THE NEW YORKER WRITES ABOUT PASOLINI

36 YEARS LATER, BUT FINALLY, THE NEW YORKER MAGAZINE WRITES ABOUT PASOLINI~

PASOLINI’S THEOREM

reposted courtesy~ Richard Brody

The second-to-last interview that Pier Paolo Pasolini gave before he was murdered in 1975 

(a case that still remains mysterious) and that was long believed 

lost has turned up. 

Eric Loret and Robert Maggiori tell the story in Libération—

Pasolini was introducing his work in Sweden, a round-table

 discussion was recorded for broadcast, 

then held, then lost, until his Swedish translator, 

Carl Henrik Svenstedt, recently found his

 personal recording of the talk. The Italian weekly L’Espresso

 has published a partial transcript of the discussion, 

along with the audio recording. 

The principal subject was Pasolini’s most recent 

(and, as it turned out, final) film, 

“Salò,” an adaptation of the Marquis de Sade’s
“120 Days of Sodom,”set in the last bastion of Italian fascism,
 under direct German tutelage, in the waning days of the
Second World War. It is, of course, a legendarily difficult
movie to watch, because it depicts torture and sexual
 violence with a frank and explicit realism.
Pasolini said,In this film, sex is nothing but allegory, 

the metaphor for the commodification of bodies

 subjected to power. I think that consumerism manipulates 

and violates bodies neither more nor less than Nazism.

 My film shows the sinister connection between 
consumerism and Nazism.

Later in the interview, he restates the point: 

“I consider consumerism to be a Fascism worse than 

the classical one, because clerical Fascism didn’t
really transform Italians, didn’t enter into them.
It was a totalitarian state but not a totalizing one.”

He emphasizes that he chose to film “a world at its end,”
the end of Fascism, for its “poetic” qualities—

and that, had he chosen to film Fascism at its
moment of “great glory,” in the late thirties,

 it would have been “an intolerable film.”
 He calls “Salò”a film “on the true anarchy,”
 on “the anarchy of power.” 

And when Pasolini speaks of poetry,
he does so literally: born in 1922,
he had already published several books of poetry

 and a novel before turning his attention to movies;
asked about his cinematic training, he said he had none—

“Or, rather, that of a spectator, but I started
 immediately with two big specific loves which
continue to this day: on the one hand, Chaplin,
 and, on the other, Kenzo [sic; actually, Kenji] Mizoguchi…..

” Whatever else these two cinematic colossi of drastically
different styles are, they are both among
the great political flimmakers; the discovery of
this double filiation makes perfect sense—

and says as much about their work as it does about Pasolini’s. 

(“The Gold Rush” is still playing at Film Forum—

today is the last day of its run—and, seeing it again recently,
I was struck by the sense of outrage and 

revolt that it propels along with its derisive humor
and wounded romanticism.)

 It’s for such illuminations that interviews,

 a kind of view into the artist’s workshop and library,
are such treasures.

And as for Pasolini’s vehement rejection of
 postwar liberal modernity—

it’s a founding notion of art that it offers speculative visions that life can’t, 

and it’s also a reminder that there’s no better reason to look
to artists for guidance  regarding political practicalities than to
turn to politicians for their views on artistic creation.

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