ABSTRACT
The association between Susanna Pasolini’s cinema and Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis is evoked by Pasolini himself when he recounts one of his first experiences in filmmaking. Drawing on both the literary concepts of mingling of styles and figura, Pasolini rethought ‘realism’ as a composite textual ‘representation of reality’ which combined realistic frames of daily life with literary and religious texts, music, and the visual arts. Pasolini seems to respond to the challenge of creating a sort of ‘Auerbachian’ stylistic methodology in cinema. As a complex semiotic combination of photography, artistic images, music, and movement, the language of cinema was for Pasolini the perfect ‘living figural integration’ of literary texts, in order to extend Auerbach’s analysis of medieval figural and typological interpretation to cinema. Auerbach’s stylistic model is used with a number of references to Dante, but the text of Della Terza Dante’s Comedia is mainly used to create the complex semiotic construction of his narratives.
