Poet and peasant

At seventeen Pasolini began to write poetry in the Friulan dialect. Significantly, Friuli was not only his mother's native area, it also represented a regionalism of which his father - as both a Fascist and an inhabitant of central Italy - strongly disapproved. But Pasolini's interest in peasant dialects does not simply relate to his family, it also attests to a somewhat backward-looking, romantic, idealized vision of the peasantry as a source of 'true, natural values' which is as prevalent in his cinematic as his literary works. This early penchant for obscure dialect poetry was also connected with the current vogue for literary aestheticism — the idea that the language of poetry is absolute and sufficient unto itself. This cultivation of form for its own sake returns in Pasolini's cinema, representing a vigorous and stimulating attack on outworn forms of naturalism such as neo-realism, as well as a tendency towards extreme impenetrability.

Pasolini's favourite authors were deemed degenerate by the Fascists, and so, fuelled by hatred for his father, Pasolini developed a visceral anti-Fascism and turned towards Marxism. After the war, his Marxist leanings were reinforced at the University of Bologna, and he actually joined the Communist Party briefly in 1947-8. However, as he admits, his Marxism was emotional, aesthetic and cultural rather than directly political, and was strongly linked to his attachment to the (largely Catholic) peasantry. Indeed, Pasolini displayed only the sketchiest awareness of the works of Marx and Lenin, and none of his films could be said to adopt a rigorous, coherent and thoroughgoing Marxist point of view.

Cinema Roma

In 1950 Pasolini came to Rome, both the political capital of Italy and the home of Cinecitta, and thus an ideal place for someone interested in both film and politics. Here he became a scriptwriter, working mainly on would-be artistic low-life films - the last dying gasps of neo-realism - though he also had a hand in Fellini's Le Notti di Cabiria (1957, Nights of Cabiria) and Bertolucci's La Commare Secca (1962, The Grim Reaper).

Pasolini's work on Roman underworld films fitted perfectly with his interest in the Roman sub-proletariat, that was for him the urban equivalent of the Friulan peasantry. His earliest novels and films are set in this sector of society rather than among the organized, industrial proletariat. His first film Accattone (1961) is the chronicle of a small-time hustler, which, for all its employment of seemingly neo-realist devices (fragmentary narrative, non-professional actors, seedy locations, etc.), is significant precisely for its departures from the genre.

Though the film may be set among the sub-proletariat, it is not about them as a class and does nothing to elucidate their social condition. In this respect Pasolini's use of dialect here is less 'realistic' than a hermetic formal device which, as in his poetry, draws attention to the sounds of the words themselves. Similarly, the film's fractured structure, in which many shots appear to fulfil no clear narrative function, is less a 'realist' feature than the filmic equivalent of poetic language: metaphorical, connotative and largely self- referential.

Accattone, like so much of Pasolini's work, operates not on the level of the psychological and the social, but on that of fable and myth. His second film - Mamma Roma (1962) - is the story of an ex-prostitute who tries unsuccessfully to give her son a 'respectable' bourgeois background. It introduces another key Pasolini theme, and one that is exposed more fully in Teorema (1968, Theorem): the unacceptable face of the modern bourgeois and petit-bourgeois worlds.

Of Marx and myth

With II Vangelo Secondo Matteo (1964, The Gospel According to St Matthew) Pasolini took an already mythologized subject. Cleary influenced by Rossellini's Francesco, Giullare di Dio (1950, Flowers of St. Francis), Pasolini almost reverses the trajectory of Accattone by moving from the mythical and sacred to the everyday. Generally read as an attempt to pull Christianity back to its popular, primitive roots, it was largely this film which earned him the 'Christian-Marxist' tag. However, it could also be argued that the representation of the various 'modern' accretions to the Gospel demonstrates that the Bible possesses no one fixed meaning, but various different meanings which have come to it over centuries of social usage. Ultimately the film expresses a belief in the virtues of the people independant of social classes, while its view of history is too cloudy and romanticized to be considered properly materialist. In line with Pasolini's reverence for what he calls the sacred, the miracles are allowed to retain their sense of mystery.

Coinciding with the upsurge in left-wing political activity in the late Sixties, Pasolini retreated increasingly into the creation of a largely mythical universe, with films such as Edipo Re (1967, Oedipus Rex), Teorema, Porcile (1969, Pigsty) and Medea (1970). It was hardly surprising that he should be attracted by the Oedipus legend, not only in Oedipus Rex but throughout many of his films in which its presence (though not always immediately obvious) acts as a structure of images and ideas informing the whole. Oedipus Rex is framed by a contemporary prologue and epilogue, set in the Friulan countryside and Bologna respectively. The main action occurs not in an historically specific ancient Greece, but in an seemingly timeless pre-historical North Africa, a world of primitive drives and desires. This is presented as deliberately strange and distanced, like someone else's dream, affording the spectator no possibility of involvement and identification.

Before the Fall

Like many Pasolinian figures Oedipus inhabits a pre-moral world, obeying only his basic drives before eventually being forced to enter into knowledge, to understand the significance of his acts and to realize that certain desires are taboo. But by then it is too late and retribution inevitably follows, making many of Pasolini's films akin to pagan versions of the myth of the Fall, set in the realms of the universal and the mythic as opposed to the personal and the psychological. Indeed, his trilogy of tales - Il Decameron (1971, The Decameron), I Racconti di Canterbury (1972, The Canterbury Tales), Il Fiore delle Mille e Una Notte (1974, Arabian Nights) celebrates a pre-lapsarian world, the invocation of an almost magical past in which innocence is still possible. Arabian Nights in particular is a paean to guiltless sexuality, to the naked human body and to frank sexual desire: a film in which, unusually, the male heterosexual vision does not dominate, and male and female beauty and desire are treated in an unconventionally equal manner.

After the relative innocence of the trilogy Pasolmi plunged back into the horrors of a twentieth century in the grip of Fascism with Salo o le Centoventi Giornate di Sodoma (1975, Salo or the 120 Days of Sodom). Transposing the Marquis de Sade's eighteenth-century erotic tales to a castle in northern Italy during the last days of Mussolini, Pasolini presents an increasingly extreme series of orgies and tortures in order to demonstrate that sex is no longer a means of liberation but simply one more tool of oppression. The point may be debatable, but not the horrifying cruelty and pessimism of this uncannily valedictory work.

Pasolini was battered to death by a teenage youth shortly after completing Salo on November2, 1975, in circumstances that still remain clouded and controversial.