The Heretical Landscape of the Body: Pier Paolo Pasolini and the Scopic Regime of European Cinema

Abstract

Pier Paolo Pasolini, the Italian poet, novelist, and film director, is widely regarded as one of the most significant figures to emerge in postwar European culture. In this paper I focus on four of Pasolini's films, Mamma Roma, Theorem, Arabian Nights, and Said, in order to explore the innate tension in his work between nature and culture emerging from his search for cultural authenticity and artistic autonomy. I show that his earlier concern with the superiority of rural life evolved into an emphasis on the body and sexuality as an ontologically privileged and prelinguistic source of meaning in his 'cinema of poetics'. I suggest that Pasolini never successfully resolved the problematic place of the cinematic medium in relation to culture as a contested historical process of ideological signification. I conclude that the contradictions within Pasolini's work have implications for the contemporary critique of occularcentristn under Western modernity.

Contradictory Modernities: Conceptions of Nature in the Art of Joseph Beuys and Gerhard Richter

“…Examples include Cosgrove and Daniels (1988); Duncan and Ley (1993); Kemal and Gaskell (1993); Mitchell (1994); and Wrede and Adams (1991). Another emerging area of interdisciplinary scholarship concerns the aesthetic tensions between nature and modernity (see Gandy 1996aGandy , 1996bMatless 1992;Matless and Revill 1995;Rollins 1995).…”

Contaminations of Past and Present in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s I racconti di Canterbury

“…[60] As we shall see, the garden in The Merchant's Tale accords with Mathew Gandy's description of Pasolini's representations of an "uncompromisingly essentialist reading of nature as a physical embrace around the everyday world of bourgeois reality." [61] Indeed, the garden is a space that is essentializing in the way nature and culture are opposed, and it is also classically gendered. Yet, just as Pasolini's earlier explorations of the Roman borgate in Accattone (1961) and Mama Roma (1962) were fixated on the visual overlap between open land and urban structure and development, so too does the garden interpenetrate with the figure of the palace.…”

“The Form of a City”: Pasolini and the Poetic Ecology of the Sign

“…The Italian author’s works of political and social criticism render him an important thinker of 20th-century industrial modernity (Ravetto-Biagioli, 2012; for an opposing reading, see Ferrarotti, 2006), yet he remains relatively unknown to researchers in the social sciences and urban studies (except for a few avant-garde works: Bortolini, 2012; Boukala & Laplantine, 2006; Colusso, Da Giau, & Villa, 1995; Gandy, 1996; Page, 1998; see also Agnew and Bolling, 1993). This relative disinterest may be attributable to the eccentric stance that Pasolini consistently adopted.…”

“… 9. The recurrence of the theme of social construction in Pasolini’s film corpus is exemplary here (Gandy, 1996). …”