03 · 10 · 26

Pasolini's Legacy

Alonso Díaz de la Vega

Had he not been murdered, Pier Paolo Pasolini probably wouldn't have reached the remarkable age of 104 a few days ago, when his birthday was celebrated. However, although his consciousness has been absent since 1975, his legacy lives on thanks to the collective memory of his work and thought. Who killed him? The discussion remains open to many possibilities: it could have been a teenager or a group yet to be identified. Perhaps what matters today is not knowing who carried out the act or even who ordered it, but rather who benefited from it. The answer is intertwined with the work of the great Bolognese artist.

Pasolini was a deeply committed provocateur: too bourgeois to be a proletarian, and vice versa; a Marxist but, at the same time, a Christian. His films seek beauty in faces and bodies that capture erotic power as a form of good (physical pleasure is, as in ancient Islamic poetry, a path to the divine), but they also fearlessly depict the ugliness of our world. In his images, the perverse subjugate innocence and find pleasure in the destruction of other wills and the bodies that house them. Pasolini, then, most affected fascism.

One need only look at Pigsty (Porcile, 1969), which tells the story of Klotz (Alberto Lionello), a German magnate forced to accept a merger of his pig farming company, not to protect his son from rumors of bestiality, but to avoid shame. The character is portrayed as a clown identical to Hitler, playing the harp and acting with an affectation inspired by Charles Chaplin.

For Pasolini, fascism did not end with the Second World War, nor is it a phenomenon confined to singular historical circumstances; rather, it is a character trait linked to a perverse lust for power. The businessman in Pigsty is blackmailed by Herdhitze (Ugo Tognazzi), a former Nazi comrade who has reappeared with a new surname. Klotz wants to coerce Herdhitze, first by exposing his change of identity and then by spreading rumors about his research involving the bones of Jews murdered in the Holocaust. Although Pigsty oscillates between allegory and caricature, its inspiration lies in history books. In those years, West Germany had a chancellor (Kurt Georg Kiesinger) with ties to Nazism; later, it had a president (Karl Carstens).

Businessmen had supplied Hitler's German armed forces and profited from slavery and experiments in the extermination camps. Pasolini was simply chronicling the relationship between German capital and the Nazi party, both equally fascist. Above all, he issued a warning that his best descendants have taken up in contemporary films that seek to depict the modern form of evil.

Pasolini lives on in Claire Denis's Les Salauds (2013) and Abel Ferrara's Welcome to New York (2014), films that echo the news of recent weeks, since in them the monster is not the uniformed dictator or his generals; nor is it the bloodthirsty troops, as in Robert Mitchum's war films, but rather men of spotless reputations: descendants of the businessman Klotz, but without Hitler's appearance; what they share with the greatest of all monsters is their perversity.

Ugliness replaces the iconic dictatorial face in Ferrara's and Denis's films, which use the features of Gérard Depardieu and Michel Subor to launch their denunciations.

Depardieu's distinctive nose, his long hair and his bear-like shape; Subor's vampiric dark circles and his malicious smile, are part of a Pasolinian mask that pours perversity outwards, like one of his most gloomy characters: the President (Aldo Valletti) in Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (Salò o le 120 giornate di Sodoma, 1975).

The deranged expression of this figure is emblematic of Pasolini's ultimate representation of fascism, where a duke, a bishop, a magistrate, and the president (figures who belong, rather, to the liberal democratic order) abuse a group of teenagers they kidnap with the help of Italian commandos and members of the Blackshirts.

Now far removed from the militarized world, and amidst the consumerist frenzy that Pasolini considered the new face of fascism, Denis and Ferrara's characters are powerful men without explicit ties to any far-right organization or party: hers is a businessman; his, a banker based on Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the managing director of the International Monetary Fund, whose presidential ambitions in France collapsed when he was accused of sexual assault in New York. They are also figures who seek perverse pleasure in abusing the bodies they feel entitled to control. Both Ferrara and Denis, like Pasolini, dare to depict the abuse, which is best left unillustrated. It suffices to describe the scenes.

In Welcome to New York, it is a brief but horrifying act in which the protagonist attempts to subdue a female employee at the luxury hotel where he is staying. Ferrara seeks to express the ugliness of the act by avoiding cuts; the editing seems stunned by the cruelty. Depardieu appears naked in the frame; his imposing form describes the voracity of his character and the power with which he is able to dominate others through sheer physical strength. The moral perspective is already clear, but it will become evident when we see the victim's statement in a shot that captures the pain and fear expressed by her timid posture.

The subsequent images, where we see the protagonist arrested and punished, seek a certain satisfaction, especially in contrast to the preceding scenes. In one, prison guards force the protagonist to undress. The humiliation of someone who, just hours before, had been staying at one of New York's most expensive hotels is Ferrara's way of dispensing justice through film.

Denis, on the other hand, saves his image of abuse for the end, when the old businessman's most grotesque act is revealed. It's a video clip; in the background, an ominous song by Tindersticks, composed for the film, called "Put Your Love in Me," plays. The synthesizer, seemingly stuck in each measure, Stuart A. Staples' ghostly voice, and the grainy video image capturing a monstrous act are not quite as explicit as those of Pasolini or Ferrara. Denis's film is more delicate because the setting is horrific enough: it opens with the victim of these acts walking naked and bloodied through the night.

Denis also inherits from Pasolini the possibility of healing that eroticism offers. In Salò, the clandestine sex between the victims, outside the violent demands of the powerful, is understood as an act of resistance. In the plot of Les Basterds, a captain of a commercial freighter named Marco (Vincent Lindon) tries to help the victim and her mother (his niece and sister) pay off the hospital bills and save their shoe factory. Michel Subor's character is Edouard Laporte, a family associate connected to the abuse of Marco's niece. His partner is Raphaëlle (Chiara Mastroianni), the protagonist's lover many years before. They meet again when Marco begins to get closer to Edouard, and Denis finds in sensory images that relief that Pasolini explored in his most joyful films, such as those that make up the so-called Trilogy of Life.

Denis doesn't need to be explicit; on the contrary, her poetics of eroticism lead her to contemplate the backs, legs, and hands of two people who seem to merge into a single creature. In Les Basterds, these choices accentuate the melancholy of the ending, where power and comfort corrupt everything.

Pasolini breathes again in these images, which, of course, are not his own, yet descend from his antifascist imagination, which looms over contemporary cinema like a ghost to ignite what he called in a poem and a short film "rage." His images of cruelty—uncomfortable, grotesque—as well as those of Denis and Ferrara, don't intend to let us leave the theater reassured that at least in fiction justice has been served; on the contrary, they demand fury from us to transform reality.

You, children of children,
shout with contempt,
with rage, with hatred,
“Long live freedom!”

If not, you don't shout “Long live freedom!”