pasolini's full-frontal attack on contemporary culture, which seeks more than anything to exterminate difference, as exemplified by the non-Western, pre-modern paradigm.

That paradigm so saturates the other films of his 'mythic' period that even The Gospel According to St. Matthew is a semi-religious experience - not something you expect from the the work of a committed and outspoken atheist. His beautiful, dark, eroticized Christ is a revolutionary figure, a Palestinian Che to use Jonathon Jones' words (in The Guardian, 2005). Here are a few shots from that film;

Christ (played by economics student Enrique Irazoqui) was inspired by El Greco, and Byzantine art...

In this early scene by the river he looks strange - otherworldly - like a gnome or a river sprite...



Confronting an urbane-looking Satan in the wilderness (the scene was shot on Mount Etna)...



The Pharisees' incredible hats were inspired by Piero della Franscesca ...


Christ's physical beauty is his spiritual beauty. Pasolini adores the male face...

Pasolini's Christ isn't sacred in the metaphysical sense. He is a paragon of male beauty and revolutionary fervor, sacred in the way that reality is sacred, distilled to an essence of reality, a pure drop. It is the sort of thinking that animated ancient Greek religion, the power of the image, of physical perfection, of natural form and heroic action - a non-rational perception of the world, marked by passion, which reconciled dichotemies like life and death, humanity and divinity, and so made miracles possible. It is this irrational aspect of mythical thought that best served Pasolini's ends, because he wanted more than anything to discredit the rational discourse of modern Europe which denied his right to experience himself as an authentically whole being, natural and religious and ideological and free.

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For Pasolini, nothing worth knowing could be known with the mind alone. The extent to which he dethroned the mind he experienced the sacred, the 'third world' of the body freed from mind's script, the dictatorship of reason. Looking is conceived as a political act - a way of getting out of the mind - and so the purely visual dimension of his films, the ravishingly beautiful dimension, amounts to an ideological statement and a kind of manifesto. There are other, contemporary themes, Marxist allusions, Freudian allegories (especially in the autobiographical Oedipus Rex, or the realm of the unconscious in Porcile), and a host of formal gestures that belong to the film theory discourse, neorealism and its demise, but it is his vision of an undivided (pre-rational) humanity with its abiding reverence for nature's potent magical forms which stands out as his most powerful political statement, perhaps because it is so radically poetic.

Pasolini was a poet before he was a filmmaker, one of Italy's greatest, and it shows in all of his films. The most perfectly realized poetic statement of his (film) career is the unparalleled Teorema, which reconciles his mythic vision with his discarded catholicism, his landscapes of earth, desert, and city, his past and present worlds, his leftist beliefs and his critical attitude toward leftist dogma, his disgust with the spiritual inertia of modern, bourgeois reality and his overriding commitment to the life of physical passion, sex and the body. Nothing is left out, and every theme resonates with the others, so that when we see Paolo undress in the railway station and walk naked into the desert at the end of the film, we see a sort of summation of everything Pasolini has been trying to say thus far. His natural-supernatural man (the nameless 'boy' played by a young and seductive Terence Stamp) has left the old world and entered the new, shattering the identities of every character he comes into contact with, because his 'reality' breaks the static mold of their constructed selves; the contact is shamelessly sexual in every instance, and only the lower-class maid Emilia recognizes the experience as transcendent in the religious sense; the others are driven half-mad with loss after the stranger leaves. It is an extraordinary film, intellectually and theoretically taut, strange, beautiful, painful, and eternally relevant, now more so than ever.

It's impossible to do justice to this prolific, brilliant artist in a single post, but I want to include a poem and some paintings as well, just to give an idea of his versatility and range. I'm not a fan of the portraits, but his landscapes in quicklime and glue or oil and tempera on sackcloth are lovely:

The poetry is soaring, impassioned; it skewers the truths of modern lives with its details, declares the triumph of the low-born, the unsophisticated, and the body. I will sign off with one of his earliest, collected in City Lights' Roman Poems:

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SEX, CONSOLATION FOR POVERTY

Sex, consolation for poverty!

The whore is queen, her throne a ruin,

her land a piece of shitty field,

her sceptre a purse of red patent leather:

she barks in the night,

dirty and ferocious as an ancient mother:

she defends her possessions and her life.

The pimps swarming around

bloated and beat

with their Brindisi or Slavic moustaches

are leaders, rulers:

in the dark they make their hundred lire deals,

winking in silence, exchanging passwords:

the world, excluded, remains silent

about those who have excluded themselves,

silent carcasses of predators.

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But from the world's trash

a new world is born,

new laws are born,

where there is no law

a new honor is born

where honor is dishonor ...

A ferocious nobility and power is born

in the piles of hovels

in the open spaces

where one thinks the city ends

and where instead it begins again, hostile,

begins again a thousand times,

with bridges and labyrinths,

foundations and diggings,

behind a surge of skyscrapers

covering whole horizons.

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In the ease of love

the wretch feels himself a man,

builds up faith in life,

and ends despising all who have a different life.

The sons throw themselves into adventure

secure in a world which fears them and their sex.

Their piety is in being pitiless,

their strength in their lightness,

their hope in having no hope.

Wet Picture - a poem by Jaroslav Siefert

Those beautiful days
when the city resembles a die, a fan and a bird song
or a scallop shell on the sea shore
- goodbye, goodbye, pretty girls,
we met today
and will not ever meet again.

The beautiful Sundays
when the city resembles a football, a card, and an ocarina
or a swinging bell
- in the sunny street
the shadows of passers-by were kissing
and people walked away, total strangers.

Those beautiful evenings
when the city resembles a rose, a chessboard, a violin
or a crying girl
- we played dominoes,
black-dotted dominoes with the thin girls in the bar,
watching their knees,

which were emaciated
like two skulls with the silk crowns of their garters
in the desperate kingdom of love.

Quote: Nietzsche

"The essence of all beautiful art, all great art, is gratitude."

Nike's pantry

Quote: Mallarme

"If a poem is to be pure, the poet's voice must be stilled and the initiative taken by the words themselves, which will be set in motion as they meet unequally in collision."

Roberto Bolano 'The Savage Detectives'

So much has been written about Roberto Bolano since his books have come out in English translation it seems a bit redundant to add one more review to the mountain available in print and on the internet. And there is such a great review of The Savage Detectives by Benjamin Kunkel in 2007's LRB that there is really nothing further to add, except, if Garcia Marquez, magic realism, and the so-called Boom in Latin American literature left you cold, Bolano could be exactly the writer you have been waiting for, not so much because he repudiates that oeuvre (though he does) but because he represents something entirely unlike both that trend and really any trend in literature, except perhaps the Beats - his sprawling, anarchic, idealistic, almost-formless style, with its flawed, chatty, uncertain characters, its defiantly inconclusive narrative segments and breathless profusion of detail, and its repeated commitment to the idea of a thoroughly lived, embodied poetics, as opposed to the quasi-fascist, stylistically finished literature of the past, is a kind of warcry, an anti-literary statement which is both politically and aesthetically radical. You will wonder what sort of a ride this writer is taking you on, what sort of a fool he thinks you are, until somewhere near the middle of the book you recognize, through the humor, the irony, the misplaced ideals, the vanishing-into-oblivion of people and places and plans, how entirely lifelike these characters and their situations really are, how unlike the perfectly packaged narratives of other writers' characters, and how unusual, how utterly refreshing it feels to encounter this sort of thing in print. You really have to read the book to believe it. It is the sort of upheaval literature needs in order to remain relevant, to thrive and change and live. The Boom is dead! Long live Bolano!