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Pier Paolo Pasolini. His life . The roman suburbs. - Literary experiences. - Cinema. That tragic 2nd November 1975 The first years in Rome were hard for Pasolini, who stumbled into a completely new reality of the Roman suburbs. These were insecure, impoverished and lonely times. One can better understand the drama of Pasolinis situation through his own words: "That was a tremendous period of my life. I came to Rome from the far Friulan country: unemployed for many years; ignored by all people; consumed by internal terror of not being as life wanted; occupied on working furiously on hard and complicated studies; unable to write but repeating myself in a world that had changed. I would find it unbearable to re-live those two or three years". (12) "In the first months of '50 I was in Rome with my mother. Two years later my father came too and from Piazza Costaguti we moved to Ponte Mammolo. Already in 1950 I began to write the first pages of Ragazzi di vita. I was unemployed, in really desperate conditions: I could also have died for that. Then, helped by the dialectical poet Vittori Clemente, I found a job as teacher in a private school of Ciampino, for 25.000 lire per month".(13) Wrote Pasolini in those years to Silvana Ottieri: "A thing I don't understand, and that I didnt forsee in the affair involving me and my punishment, is my mother's lot. I'll not write you very much about that, because I've already tears in my eyes. She found a job nearby with a little family (husband and wife and a little two years child): and with a heroism and a simpleness I cannot explain she has accepted her new life. I go and see her every day and take the child for a walk, to help her for a bit: she does anything to present herself as happy and light: yesterday was my birthday; did you know how she behaved..."(14) The father was sick, and after the facts in Casarsa the conflicts with the son became sharper: "Two years of furious work, of pure struggle: and my father was always there, alone in our poor little kitchen, with his elbows on the table and his face against his fists, immobile, mad, in pain; he filled the room in the little hollow with the largeness that dieing bodies have". (15) Rather than asking for help from those he knew, Pasolini, out of modesty, tried to find a job on his own. He entered the film industry at the bottom rungs of Cinecittà he became a proof-reader and sent his books to the local bookstalls. At last, thanks to the Abruzzi-language poet Vittori Clemente he found a job as teacher in a school of Ciampino. Those are the years when Pasolini transferred the mythicization of the Friulan countries to the disordered frame of roman, seen as the center of history, that gave birth to a painful growing process: the myth of the Roman lumpenproletariat arose. "For two or three
years I have been living in a "different-smack"
world: Pasolini prepared the anthologies on dialectal poetry; he contributed to "Paragone", a magazine by Anna Banti and Roberto Longhi. In Paragone Pasolini published the first version of the first chapter of Ragazzi di vita. Angioletti called him to be part of the literary section of the new cast, together with Carlo Emilio Gadda, Leone Piccioni and Giulio Cartaneo. The initial difficult Roman years had ended. In 1954 Pasolini left teaching and moved to Monteverde Vecchio (a little-bourgeois quarter in Rome). He published his first important volume of dialect poems: La meglio gioventù. In 1955 Garzanti published the novel Ragazzi di vita, which had a big success both among the critics and the public. The judgement of the official culture of PCI was for the most part negative. The book was declared to be full of "morbid taste", of "the dirty, the abject, the unseemly, the torbid." The Premiership (in the person of the that-time Home Secretary, Tambroni) promised a lawsuit against Pasolini and Livio Garzanti. The trial ended with acquittal "because the fact doesn't amount to a crime". The book, previously removed from bookshops, was de-sequestrated. Pasolini became one of the favorite butt by crime-news newspapers: he was accused of crimes until it seemed grotesque: aiding and abetting for brawl and theft; armed robbery in a pub neighbouring to a petrol pump in S. Felice Circeo. In 1957 Pasolini, together with Sergio Citti, collaborated on Fellini's film, Le notti di Cabiria, writing the dialogue in Roman dialect. He signed the scripts together with Bolognini, Rosi, Vancini and Lizzani, with whom made his dèbut as actor in the film Il gobbo in 1960. In those years Pasolini contributed to the magazine "Officina", together with Leonetti, Roversi, Fortini, Romanò, Scalia. In 1957 he published the short poems Le ceneri di Gramsci for Garzanti, and the next year L'usignolo della Chiesa cattolica for Longanesi. In 1960 Garzanti published the essays Passione e ideologia, and in 1961 another volume in verse La religione del mio tempo. In 1961 Pasolini made his first film as film-director and scriptwriter, Accattone. The film was forbidden to those under 18 and excited many polemics to the XXII Venice film festival. In 1962 he directed Mamma Roma. In 1963 the episode La ricotta directed by Pasolini and inserted into the film RoGoPaG, was sequestred and Pasolini was accused of the crime of public defamation of State religion. In '64 he directed Il Vangelo secondo Matteo; in '65 Uccellacci e uccellini; in '67 Edipo re; in '68 Teorema; in '69 Porcile; in '70 Medea; between '70 and '74 the trilogy of life, or of the sex, i.e. Il Decameron, I racconti di Canterbury and Il fiore delle Mille e una notte; finishing with his last film, Salò e le 120 giornate di Sodoma in 1975. The cinema pushed him into traveling abroad: in 1961 with Elsa Morante and Moravia he went to India; in 1962 to Sudan and Kenya; in 1963 to Ghana, Nigeria, Guinea, Israel and Giordania where he made a documentary whose title is Sopralluoghi in Palestina).
"I have never fallen so in love with a country. Except for Africa, maybe. But in Africa I would like to go so as to don't kill myself. Yes, Africa is like a drug, that you take instead of killing yourself. On the other hand, New York is a fight that you face instead of killing yourself." (17) In 1968 Pasolini was again in India to film a documentary. In 1970 he returned to Africa: in Uganda and Tanzania, from which he filmmed the documentary Appunti per un'Orestiade africana. In 1972, with Garzanti, he published a volume of criticism, mostly on cinema, entitled Empirismo eretico. In the years of the student protest Pasolini adopted a separate position from the rest of Left culture. Though he accepted and supported students ideological motives, he thought that they were anthropologically bourgeois and, as bourgeoise, destined to fail in their attempt at revolution. In 1968 Pasolini withdrew his novel Teorema from the Premio Strega competiton and agreed to participate in the XXIX Venice film festival after being guaranteed that there would be no awards. Pasolini was one of the biggest supporters of the Associazione Autori Cinematografici [Cinematographical Authors Association, n.t.] that fought to manage the event themselves. On 4th September the film Teorema was projected for critics in a red-hot atmosphere. Pasolini interrupted the films projection to confirm that the film was present to the festival only at the producer's request, and as author he asked the critics to leave the hall. That didn't happened. Pasolini refused to take part in the traditional press conference, and invited the journalists to a garden of a hotel to talk not about the film, but about the situation of Biennale. In 1972 Pasolini decided to co-operate with youths of Lotta Continua, and together with some of them, including Bonfanti and Fofi, signed the documentary about the massacre in Piazza Fontana in Milan: 12 dicembre. In 1973 he began his contribution for "Corriere della Sera" [an Italian newspaper, t.n.], with criticism on the problems of the Country. In 1970 Pasolini bought what remained of a medieval castle near Viterbo. He rebuilt it and from there he began writing his incomplete work Petrolio. In 1975, with Garzanti, he published the collection of criticism Scritti corsari, and re-proposed Friulian poetry in a curious way, with the title La nuova gioventù. On the morning of 2ndNovember 1975, on the Roman litoral of Ostia, in an uncultivated field in Via dell'idroscalo, a woman, Maria Teresa Lollobrigida, discovered the dead body of a man. Ninetto Davoli identified the body as Pier Paolo Pasolini. "When his body was
found, Pasolini lay outstretched, face downwards, a bleeding arm
shifted and the other one hidden by the body.  .. and nape. Ten broken ribs, the breast-bone broken. The heart burst". (18) During the night Carabineers stopped a young man named Giuseppe Pelosi, known as "Pino la rana", while driving a Giulietta 2000 that turned out to be owned by Pasolini. The boy, interrogated by Carabineers, and presented with the evidence, confessed the murder. He claimed to have encountered Pasolini near Termini railway station, and after a dinner in a restaurant, reached the place where the body was found. There, according to Pelosi's version, Pasolini attempted to approach him sexually but when he was rejected he responded violently, inciting the boy's reaction. The trial that followed brought to light disturbing facts. One suspected the complicity of other people in the murder. This matter will never be clear. Piero Pelosi was sentenced (he was the only one found guilty) for Pasolini's death. Pasolini was buried in Casarsa, in his never-forgotten Friuli. "So it's absolutely necessary to die, because till we're alive we are lacking of sense, and the language of our life (with which we express ourself, and to which we attach the maximum importance) is untranslatable: a chaos of possibility, a research of relations and meanings without solution of continuity. Death makes an instantaneous montage of our life: that is, it chooses ones really significant moments (and not more by now modifiable by other possible contrary or incoherent moments), and it puts them in succession, making of our never ending, instable and unsure present and so linguistically not describable, a clear, stable, sure past, and so linguistically describable (just in the ambit of a General Semiology). Only thanks to death, our life is used by us to express ourself". (19) ____________________ (12) Pier Paolo
Pasolini, Il treno di Casarsa, in "FMR", n. 28, November 1984,
Franco Maria Ricci, Milan. |
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I fit my body through very slow responsibilities. Between
Ibsenian and Pascolinian (to understand one each other...) I'm here
in an all-muscles existence, turned inside out like a glove, that
always explains itself as one of these songs that once upon a time
I hated, absolutely without sentimentality, in human organisms so
sensuous as to be nearly mechanical; where one doesn't know any of
the Christian attitudes, the forgiveness, the meakness, etc... and
the selfishness takes permitted, manly forms (...). In the northern
world where I have lived, there was always, or at least it seemed
to me, in the relationship between people, the shadow of a piety
that took the form of shyness, respect, anguish, affectionate
transport etc...: to free oneself from love a gesture or a word was
enough. Dominating the pull of the heart, the goodness or the
badness that's inside us, it wasn't a balance that one was looking
for among people (one person and another person), but a reciprocal
impulse. Here among these people, entirely dominated by the
irrational, passion, the relationship is always well defined, it
builds itself on more concrete facts: from muscular strength, to
social position". (16)
In 1966, on the occasion of the
presentation of Accattone and Mamma Roma at the New
York Film Festival, he made his first trip to the United States; he
was very taken by that country and most of all by New York. He
revealed to Oriana Fallaci: 
