Celebrity
Chapter Three discusses the conditions for the strategic branding of Pasolini’s authorship in the Italian media during the 60s, and his attitude to celebrity culture. In this chapter, I consider the idea of performing authorship in the terms of self-fictionalization and masquerade. In particular, in his short film La ricotta (The Ricotta, 1964), which represents the first example of the spectacularization of Pasolini’s authorship, he projects his authorial self onto the figure of American star director Orson Welles. An outsider of the studio system, Welles furnishes Pasolini a model for an auteur who persistently seeks out a performative mode, putting himself in play as the author alongside the other characters. At the same time, through the figure of this star director, Pasolini also expresses his uncompromising attitude toward celebrity culture and culture industry. In La rabbia (The Rage, 1963)—created through montages of unused film footage from a film archive—Pasolini uses another international star, Marilyn Monroe, to stage his ambivalence towards the role of his own representation in the media. For Pasolini, Monroe’s death becomes a tragic, symbolic form of subjective resistance and a protest against the conformist system of celebrity that they both confronted.