Pasolini the Cinema of Poetry

¶ … Pasolini's final interviews, before the release of Salo, or The 120 Days of Sodom, and prior to his murder, he revealed his thoughts on his work. He simply saw himself as a poet. His most popular essay on the cinema was entitled "Il cinema di poesia." In that essay, he discusses his writings and films and referred to the poetry as inspirations from the paintings of Giotto, Michelangelo, Pontormo, Rosso Fiorentino, and Masaccio.

His concept of poetry was wide and included all the art forms. Paolini's point-of-view was derived from classical roots such as Aristotle and later, Horace. It was also apart of an Italian idealist philosophical tradition manifested by Benedetto Croce, whose philosophical method influenced every Italian intellectual of Pasolini's generation. These included Pasolini and Antonio Gramsci. The mixture of Marxism and idealist philosophy, coupled with Catholic context, was specific to Italy.

To provide further background, Pasolini studied art history with Roberto Longhi, Italy's well-known art historian, at the University of Bologna during the early 1940s. Most of imagery depicted in his films, either by content or by outlining and location, are reproduced from the periods of Italian Renaissance and baroque paintings. His thesis at the university consisted of the symbolist-decadent poet Giovanni Pascoli. Pasolini's films mention directly from painting, poetry, music, and seldom, the cinema.

Frequently the references are constructed as comparisons between the everyday low life like whores and libertines to the high and spiritual, either illustrated or from music and literature, as in Salo, for instance, where the libertines are correlated with divine music, the avant-garde of the thirties (Leger), the neoclassical (their villa, where victims are collected, detained, and murdered), Leonardo da Vinci's The Last Supper (the banquet of tripe), and most plainly the Marquis de Sade and the Inferno of Dante Alighieri. The libertines quote Nietzsche; Pasolini quotes Bataille and Barthes. In The Decameron, Pasolini feigned the role of Giotto; in The Gospel According to Matthew, Italian scholars portrayed the apostles, Pasolini's mother, and Mary, the mother of Christ.

References, such as orphans granted a new home, made into reproduction and photomontage, are essence of present-day art -- in painting, photography, the cinema, and writing. Pasolini's references are comprehensive, originally considerable as metaphors and comparatives between life and art, between mores, place, and temporalities, remarkably the instance in Salo but genuine of all his films beginning with the very first: Accattone in Accattone is equated to Bernini's angels, followed by the music of Bach; Ettore in Mamma Roma to the limited Deposition of Christ by Mantegna, followed by the music of Vivaldi; the ghettos of Rome to the baroque era, creating a distinguished past to the now and a despicable now to a glorified past, polluting both, disgracefully, in La ricotta (the sub-proletarian gorger Stracci expiring on the cross from nausea equated to the sacrifice of Christ).

Salo incorporates a minimum of four physical layers: the year it was made (1975); the span of the final year of the Italian Fascist stooge government beneath Mussolini in Salo, on Lago di Garda, in Northern Italy; the novel The 120 Days of Sodom by the Marquis de Sade in 1785; and the narrative Divine Comedy of Dante. Pasolini presents these temporalities analytically as well as metaphorically, at the center of which is his distaste for modern society, modified and consumerist, as it appeared to him, up to the final fortress of defiance and liberty as it pertained to language, sexuality, and the body.