Bandung Man / L’uomo di Bandung

‘L’uomo di Bandung’ was published first in the journal Julia Gens in 1964, then in Pier Paolo Pasolini, Bestemmia. Tutte le poesie, ed. by Graziella Chiarcossi and Walter Siti, and finally among the ‘Appendici a Poesia in forma di rosa’ in Tutte le poesie, ed. by Walter Siti, 2 vols (Milan: Mondadori, 2003), i, pp. 1305–13 (from which it is quoted and translated). This is the first time the poem appears in English and the translation is by Robert S.C. Gordon.

Pasolini as Jew

Pasolini’s first turn beyond Europe can be dated to three lengthy journeys to Asia and Africa undertaken between December 1960 and February 1963. The places he visited quickly bring to mind a long series of subsequent projects – poems, screenplays, films realized or unfinished – from throughout the remaining fifteen years of Pasolini’s life, during which he pitched himself in a wholly new light as a poet of the Third World.

Figura lacrima

Talking about tears in Pasolini’s cinema evokes the brief moment in Mamma Roma, when a boy hums Una furtiva lagrima in a mocking tone as he sits on a staircase. The man’s tear doesn’t even try to pass for real; it is, in short, a pure ‘tear of the cinema’, made of glycerin, but it assumes, as such, in the story, a figurative reality integrated in the ‘real’ within the fiction and the character’s psychology.

Outside Italy

In the 1960s and 1970s, Pier Paolo Pasolini described a rapidly changing world, expressing a new poetics that can be considered transnational. I will use different examples – beginning with Pasolini’s Indian travelogues – to show how his initial devotion to Italian millenary traditions and peasant cultures finally led to an open vision and understanding of human behaviors and mores beyond any national boundary.

Pier Paolo Pasolini and Pan-Meridional Italianness

Despite his ‘Third World’ and Marxist sympathies, Pier Paolo Pasolini showed, throughout his life, strong poetic and political attention for national narratives and the building of Italianness. However, Pasolini’s ‘desperate love’ for Italy and Italianness – which I consider one of the basic elements of his poetic universe – can be fully grasped only if we read it in the light of his fluid, transnational, and pan-meridional approach.

‘La vera Diversità’

Before completing his uncharacteristically hopeful filmic vision of an African Oresteia, Pier Paolo Pasolini invented a theatrical continuation of Aeschylus’s trilogy. Pilade (1966/70) imagines what happens after Orestes, having being absolved by the Aeropagos in Athens, goes back to Argos. With its clear allusions to political developments in the last century – fascism, the Resistance, and Communist revolutions – the play reads as a mythical allegory for the situation of engaged intellectuals in the twentieth century.

Alain Badiou’s Pasolini

In the following analysis, I wish to show how Alain Badiou’s work is crucial to understanding the exact sense of change as ‘inactuality’ or paradoxical actuality, and I wish to do so by scrutinizing his references to Pasolini. Badiou in fact investigates the concept of change through Pasolini’s depiction of the figure of Paul, arguing that it exposes a specific tension between universality and singularity, and between eternity and novelty, which constitutes the very dialectic of change.

Analogy and Difference

My paper will discuss Pasolini’s preference for the figure of contradiction and his opposition to Hegelian dialectics, as he understood it, from the perspective of multistable figures or Kippbilder. A Kippbild is a figure that oscillates between distinct aspects without mediation or synthesis. My basic questions are whether it is possible to read Pasolini’s insistence on contradictions in terms of multistable figures and what might be gained from such a reading.

Introduction

Pier Paolo Pasolini’s own phrase ‘the scandal of self-contradiction’ (‘lo scandalo del contraddirmi’) from ‘Le ceneri di Gramsci’ (1957) encapsulates one of his most salient characteristics. Deeply influenced by a religious childhood, he became an atheist without loosing a powerful sense of the sacred; he was a Marxist expelled by the Italian Communist Party, a revolutionist with a great admiration for the past, a deeply anti-bourgeois bourgeois.

The Body of the Actor

What is the role or the function of the actor in Pasolini’s cinema? I shall try to put this very general and generic question in another way: how can we define, overall, the particular physiognomy of a Pasolini actor? There are undoubtedly some particular characteristics, but what are they exactly?