ABSTRACT
293 PierPaolo Pasolini
While everyone was asleep that scorching afternoon, I went walking through the deserted streets. I was heading for a lonely bridge over the river which for some days had been my favorite goal, holding some unknown allure. Upon reaching it I leaned on the parapet and looked down. I remained there for some time then raised my head, and, looking around, noticed a detail that had previously escaped me: along the street bordering the river, but quite secluded, stood an old urinal surrounded by a sheet of rusted iron. This structure was new to me, since in the village from which I came, there was nothing of the sort. Approaching, I entered, and saw a slab of yellowed marble, wet from the continual dripping of water. There was a sharp, persistent stench of ammonia. Very excited, and as though on the point of committing something forbidden, I was about to urinate in that place that up until now had been foreign to me. Suddenly, I heard voices approaching. Two men were speaking, and they were already inside as I was about to run away; I could no longer get away and remained there, in the middle, between the two men, against the marble slab, bowing my head, waiting for them to leave.
When later I was alone again by the river’s edge, I realized that I was completely overcome by a new, intoxicating, spasmodic palpitation. My modesty had recieved a shock so violent and unexpected that even that pleasure that I had just discovered, different from anything else I had previously experienced, seemed to redothe itself in somewhat more compelling attractions. I was unable to derifer them then though. I was simph/ thrown into the midst of their violence. But the fiercely logical thoughts of a child began to connect themselves in line with a practical and interested order. By now I was seeking a way to again obtain for myself that offense to my boyish modesty. As was natural for me, a plan immediately formed in my mind on which the tempations and curiosities of that different adult atmosphere, imbued with sin, had been impressed: I would pretend to be looking at the river as usual, and as soon as someone stopped at the urinal, I would go in too. I devoted the first deserted and burning hours of the noonday to plotting my course from that urinal to another similar one that I had discovered near the Market. As I stood before the sultry slabs I often heard the buz? of bluebottles, of horseflies, or of some stray wasp.
(1948–1949)
<target id="page_294" target-type="page">294</target> <italic>Accattone</italic> (1961): Franco Citti (Accattone) and his partners-in-crime just before the crime that leads to Accattone's death. This film was the first film in the history of Italian cinema to get an “18 years and over” rating. It was considered “vulgar” in it's representation of the sub-proletariate, causing the Italian Parliament to take an unpresidented vote to censor it. Pasolini was assaulted during a riot in the theatre on it's openning night. https://s3-euw1-ap-pe-df-pch-content-public-p.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/9781315021508/df290b3e-cb34-4820-885b-273c2b0f9723/content/figu76.jpg"/> 295 https://s3-euw1-ap-pe-df-pch-content-public-p.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/9781315021508/df290b3e-cb34-4820-885b-273c2b0f9723/content/figu77.jpg"/> <target id="page_296" target-type="page">296</target> <italic>Salò (o Le 120 Glomate di Sodoma</italic>) (1975): Two fascist guards dance together in the final scene. A poignant portrayal of the decline of fascism in Italy at the end of World War II, this film was banned in most countries on grounds ranging from indecency and pornography to politcal subversion. This was Pasolini's last film before his untimely death. https://s3-euw1-ap-pe-df-pch-content-public-p.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/9781315021508/df290b3e-cb34-4820-885b-273c2b0f9723/content/figu78.jpg"/> <italic>Teorema</italic> (1968): Terrence Stamp (The Visitor) and Andrès José Cruz (Pietro) undress before going to bed. A film that was widely condemned and considered scandalous because of it's depiction of a (sexually) decadent bourgeois-upper class. https://s3-euw1-ap-pe-df-pch-content-public-p.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/9781315021508/df290b3e-cb34-4820-885b-273c2b0f9723/content/figu79.jpg"/> 297 https://s3-euw1-ap-pe-df-pch-content-public-p.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/9781315021508/df290b3e-cb34-4820-885b-273c2b0f9723/content/figu80.jpg"/>298 https://s3-euw1-ap-pe-df-pch-content-public-p.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/9781315021508/df290b3e-cb34-4820-885b-273c2b0f9723/content/figu81.jpg"/>
“… my inditements have been institutionalized and have become part of mainstream contemporary Italian culture, Italian history. I’ve been antbologized; my writings and films have been carefully reinterpreted, revised. The eros in my work has been eitber ignored or aestbetisized. The beauty has bttn gutted-out or else it has been turned ugly.
Synthesized, compacted, edited, decontextualized, deconstructed, it has all become part of other people’s discourses and rhetoric, becoming abstracted. Why has my essay “The church, the penis and the vagina” been forgotten for so many years? Why haven’t my essays “Homosexuality” and “Jail and the fraternity of homosexual love” been translated? Why has so much of my work been supressed… not to mention the pieces I’ve written on abortion, extra-marital sex, terrorism, fescism and anti-fascism, etc. Why didn’t the people at the Museum of Modern Art call a spade a spade (a fag a fag) when they elevated me to the status of a “Modern(’s) Master” with their (not my) travelling film retraspective? It is becoming apparent why I have been reconstructed into a white-washed (anti-)hero. The lines on my face are being softened by revisionist historians of (homopbobic) hourgeois sensibilities. This is my real murder, my real condenmation. This is my real sacrifice. My life flashes before my eyes…
“(I would’ve been 69 this year) and I’d have lived through over half a century of perhaps the most violent changes in Italian and world history. I was born in ‘22, the year Mussoloni came to power. My father was a fascist by convention. I remember his black shirt. I witnessed the downfall of fascism after the War which took away the life of my only brother. I participated in the rise of communism, in reaction to the attrocities, amoung them the death of my brother and the brainwashing of my father. It was on attempt at washing away the violence of those black shirts, those black years. Soon though, the Partito Communista Italiano expelled me from it’s ranks for alleged “perverse actions” of which I was aquitted undeniably in court. My sexuality was a threat to their attempt at assimilation. I was naive then … But I’ve seen something even more terrifying: I’ve seen the machine of mediocrity woo away an entire nation with the promise of security and a heavenly afterlife; the Democratic Christian Party guarenteeing prosperity to the working class, offering them the promise of rising into the ever swelling ranks of the bourgeoisie, I’ve witnessed the mass-production of FLAT’s, appliances, designer clothes, gourmet foods, smiles and stars. The decline of culture bartered in exchange of or a bit-part in a CineCittà film or a gig in a foeo-romanzo. The bourgeoisie and it’s moralism are the real evil.
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I’ve been part of the counter-culture as it has been defined by the dominant-culture. I’ve tried to create a space where open discussions of taboos, sexual and other, could take place. I was told endless times by every faction of the Left with whom I aligned myself during the years, to down-play these forums and to think of the greater struggle of the nation for now… everything would later fall into place. How could I be so egotistical when there were more important and pressing things to fight for? ‘… the collective, the collective… we Italians are excessively social beings … after all homosexuality doesn’t really exist in Italy. No, Pier Paolo, you’re suffering from an unresolved psychological trauma regarding your parents. You’re a true Italian, a poet; focus your energies towards more noble matters, toward the people, the nation, La Patria…’
“I’ve heard it all. I’ve been disregarded, misinterpreted, and when I resisted, mocked, humiliated and vilified. I was brought into courthouses all across Italy on various charges during these years, all fuelled by an incessant homophobia. (I was aquitted everytime.) The media lynched me year after year and had a fieldtrip with my courtdates, the constructed scandals around my private life, the censorship of my films and novels, my newspaper columns, essays, public speeches, all acts of violence against me … and with all this, created the image of a monster to the public. I was a genious perhaps, but also a pervert, a corrupter of youth, a subversive, a homosexual; thus I was dispensible. Does this shed light on that night in 1975, when I was killed? And why did the courts never fully complete thier investigation into the cause of my death (read: assasination) even after repeated formal requests by their own constituents? Get Real!
“The Italian slang for faggot is ‘finoecbio’, the Italian word for fennel. Why? In the Middle-ages when homosexuals were burned at the stake, fennel was thrown on the remains. The fennel had an almost miraculous quality of halting the unbearable stench of the charred flesh.
I’ve become both the object of loathing, as well as it’s appeasment.
300 John Di Stefano
Often the sexually charged scenes in many of Pasolini’s films were really repressions of his own homosexual desire, cloaked in what seemed to him to be the only viably acceptable currency: heterosexuality, often in the guise of comradery between men. Thus, gay male sexual desire was in interupted or denied altogether. Where Pasolini’s gaze may have been driven by gay desire, his actions were driven by self-loathing. While asserting an image of defiance to the order of Italian macbismo, he was somehow complicit with it’s logic. In order for his unacceptable desire to be tolerated it had to be somehow meshed with this logic; it had to be conflated with political ideology. To be taken seriously in Italy, one must align oneself religiously to the ideology of a political party. He chose early on to align himself with the Left. His dedication to communist ideals helped displace the shock of his homosexuality to his contemporaries. It became the alibi for his desire, and may partly explain his obsession with the subproletariatc, and specifically with subprolctarian men. Pier Paolo aligned himself with the plight of this class socio-politically, but his position was inevitably directed by his sexual desire – a desire that also tried to deflect guilt from the power he wielded as a member of the literati. Ideologically, his patriarchal benevolence, his altruistic interest in the boys of the borgata gave him the only possible access to desire that he could accept ethically. This is exemplary of the hypocrisy on which the italian intelligentsia is often founded – the hand that contributes to sexism, racism and homophobia Of this hypocrisy, Pasolini was guilty. As visible as he was in the public sphere as a gay man, he was not as radical as perhaps he wanted to be. For what he expressed, there was an equal amount left unvoiced. Pasolini was torn, his conviction diluted. He was still invisible.
These “repressions” in Pasolin’s films mirrored the compromised marxist adoption of bourgeois restraint in Italy – the betrayal of his true desire: the desire to see two men happy together on screen (and in his own life). He chose the security of patriarchal logic to present his desire to a society that didn’t want to hear. He adopted as a model the institutionalized myth of the Freudian homoseiual-victim manifested in the unresolved Oedipal complex. He went as far as making a film about the Oedipal myth, which lacked any significant reference to (his) homosexuality. He had a morbid love for his mother, and a quite dedictable hatred of his father – the man yon desired the most and who you could never allow yourself to love, but had wished to possess; the man you wanted to fuck hard and violently and by whom you wanted to be fucked passionately; the man whose cock you wanted to suck as if it were a milk-giving nipple; the man who you wished would ejaculate all over your chest and whose cum would envelope you. Why did we never see this on the screen? Why did we never read this in your books? Why did we have to wait years for it to be said by someone else? Why did you deem the only acceptable way for your sexual desire to be expressed was when it was with a bustler whose services you bad to pay for, in a field at night, or in an alley, in your car, on an empty soccerfield in Ostia … I read once were you paid ten (or more?) neapolitan youths to jerk-off in a circle around yam while performing fellatio on several of them. Was this the real scene you wanted to shoot for one of your films? You’ve been accused of worse, why didn’t you show Italians that they are homos too and that it could mean something different; that it didn’t have to be about power and marginality. You were not the only one. (I am not the only one.)
It has been said that you were sexy in your radicalism and vitality (Laura Betti sure fell for it!). It has been said that it turned your facial features into beacons. I have been told that you were very sensual when you talked of politics, when you got angry, livid, and raised your cocky eyebrow. It has been whispered in my ear that your sexiness was persuasive in particular when you spoke of revolution and desire, when you tried to re-write it. (I could believe in that.) Some say you filled a void that no person since has quite been able to fill. Some have told me that they were not afraid to look to you; they were no longer ashamed.
