On that Saturday, the first day of November 1975, Pier Paolo Pasolini spoke with journalist Furio Colombo. Pasolini suggested to the journalist to call the interview "Because we are all in danger". He explained this with the sentence: "And you don't know who is thinking of killing you all this time." After a few hours, Pier Paolo Pasolini was indeed dead. He was killed in the night between November 1 and 2, 1975. The day before that, he returned from Stockholm, where he met Ingmar Bergman.
Around half past eleven in the evening, Pasolini welcomed seventeen-year-old Giuseppe Pino Pelosi, who was involved in homosexual prostitution, into his car at Rome's Termini train station. From that point on, there are several versions of the story. According to the official version, Pasolini drove with Pelosi to Ostia, a small town at the confluence of the Tiber and the Mediterranean Sea, 35 kilometers from Rome. There, Pasolini is said to have died at a local football stadium near the beach in a physical altercation with Pelosi. His body was mutilated. Pelosi said he accidentally ran over the beaten Pasolini when he got behind the wheel of his car.
Political murder?
Another version of the story, encouraged by Pelosi, who retracted his confession in 2005, goes like this: Several people with a southern accent beat up Pasolini, yelling that he was a "communist pig." Pelosi claims that he remained silent out of fear for his family, because he was threatened, and that he spoke only when his parents passed away. Journalists and Pasolini's friends claimed from the beginning that it was a political assassination and that Pelosi was just a decoy. Back in 1975, the famous Italian journalist and writer Orijana Falaci wrote that according to the testimony of a witness, Pasolini was killed by a group of extreme right-wingers. She refused to give the name of the witness, because she had promised to do so, she was sentenced to four months in prison, but she was amnestied.
The police conducted the investigation sloppily, they left Pasolini's car in the rain, so the fingerprints were destroyed. Pathologists suspected that the severe injuries on the body indicated multiple perpetrators. But it was not included in the official report. It has never been fully clarified how Pasolini died.
De Sad in the Mussolini era
At the time of his death, Pasolini had already completed a film based on the book 120 days of Sodom The Marquise de Sada, however, takes place during the Italian fascist Republic of Salo (1944-45), which Hitler formed in the north of Italy for the deposed Mussolini. Pasolini's last film caused fierce controversies, bans, but also recognition.
I remember the art cinema "Lerer beutel" in Regensburg - the best program cinema I've been to. I watched there in the early nineties 120 days of Sodom. I left the cinema into the warm Bavarian night. I thought this dark, orgiastic symphony might be the best cinematic study of fascism I'd ever seen. Pasolini's ingenuity placed De Sade's harrowing book about sexuality as an aspect of power and subjugation in the final years of Mussolini's fascism in Salo, a puppet German creation. Pasolini spent the last two years of the war in Friuli, near the northern Adriatic, in the small town of Kazarsi, his mother's birthplace. He will once say about that time: "I lived through terrible days in Friuli. For example, some of the biggest partisan battles were fought there, in which my brother was also killed. One of the most cruel regimes was established there, because the whole of Friuli was under German control, with some local fascists, who were real murderers. In addition, Friuli was constantly bombed by the Americans, whose flying fortresses dropped bombs there, on their flight to Germany. Raids, abandoned cities, bombing, almost senseless, pure cruelty”.
Circles of Fascist Hell
Pasolini connected that cruel atmosphere with De Sade's dislocated scenes, and he structured the whole matter in four circles - modeled after Dante's Divine comedy: Hall of Hell, Circle of Obsessions, Circle of Shit, Circle of Blood.
In the story of four representatives of the fascist government who live in a villa over kidnapped girls and young men, Pasolini tells the story of the relationship between the government and its subjects. In a conversation that Pasolini had with journalist Gideon Bahman in 1975, during the filming of the film, he says, among other things: "In my film, all that sex takes on a special meaning: it is a metaphor for what the government does to the human body, about its reduction to the point, which is typical for government, for every government". Asked if he wanted to evoke disgust in the scenes where a young slave is forced to eat excrement, Pasolini said that “the producers, the industrialists, force the consumer to eat excrement. All that industrially produced food is worthless garbage”.
Defense of the Friulian language
About 600.000 people live in the province of Friuli, whose mother tongue, from Venice to Gorica, is Friulian, as the largest branch of retro-Romance. Pasolini's mother Suzana was born there. And although Pasolini was born in Bologna, on March 5, 1922, a few days before Mussolini came to power, as the son of a conservative officer who was inclined to fascism, the summers he spent in his mother's area allowed him to absorb this language, similar to Italian but still his own. Pasolini studied art history in Bologna, dealing with Renaissance painting. He had to stop his studies because of the outbreak of war. Twenty-year-old Pasolini studied literature in Kazarsa, his mother's birthplace, and wrote and published a book of his poems in 1942: Verses from Kazara - in which he largely relied on the Friulian expression. In Fascist Italy, "dialects" were considered anti-Italian remnants of the past. This collection of songs foreshadowed the great artist Pasolini. After completing his studies in literature, he taught literature in schools in Friuli. It is a favorite among students and parents. But an anonymous tip that he was homosexual and that he was behaving inappropriately, led to his expulsion from school, but also to his exclusion from the Italian Communist Party, which he joined after the war. Then he vowed to remain a leftist for the rest of his life, regardless of the party. The accusations turn out to be false, but he goes to Rome. At first he lives hard, but soon he starts publishing in the left-wing press, publishing collections of poems and novels like Life boys (translated into Serbian as Experienced guys) that cause public disgust of the ruling Christian Democratic elite. They shower him with lawsuits, and this will not change during his life - he had to go to court 33 times because of his art or his opinion.
"Sink into this beautiful sea of yours"
He did not remain indebted to such Italy. He published the song "To My Nation" in 1959:
Not the Arab people, not the Balkan people, not the ancient people,
but a living nation, but a European nation:
and what are you really? Land of children, hungry, venal
rulers, servants of landowners, administrators
cowards, petty lawyers coated in the brilliance of dirty feet,
Drip liberal officials as well as deranged uncles,
one barracks, one seminary, one free
beach, one brothel!
Millions of petty bourgeois like a million pigs graze
jostling in front of the new palaces,
and among colonial houses stripped bare like a church.
Precisely because you existed now you don't exist,
precisely because you were conscious you are now unconscious.
And just because you're Catholic, you can't think that it is
your evil total evil: the guilt of all evil.
Sink into this beautiful sea of yours, set the world free.
After about fifteen years, filled with writing sharp, extremely well-read columns and uncompromising books, as well as shooting controversial films, Pasolini supplemented this poetic statement with the statement: "All I have to do is accept Italy as it has become. That giant snake's nest, in which everyone, with some exceptions and some slightly deranged intellectual elites, are just snakes, stupid and insidious, unrecognizable, ambiguous, repulsive..."
Film as a "language of reality"
In the fifties, Pasolini first became an assistant to Federico Fellini, the pope of film neorealism in Rome. Then, from 1961, he got the opportunity to make films himself. His artistic vision remains the same, but the language changes: "By making films, I somehow renounced the Italian language, that is, my nationality." Those films anger his powerful conservative opponents even more than his literature. He is publicly defended by the great Italian writer and his friend Alberto Moravia: "He was accused of contempt for religion." It would have been much more correct if the director had been accused of expressing his contempt for the petty Italian bourgeoisie".
In poetry, he was beyond all ideological boundaries. His collections are called i Nightingale of the Catholic Church i Gramsci's ashes. This second book is dedicated to the Italian communist thinker Antonio Gramsci, who wrote his writings in a fascist prison.
It was the same with movies. Pasolini made one of the best films about Jesus - Gospel according to Matthew - and then a series of films that can be understood as a direct provocation of the ruling Catholic morality.
Since 1971, he has been filming the "Trilogy of Life", which consists of films decameron, Flower of 1001 nights i The Canterbury Tales. Youth and eros are celebrated in them. He then plans the "Trilogy of Death", but manages to film only Fat or 120 days of Sodom.
"The end of the world"
What would Pier Paolo Pasolini say to today's world, if he had not been killed by any chance? Perhaps: “The collapse of the present includes the collapse of the past. Life is just a pile of senseless and ironic ruins". He saw capitalist modernization as turning people into consumer idiots, the leveling of regional cultures, and all that we call globalization today in a far more accelerated and aggressive form, as a mechanism for transforming people into things: "In consumerism, you don't have to have a flag; the clothes you wear are your flag. Some means and some external signs have changed, but, in practice, it is about the impoverishment of individuality, which is disguised as its valuation". He claimed that "television and, perhaps even more, compulsory schooling, will degrade all children and youth into squeamish, complexed, second-rate racist petty citizens."
Pasolini was clairvoyant in his radical critique of consumerism supported by technology. After all, back then, in the deep analog era, without the ubiquitous hyper-information network, without our worried look at a child playing with a smartphone, he already claimed: "The real apocalypse is the one brought by technology, the era of applied science, which will turn man into something different from what he used to be. Something happened without an equivalent in the history of mankind so far. We are frightened by the idea that our children and descendants will not be like us. It is, in a sense, the end of the world".
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