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Notizie Pasolini a New York Poet, playwright, screenwriter, filmmaker, Communist, Christian, moralist, pornographer, populist, artist: 32 years after he was murdered by a teenage hustler (who later tried to recant his confession), Pier Paolo Pasolini remains, perhaps above all, a subject for furious argument. In an era when Italy produced a bumper crop of difficult, passionate artists, especially in the cinema, he may have been the most difficult of all, and arguably the most prodigiously talented. 
That film, a 1962 melodrama with a molten performance by Anna Magnani at its center, remains Pasolini?’s most popular and most accessible. It is neorealism brought to the pitch of opera, with Magnani?’s incarnation of wounded, furious motherhood teetering on the edge of camp. And it shows a class consciousness that goes far beyond the social concern of some of Pasolini?’s contemporaries, into a lower-depths romanticism that has more in common with Jean Genet (or, to risk anachronism, with Rainer Werner Fassbinder) than with De Sica or Visconti. 
But his films, finally, cannot really be assimilated to any ideological or aesthetic program. Certainly his last movie, Sal?, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975), based on a novel by the Marquis de Sade and set during the decadent phase of Mussolini?’s regime, is unmatched in its moral extremity and sexual cruelty. Not even today?’s cinematic torture maestros will go where Pasolini did in the orchestration and observation of cruelty. ?“Sal??” is not for the faint of heart, or for those who wish to continue believing in the possibility of human goodness. But that is not to say there is anything sentimental or compromised about the rest of Pasolini?’s work. It springs from the tormented sensibility and rigorous intellect of a man who lived and died at the heart of some of the modern world?’s most painful contradictions. More than three decades after his death, his best films still feel like news. ? |
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