This post is partly a response to the fact that, with the UK election today, politics is very much in the air right now. Pier Paolo Pasolini was a very controversial, politically active and outspoken man.
This is an odd entry, in a way, as it represents an as yet mostly unexplored fascination. Whereas the former three posts of this series represent stuff I’ve looked into quite a bit, my interest in Pasolini is much less clear or understood (by me!). His name has floated around in my life for years. The first or most memorable encounter I can bring to mind is Tom Baker’s enthusiastic recollections, in his candid and often hilarious autobiography Who On Earth is Tom Baker?, of playing a part in Pasolini’s Canterbury Tales. As a result of this anecdote, and the effusive reverence Baker evinced for, I watched said Canterbury Tales. This would be about 15-20 years ago. My abiding memories of that viewing are two very earthy bodily function related scenes, one involving The Damned being shat out of a huge Devil’s arse, and the other seeing some guy peeing on folk from a balcony! And lots of sex (although no erotica).
Many years later, my occasional peripheral interest in extreme cinema lead me to a viewing of Pasolini’s controversial Salo, or 120 Days of Sodom. At the time I was trying to find out if there were any films out there that I would find genuinely shocking or disturbing (actually there are legion, but they shock and disturb me for their utter vacuity, but that’s an altogether different topic). Having been brought up in a very sheltered Christian home, I guess this is or was all part of trying to find one’s own identity and boundaries. Intriguingly I recently learned that Abel Ferrara, whose Driller Killer ‘video nasty’ was part of the same search for shocking cinema, has made a film starring Willem Defoe. Simply titled Pasolini, it’s about the Italian poet, leftist and film-director’s brutal and mysterious demise. I also find it intriguing that Pasolini looked rather like the older wrinkled and ravaged Chet Baker, who, in a bizarre coincidence, spent much time as a virtual exile in Italy, and also met an untimely end in somewhat mysterious circumstances.