The major Italian filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini was also a poet, novelist, essayist, and iconoclastic political commentator. Naomi Greene reveals to English-speaking readers the diverse talents that made him one of the most controversial European intellectuals of the postwar era, at the center of political and cultural debates still vital to our time. Greene presents Pasolini's films to the English-speaking world in full detail and in a rich critical context, using them to trace the evolution of his ideas and the details of his troubled personal life from 1950, when he settled in Rome, to 1975, the year of his brutal murder, apparently at the hands of a young male prostitute. "In her concise and sympathetic book, Greene intelligently explicates the political and social context within which Pasolini became both a leading figure and a significant heretic. He was an atheist who directed one of the few genuinely profound biblical films in the cinema, a communist who severely criticized many of the radical movements of modern Italy. Though he publicly acknowledged his homosexuality, he privately referred to it as his "sickness." As the book well documents, Pasolini was not a rebel but rather an authentic heretic who worked in contradiction to both his medium and milieu."--Choice
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Satisfying survey of Pasolini's works,
By Hairy Lime (ND, USA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Pier Paolo Pasolini: Cinema As Heresy (Hardcover)
This book is a decent analysis of Pasolini's works, including both his major films and writings on film theory. It starts by examining the director's early neorealist films which the author, Greene, frames within the Marxist beliefs Pasolini was enthusiastic about early in his life. She says Marxist critics had issues with these films for being too "decadent." Pasolini's growing disillusionment with Marxism led to his later movies having different styles than his earlier ones: instead of reaching his audience through dramatic social tales of Italian peasants, he tried to convey his themes by playing up the subtle "decadence" of his earlier realistic films with more over-the-top metaphor and myth. Films that the author discusses include such varying titles as "The Gospel According to St. Matthew" and the highly controversial "Salo." The later films are all quite interesting, as most of them deal with some sort of taboo or controversial topic. A lot of the author's commentary on Pasolini's works deal with his Marxist beliefs and struggles with his religious convictions and sexual orientation. The chapter dealing with Pasolini's film theory writings is not for the beginner in this subject looking for an easy read. Greene gets into things like free indirect discourse, semiology, and linguistics, which can be a little tough to grasp if you haven't studied film theory before. The book also includes a section of 24 pages of B+W photographs, mostly from Pasolini's movies. Overall, this is a good introduction to a complex director, but the chapter on his theoretical writings gets a little technical for the beginner.
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