Pier Paolo Pasolini

[Reckoneroads]

I'm new here, so I've searched and can't find thread of Pier Paolo Pasolini.. He's an Italian writer, poet, director, artist, whos' place in the 20th century's art very, very big..
I can't say which is his best work, but my top 5 is here: Teorema, Mamma Roma, The Gospel, Salo or the 120 days of Sodom and Uccelacci e Uccellini..
So check it out who haven't seen yet and who have, just discuss this great person..

p.s. sorry for my Engl.

[Pogue]

Hi welcome :)

Could you tell us a bit mroe about his style, and what he tends to write about?

[Reckoneroads]

Pogue, I don't know his writings very much, coz he was writing in some Italian dialect (not italian, cos he thinked that it was language made for bourgeois people), I know his cinema works. actually, Teorema is his novella and film too. his works main theme is the bourgeois and person. if you wanna see his Marxist/socialist films , u must see Teorema and Uccellacci e Uccellinni, there's also Salo or the 120 days of sodom, which he took acording the Sade's novella. But it's very very shocking an strange film, his last, when it realesead he was dead.(very misterious death). It's very hard to understand absolutely Salo's message.. As I know during t he 1968 he wrote a essay and told that he was on policeman's side, cos they were workers and protestants were children of bastard bourgeois..

[Pogue]

I believe Sarte said something similar about the police in 1968, an interesting point that I don't agree with at all but it was an interesting one all the same. Of course the reality is the police should have just gone on strike with the class.

He sounds well interesting, I'll give it a look, thanks chum.

[Rakhmetov]

Good poet

http://images.google.com/images?hl=en&um=1&ei=SAPFSo7zE8rDtwfLqoy5AQ&sa=X&oi=spell&resnum=1&ct=result&cd=1&q=pier+paolo+pasolini&spell=1&start=0

TO THE RED FLAG
For him who only knows your color, red flag,
you must really exist, so that he can exist:
he who was covered with scabs is covered with wounds,
the laborer becomes a beggar,
the Neapolitan a Calabrese, the Calabrese an African,
the illiterate a buffalo or dog.
He who hardly knows your color, red flag,
won’t know you much longer, not even with his senses:
you who already boast so many bourgeois working-class glories,
you become a rag again, and the poorest wave you.

[Dimentio]

I have seen Salò. Instead of adulating him, I must confess I got the gut feeling it was a really screwed-up mind behind that.

[New Tet]

Mamma Roma is the movie that I think best describes Pasolini's style. His death was not mysterious. He was beaten to death by some guy in a homophobic rage.

He was a great of Italian neo-realism.

Whereas my favorite is Ermano Ermi, director of films like "Il Posto", "I Fidanzati" and my all-time Italian favorite "The Tree of Wooden Clogs". Oh, of course I like Fellini, Rossini and even Wertmuller (kitschy as she may be), but Ermi's my favorite for his most uncompromising proletarian viewpoint.

[Stranger Than Paradise]

Yes he is a very interesting director and a communist aswell. I was also intrigued by his comments about 1968.

[brigadista]

one of his best movies is accatone

[pierrotlefou]

one of his best movies is accatone
agreed.


also, I have read he was beaten to death because of making Salo. It's a very intense and, to some I can see, pretty offensive. I thought it was a powerful film about the extremes of sick individuals in Fascism, which is already sick by itself.

[Raúl Duke]

not italian, cos he thinked that it was language made for bourgeois peopleItalian wasn't made up...what they did was take the Florentine/Tuscan dialect and nominate it as Italian (Venetian could have been "Italian" but at the time Venice was taken over by Austria and lost its cultural prestige to Florence). This decision was made at around the unification of Italy, although arguably that act was something in the interest of bourgeois nationalists so with some shaky logic one could say that "italian" is "bougeois".

[Holden Caulfield]

I watched Salo for uni.
But I don't want to talk about it, remember it, or to ever have to think about it again.

[Pogue]

I watched Salo for uni.
But I don't want to talk about it, remember it, or to ever have to think about it again.

:S

[narcomprom]

I've seen his decamerone and his canterbury tales. he did a fine job at making these demi-phantastic tales believable to the point you'd think that could have happened in your neighbourhood as well.

his sodom i haven't seen but I don't like the idea of taking fascism as the setting. de sade wrote about the elites of his times locking themselves up in a remote castle because they potentially could. I think pasolini was influenced by psychoanalic fascination with swastikas, genitalia and exploitation that was rampant in his time (http://www.history.ucsb.edu/faculty/marcuse/classes/33d/33dTexts/SontagFascinFascism75.htm).

[Pirate Utopian]

I've only seen Salo.

What was so bad about Salo?

[Holden Caulfield]

I've only seen Salo.

What was so bad about Salo?

erm the extreme sadism, the shit eating, the paedophillia, the degregation of humanity (on both sides) etc etc etc

[Pogue]

erm the extreme sadism, the shit eating, the paedophillia, the degregation of humanity (on both sides) etc etc etc

:ohmy:

[narcomprom]

the sadism is neither too extreme, nor too weak. it is as normal as it gets.

[Holden Caulfield]

the sadism is neither too extreme, nor too weak. it is as normal as it gets.

thats okay then. I didn't realise it was only dipicting mild paedophillia and degregation. My mistake

[narcomprom]

thats okay then. I didn't realise it was only dipicting mild paedophillia and degregation. My mistake
Give me another red rep, if you please, it would be still silly to claim otherwise.

It's like saying what Marx wrote was extremely Marxist. That is not the case. It is perfectly fine Marxism.

Not extreme, nor bland.

[Pirate Utopian]

erm the extreme sadism, the shit eating, the paedophillia, the degregation of humanity (on both sides) etc etc etc
Yeah, it was a good movie.

[Pogue]

Doesn't really sound like my thing :lol:

[narcomprom]

De Sade was a materialist and his work is rebellion the Rousseau brand of piety popular at his time. His 120 days of Sodom and Justine he wrote when he was thrown in prison because he was dishunouring his noble name.

Sadism is not just about taking pleasure in belittleling others. The pleasure comes from disregarding the formalities when excercising power. That's the point von Trier's put much more aptly in his Dogville.

Pasolini is abit too awkward to my taste. It might have had been fashionable when you see nothing but zoomed genitalia on the screen for several minutes, but today that's just boring. That wasn't the point in the book: There, there the saucy parts got mentioned only in brief.

here it is, by the way:
http://www.globusz.com/ebooks/120Days/00000010.htm

and here's Justine. It will make a good read to all the love-thy-next type anarchist teens on this site:
http://www.globusz.com/ebooks/Justine/

[Stranger Than Paradise]

thats okay then. I didn't realise it was only dipicting mild paedophillia and degregation. My mistake

Is there something wrong with depicting that? I don't understand your point.

[Holden Caulfield]

Is there something wrong with depicting that? I don't understand your point.

I am just saying that it is unpleasant to watch.

[Pogue]

can't see how anyone would ever wanna watch it

[narcomprom]

can't see how anyone would ever wanna watch it
what about return fire, black hawk down or the latest films of mel gibson and clint eastwood? i think i'd prefer to meet a pasolini fan in an alley to the public of those.

[Holden Caulfield]

Not me. There is a difference between somebody who watches a war film and enjoys it than somebody who watched a shit eating paedophillia film and enjoys it. You see kids playing soldiers since time immemorial, playing with tin soldiers to playing Call of Duty, you don't see shit eating and paedophillia in everyday life, in 'normal' behaviour.

either way Passolini goes out of his way to repulse to show the repulse he feels for modern consumerism, fascism and decedance so if you enjoy it he is a shit director aint he.

[narcomprom]

And what about a modest proposal? Pretty obscene, eh?

I'm quite surprised, Holden, to hear such a position on this forum. You the fourth internationale in your avatar, don't know if it matters to you but Trotsky talked quite compassionately (http://www.magister.msk.ru/library/trotsky/trotl486.htm) about a pedophiliac sodomist writer accused of gross indecency in Britain (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oscar_Wilde#Trial.2C_imprisonment.2C_and_transfer_ to_Reading_Gaol).

I thought a Marxist must be more concerned about the real conditions of the working class (described in a way that makes Dante blush by Engels in his "...in England" (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/condition-working-class/)) than some whipping in the phantasies of a de Sade. Apparently I was wrong. Marxists differ through place and time.

To me de Sade made a fairly point against moralism with his tirades and Pasolini did a fairly good job in bringing it to the screen. Von Trier, on the other hand, used a similiar shock effect for no purpose at all, in his recent Antichrist.

The end matters to me much more strongly than the means to acchieve it.

It sad that real existing socialists got mostly stuck in nigh-victorian prudishness while the west was celebrating sexual revolution. That came about because Lenin was afraid to scare the dim masses from materialism by outright obscenity and blasphemy.

That got stuck and, with Stalin, turnt into a "proletarian antithesis to bourgeois sexual morality", in practice a means to eradicate certain enemies of his for supposed sexual escapades. (that was lampooned in a Yugoslavian 1972 movie (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0067958/). Tito wasn't as uptight, it seems.) That's the only thing moralism is good for.
:
"You see kids playing soldiers since time immemorial, playing with tin soldiers to playing Call of Duty, you don't see shit eating and paedophillia in everyday life, in 'normal' behaviour."
Tradition is good because it is tradition and, probably, natural law. That is a valid pov, but not that of marxist or, more broadly, a leftist. What are you doing on these forums? Either you defend militarism and moralism appealing to the cozy status quo or you defend the wretched of the earth. You can't do both.

[Holden Caulfield]

You know what?
I don't care what some dead Russian said about somestuff I cared enought to make a 3 line post about.

I don't like watching shit eating paedophillia, I do like the Deer Hunter.
I guess Im a capitalist but thats the ways I likes it

[narcomprom]

I, for one, don't like reactionary propaganda like the Eternal Jew or the aforementionned blurts of the Hollywood, though they do not contain anything you call an objectionable scene. There's no copro- or pedo- philia in Jüd Süss either. Nevertheless I don't like it. Do you?

[Stranger Than Paradise]

Holden is right, it is not exactly supposed to be pleasant to watch. It is depicting Fascism, therefore it is supposed to be repulsive. That doesn't take away from it in anyway as being an excellent piece of cinema.

[Reckoneroads]

So, I don't agree that Pasolini was only a good neo-realist.. Of course Accatone and Mamma Roma are the fantastic movies, but...
Pier Paolo Pasoli directed "Vangelo Secondo Matteo" in 1964... and hi was the ONE who could describe Bibles message, it's meaning , not only showing the story.. It's the Marxist view on Bible, as he said, he found the most revolutionary things in St.Mathew-evangele.

So, there were the "trilogy of life- Decameron, The Centerbury Tales and 1001".. I said it was the dangerous his death.. Yes, I know what is the view all world about it, but still it's dangerous.. There is a view that Pasolini made his death too, as his final performance..
He was kicked off from the ICP, he was many timed in the court by church or by goverment..
It's silly to understand SALO like a pedophilia or something else.. It was 1972 (or 1974?), it has big meaning that in the movie, fascists says the qoutes from dostoevsky, tolstoy and etc.- the favourite writers for lefts.. and what? Pasolini denied himself, he was all his life against the HEROES and found that he was becoming another HERO for leftist.. He became more leftist, said you fucking idiots.. It has a big meaning the end of this movie, when 2 boys are dancing, make all material what was before this moment useless..