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ABSTRACT
Pier Paolo Pasolini’s death has been the subject of numerous works in media from cinema to graphic novels. Most focus on Pasolini’s assassination, its murky political implications, and the events surrounding the last hours of his life. Although this copious material was generated in an effort to bring justice to his death, in most cases it has ended up underplaying the multilayered approach to death and authorship present in Pasolini’s works. Here, I ask whether it is possible to consider Pasolini’s death through lenses other than that of the events surrounding his murder. I consider two films: Glauber Rocha’s last film, A Idade da Terra (The Age of the Earth, Brazil, 1980), and Fi Intidar Pasolini (Waiting for Pasolini, Morocco, 2007) realized by Daoud Aoulad-Syad. These Global South directors not only depart from a journalistic approach to Pasolini’s death, they also reinvent, translate, and, to a certain extent, ‘provincialize’ it.
SOMMARIO
La morte di Pier Paolo Pasolini è stata raccontata in diversi modi e facendo uso di media che vanno dal cinema fino alla graphic novel. La maggior parte di questi lavori si è concentrata sull'assassinio, le sue implicazioni politiche e la ricostruzione delle ultime ore di vita di Pasolini. Realizzate con l'intenzione di rendere giustizia al crimine, queste opere hanno però finito col trascurare la funzione complessa che la morte – e l'autorialità – giocano nell'opera di Pasolini. Prendendo in considerazione l'ultima opera di Glauber Rocha, A Idade da Terra (L'età della Terra, Brasile, 1980), e Fi Intidar Pasolini (Aspettando Pasolini, Marocco, 2007) realizzato da Daoud Aoulad-Syad, questo articolo vuole ripensare alla morte di Pasolini andando oltre ad una sua narrazione cronachistica. Non solo questi registi del Sud Globale hanno evitato un approccio giornalistico alla morte di Pasolini, ma l'hanno reinventata, tradotta e, in certa misura, provincializzata.
Acknowledgements
The author wishes to thank Penny Marcus, Dudley Andrew, Chiara Arnavas, Luca Caminati, the two anonymous reviewers for their generous advice, comments, and criticisms, and the Italianist team for their reviews and detailed editing work.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Gian Maria Annovi, Pier Paolo Pasolini: Performing Authorship (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017), p. 7.
2 Daney said, ‘Now, looking back, I tell myself that Pasolini’s death is a good date to say that, from that moment, the cinema stopped being an explorer, being itself, in other words, a sorcerer’s apprentice’. Christophe Derouet and Vincent Vatrican, 'Entretien Avec Serge Daney: L'apprenti Sorcier' 24 Images, 61 (1992), 62–68 (p. 63), my translation.
3 The list of Italian films that deal with Pasolini’s death is vast and still growing. See, for instance, Marco Tullio Giordana’s Pasolini, un delitto Italiano / Who Killed Pasolini? (1996); Abel Ferrara, Pasolini (2014); David Grieco, La macchinazione / The Plot (2016); Paolo Angelini’s Pasolini Cronologia di un Delitto Politico (2022); and, in a different medium, the graphic novel Il Delitto Pasolini / The murder of Pasolini by Gianluca Maconi (2008).
4 I suggest substituting the term ‘Global South’ for the term ‘Third World’, but I use the latter term whenever directors such as Pasolini and Glauber Rocha use it. The concept of the Third World was originally theorized as an alternative to the two main power blocs during the Cold World: the West and the Soviet Union. Based on Antonio Gramsci’s The Southern Question, trans. by Pasquale Verdicchio (Toronto: Guernica Editions, 2005), which dealt with possible alliances between southern Italian peasants and workers from the north, the Global South offers a more flexible approach. Antonio Gramsci, The Southern Question, trans. by Pasquale Verdicchio (Toronto: Guernica Editions, 2005). In fact, as Anne Garland Mahler argues, it should not be understood in terms of a static dichotomy between North and South since ‘[t]here are Souths in the geographic Norths and Norths in the geographic Souths’. Mahler, From the Tricontinental to the Global South (Durham, NC: Duke University Press), p. 32.
5 I use this term following Dipesh Chakrabarty’s Provincializing Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000) as an act of challenging Eurocentrism as well as historicizing the centrality of its categories.
6 Pier Paolo Pasolini, Heretical Empiricism, trans. by Louise K. Barnett and Ben Lawton (Washington, DC: New Academia Publishing, 1988), p. 234.
7 Ibid., p. 236.
8 Note Pasolini’s famous comparison between death and editing: ‘Death effects an instantaneous montage of our lives’. Pasolini, Heretical Empiricism, p. 6. [Emphasis in the original.]
9 Pasolini, ‘Unpopular Cinema’ in Heretical Empiricism, pp. 267–275 (p. 268).
10 Ibid., p. 273.
11 Ibid., p. 269.
12 See Annovi, Pier Paolo Pasolini, p. 5.
13 Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. by Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1975), p. 27. [Emphasis in the original.]
14 Ismail Xavier, Allegories of Underdevelopment (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1997), p. 260.
15 See, for example, David T. Haberly, Three Sad Races: Racial Identity and National Consciousness in Brazilian Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).
16 The reference to Pope XVII is related to the ‘liberation theology’ approach of Gustavo Gutiérrez that developed in various countries in Latin America, such as Chile, Peru, and Brazil.
17 In a scene in A Idade, the journalist Castello Branco ends his history lesson on the military coup by pointing out that ‘the nation is doing well but the people are not’.
18 Carlos Castello Branco, Introdução à Revolução de 1964 (Rio de Janeiro: Artenova, 1975).
19 Rocha recounts the first time he saw Pasolini’s The Gospel in these terms: ‘when I returned from Genoa to Rome, I went to see The Gospel according to Saint Matthew. […] As I had filmed Black God, White Devil almost at the same time, Pasolini’s film showed me common tribal and primitive identities’. Glauber Rocha, On Cinema, trans. by Stephanie Dennison and Charlotte Smith (London: I. B. Tauris, 2019), p. 217.
20 Glauber Rocha, ‘The Morality of the New Christ’ in On Cinema, pp. 172–178 (p. 176) [Emphasis in the original].
21 Naomi Green, Pier Paolo Pasolini: Cinema as Heresy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), p. 218.
22 Glauber Rocha, O seculo do cinema (São Paulo: Cosac & Naify), p. 284, my translation.
23 Ibid., p. 285. On some occasions Pasolini consciously played with this ambivalence between subversion and perversion. This is the case with a poem like Gerarchia (Hierarchy) where Pasolini narrates his experience in Brazil. He writes for instance: ‘Ah, subversive people, I am looking for love and I found you. / I’m looking for perdition and I found thirst for justice./ Brazil, my land./ land of my true friends’. Pasolini, Tutte Le Poesie, 2 vols (Milan: Mondadori), ii, p. 209, my translation.
24 Glauber Rocha, O seculo do cinema, p. 321, my translation.
25 Glauber Rocha, ‘Amor de macho’, O Pasquim, 5–11 December 1975, VII-336, p. 12–13.
26 Herve Joubert-Laurencin, ‘Glauber et-Il une Femme?’ Savoirs et Clinique, 17 (2014), 179–86 (p. 184).
27 Rocha, O Seculo do Cinema, 332–33, my translation.
28 Pasolini, ‘The Cinema of Poetry’ in Heretical Empiricism, pp. 167–186 (p. 183).
29 Rocha, On Cinema, p. 265.
30 Pasolini, Heretical Empiricism, p. 183.
31 Ibid., p. 178.
32 Rocha writes that ‘Pier Paolo said that the handheld camera and the zoom shot were characteristic of the poetic’; he considered The Gospel Pasolini’s first example of a ‘cinema of poetry’ because of its ‘emphatically employing the “handheld camera”’. Rocha, On Cinema, pp. 205, 204.
33 Pasolini, Heretical Empiricism, p. 181.
34 See especially Ismail Xavier’s interpretation of Land in Anguish in Allegories of Underdevelopment (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), pp. 62–67.
35 Pasolini, Heretical Empiricism, pp. 177–78. [Emphasis in the original.]
36 Xavier, Allegories of Underdevelopment, pp. 256–57.
37 If we accept McGlazer’s interpretation of Rocha’s presence in Claro (1975) as a way to perform the ‘director-as-despot’, then A Idade complicates the director’s perverse and violent desire for control but does not erase it. Ramsey McGlazer, Old Schools (New York: Fordham University Press, 2020).
38 ‘If there were a modern political cinema, it would be on the basis: the people no longer exist, or not yet […] the people are missing. […] Art, and especially the cinematic art, must take part in this task: not that of addressing a people, which is presupposed already there, but of contributing to the invention of a people’. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema II: The Time-Image, trans. by Hugh Tomlison and Robert Galeta (Bloomsbury: London: 2013), p. 223.
39 Paolo Desogus, Laboratorio Pasolini (Macerata, Italy: Quodlibet, 2018), p. 140, my translation.
40 Glauber Rocha, ‘Amor Macho’, trans. by Monica Dall’Asta and Maria Rita Nepomuceno, Bianco e Nero, 571 (September–December 2011), 31–35 (p. 33).
41 Rocha called Lacan ‘pai-de-santo’, the male priest in Candomblé and other Afro-Brazilian religions.
42 Amy Hollywood, Sensible Ecstasy: Mysticism, Sexual Difference, and the Demands of History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), p.167.
43 Glauber Rocha, ‘An Aesthetic of Dreams’ in On Cinema, pp. 121–125 (p. 124).
44 Ibid., p. 123.
45 A similar use of double exposure occurs in the central scene in Claro, in which Rocha and Juliet Berto walk on the periphery of Rome in a scene inspired by Pasolini’s first films. Here, Rocha likewise overlaps two sequences shot at a temporal proximity, creating the effect of an overlapping present, past, and future that makes the suburban people of Rome transcend their reality, transforming them into an apparition of the utopian missing people.
46 Glauber Rocha, Cartas Ao Mundo (São Paolo: Companhia das Letras, 1997), p. 513, my translation.
47 Pasolini, Per il cinema, 2 vols. (Milan: Mondadori, 2001), ii, p. 2681, my translation.
48 Luca Caminati, Orientalismo Eretico (Milan: Mondadori, 2007), p. 57.
49 See also Karen Raizen, ‘Voicing the Popular in Appunti per un Orestiade Africana’, in Pier Paolo Pasolini, Framed and Unframed, ed. by Luca Peretti and Karen Raizen (New York: Bloomsbury, 2019). Incidentally, Barbieri realized in the same period a seminal album entitled The Third World, which contains an homage to Glauber Rocha’s Antonio das Mortes.
50 Well-known films such as Lawrence of Arabia (1962) and The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), as well as blockbusters like The Mummy (1999) and Gladiator (2000) and, more recently, episodes of the TV show Game of Thrones, have been shot in this region of Morocco. Lawrence of Arabia, dir. by David Lean (Columbia Pictures, 1962), The Last Temptation of Christ, dir. by Martin Scorsese (Universal Pictures, Cineplex Odeon Films, Testament Productions, 1988), The Mummy, dir. by Stephen Sommers (Universal Pictures, 1999), Gladiator, dir. by Ridley Scott (DreamWorks Pictures, Universal Pictures, Scott Free Productions, Red Wagon Entertainment, 2000).
51 Will Higbee, Moroccan Cinema Uncut: Decentred Voices, Transnational Perspectives (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020).
52 Translation from Gian Maria Annovi, ‘Oedipus at Ouarzazate’, LaRivista: Études culturelles italiennes Sorbonne Universités, 5 (2016), 65–73 (p. 69).
53 See Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), p. 140; Chakrabarty, The Crises of Civilization (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), p. 59.
54 Annovi, ‘Oedipus at Ouarzazate’, p. 70.
55 Homi Bhabha, ‘Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse’, October, 28 (1984), 125–33 (p. 129).
56 Pasolini, ‘Sul doppiaggio’, in Pasolini, Per il cinema, pp. ii, 2785–89.
57 Annovi, Pier Paolo Pasolini, p. 153.
58 Georges Didi-Huberman, ‘People Exposed, People as Extras’, Radical Philosophy, 156 (2009), 16–22.
59 This is the case, for example, in the selection of an extra, or a scene in which the director asks the extra playing the guard to be less gentle when beating the slave who is on the ground.
60 Pasolini himself was interested in the liminal condition of extras; most of his films, particularly Trilogy of Life, dwell on details of extras’ faces, gazes, and bodies, which sometimes take control over the main story, and his short film La Ricotta (1963) is devoted to the poor extra Stracci.
61 Deleuze, Cinema ii, p. 228.
62 As Higbee points out, the international productions also hinder the development of Moroccan national cinema. This is because the latter ‘does not benefit from the well-trained technical crews and talents’ who prefer working with ‘international film crews, which can afford to pay them more than the national wage average’. Will Higbee, Moroccan Cinema Uncut, p. 25.
63 Pasolini, ‘Unpopular Cinema’, p. 275.