filmmaker
writer
poet
Pier Paolo Pasolini was an Italian film director, poet, writer and intellectual. Pasolini also distinguished himself as an actor, journalist, philosopher, novelist, playwright, painter and political figure.
Background
Pier Paolo Pasolini was born in Bologna, traditionally one of the most leftist politically of Italian cities. He was the son of Carlo Alberto Pasolini, a lieutenant of the Italian army, and Susanna Colussi, an elementary school teacher. His parents married in 1921, Pasolini was born in 1922 and named after his paternal uncle. His family moved to Conegliano in 1923 and, two years later, to Belluno, where another son, Guidalberto, was born.
In 1926, Pasolini's father was arrested for gambling debts. His mother moved with the children to her family's house in Casarsa della Delizia, in the Friuli region. That same year, his father Carlo Alberto, first detained and then identified Anteo Zamboni as the would-be assassin of Benito Mussolini following his assassination attempt. At any rate, Carlo Alberto was persuaded of the virtues of fascism.
Education
Pasolini began writing poems at the age of seven, inspired by the natural beauty of Casarsa. One of his early influences was the work of Arthur Rimbaud. In 1931, his father was transferred to Idria in the Julian March (now Idrija in Slovenia); in 1933 they moved again to Cremona in Lombardy, and later to Scandiano and Reggio Emilia. Pasolini found it difficult to adapt to all these moves, though in the meantime he enlarged his poetry and literature readings (Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Shakespeare, Coleridge, Novalis) and left behind the religious fervour of his early years. In the Reggio Emilia high school, he met his first true friend, Luciano Serra. The two met again in Bologna, where Pasolini spent seven years while completing high school: here he cultivated new passions, including football. With other friends, including Ermes Parini, Franco Farolfi, Elio Meli, he formed a group dedicated to literary discussions.
In 1939 Pasolini graduated and entered the Literature College of the University of Bologna, discovering new themes such as philology and aesthetics of figurative arts. He also frequented the local cinema club. Pasolini always showed his friends a virile and strong exterior, totally hiding his interior travail. He took part in the Fascist government's culture and sports competitions. In his poems of this period, Pasolini started to include fragments in Friulan, a dialect he didn't speak but learned after he'd begun to write poetry in it. "I learnt it as a sort of mystic act of love, a kind of félibrisme, like the Provençal poets."
Career
In 1942, at the age of twenty, Pasolini published, at his own expense, a collection of poems in Friulan, Versi a Casarsa, which he had written at the age of eighteen. The work was noted and appreciated by intellectuals and critics such as Gianfranco Contini, Alfonso Gatto and Antonio Russi. His pictures had also been well received. Pasolini was chief editor of the Il Setaccio ("The Sieve") magazine, but was fired after conflicts with the director, who was aligned with the Fascist regime. A trip to Germany helped him also to perceive the "provincial" status of Italian culture in that era. These experiences led Pasolini to rethink his opinion about the cultural politics of Fascism and to switch gradually to a Communist position.
In 1942, the family took shelter in Casarsa, considered a more tranquil place to wait for the conclusion of the Second World War, a decision common among Italian military families. In the weeks before the 8 September armistice, Pasolini was drafted. He was captured and imprisoned by the German Wehrmacht, but managed to escape disguised as a peasant, and found his way to Casarsa. Here he joined a group of other young fans of the Friulan dialect who wanted to give Casarsa Friulan a status equal to that of Udine, the official regional standard. From May 1944 they issued a magazine entitled Stroligùt di cà da l'aga. In the meantime, Casarsa suffered Allied bombardments and forced enrollments by the Italian Social Republic, as well as partisan activity.
Pasolini tried to remain apart from these events. He, his mother and other colleagues of his taught students unable to reach the schools in Pordenone or Udine starting in October 1943. Others were involved too, but this educational workshop was considered illegal, and broke up in February 1944. He had his first experience of gay love for one of his students. His brother Guido, aged 19, went on to join the Party of Action and their Osoppo-Friuli Brigade, taking to the bush, near Slovenia. On 12 February 1945 Guido was killed in an ambush planted by Italian Garibaldine partisans serving in the lines of Tito's Yugoslavian guerrillas. The fatal event turned into a harrowing tragedy for mother and son.
Six days later Pasolini and others founded the Friulan Language Academy (Academiuta di lenga furlana). Meanwhile, Pasolini's father Carlo Alberto returned to Italy from his Kenya's detention period in November 1945 on account of Guido's death. He settled down in Casarsa, Susanna's home town. Also in November, Pier Paolo Pasolini graduated after completing a final thesis about Giovanni Pascoli's works.
In 1946 Pasolini published a small poetry collection, I Diarii ("The Diaries"), with the Academiuta. In October he traveled to Rome. The following May he began the so-called Quaderni Rossi, handwritten in old school exercise books with red covers. He completed a drama in Italian, Il Cappellano. His poetry collection, I Pianti ("The cries"), was also published by the Academiuta.
Works
Politics
The June 1975 elections saw the rise of leftist options, and dwelling on his blunt, ever more political approach and prophetic style during this period, he declared in the Corriere della Sera the time was reached to put the most prominent Christian-Democrat figures to trial in a court, where a staging would be needed showing them walking in handcuffs and conducted by the carabinieri.
Pasolini also declared the Christian-Democatric party leadership was "riddled with Mafia influence".
He was angered by economic globalization and cultural domination of the North of Italy (around Milan) over other regions, especially the South. He felt this was accomplished through the power of TV.
He lashed out at publicity and television. A debate TV program recorded in 1971, where he denounced censorship, was not actually aired until the day following his murder in November 1975. In a reform blueprint drawn up by himself in September and October 1975 (he got closer to the Communist Party, "an island of salvation"), among the desirable measures to be implemented, he cited the abolition of compulsory secondary school, and television.
He opposed the gradual disappearance of Italian languages and dialects by writing some of his poetry in Friulan, the regional language of his childhood. His opposition to the liberalization of abortion law made him unpopular on the left.
After 1968 he left communism,[clarification needed] claiming instead the Radical Party (Partito Radicale): left-libertarian, liberal, anti-clerical and led by his friend Marco Pannella. In 1975, leaving a letter to Congress with radical party on written :" Dear Pannella, dear friends, dear radical Spadaccia you don't need to do anything else (I believe) that continue to be yourself: which means continuously be unrecognizable. Forget immediately i grandi successi: and continue straight ahead, obstinate, eternally opposed, to demand, to want, to identify yourself with the other; to shock; to blaspheme."
Personality
Physical Characteristics:
The LGBT encyclopedia states the following regarding Pasolini's homosexuality:
While openly gay from the very start of his career (thanks to a gay sex scandal that sent him packing from his provincial hometown to live and work in Rome), Pasolini rarely dealt with homosexuality in his movies.
The subject is featured prominently in Teorema (1968), where Terence Stamp's mysterious God-like visitor seduces the son and father of an upper-middle-class family; passingly in Arabian Nights (1974), in an idyll between a king and a commoner that ends in death; and, most darkly of all, in Salò, or The 120 Days of Sodom (1975), his infamous rendition of the Marquis de Sade's compendium of sexual horrors.
In 1963 Pasolini met "the great love of his life," fifteen-year-old Ninetto Davoli, whom he later cast in his 1966 film Uccellacci e uccellini (literally Bad Birds and Little Birds but translated in English as The Hawks and the Sparrows), Pasolini became the youth's mentor and friend. "Even though their sexual relations lasted only a few years, Ninetto continued to live with Pasolini and was his constant companion, as well as appearing in six more of his films."