Since its appearance in 1992, Barth David Schwartz's biography of Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922-1975) has been the standard reference and starting point for anyone embarking on a study of Pasolini in English, situating the multimedia artist within twentieth-century Italian and world culture. Pasolini was unique among his contemporaries--Federico Fellini, for example, didn't write novels, Giorgio Bassani did not direct films, and Eugenio Montale did not write popular journalism. Although Pasolini excelled at all of these genres, he was first and foremost a poet (see Chicago's bilingual edition of his selected poems from 2014). Whatever he was doing, Pasolini's poetry informed all aspects of his creative life, from his plays to his visual art, from his films to his political essays. In this second edition, which includes a new Afterword that contains material that has come to light since the early 1990s and revelations about Pasolini's last days, Schwartz introduces this multimedia artist to a new generation of scholars and students trying to negotiate the complexities of the Italian cultural landscape. As Susan Sontag wrote, Pasolini is "indisputably the most remarkable figure to have emerged in Italian Arts and letters since the Second World War." This new edition, revised and updated throughout, is a natural companion to our volume of poetry and, with the poems, will be a perennial seller for years to come.
Riveting, obsessive, impassioned, and scandalous, here is a major biography of one of the great Renaissance men of the 20th century. Pier Paolo Pasolini was uncompromising, homosexual, anti-Fascist, anti-Communist, anti-clerical, even as he yielded to his callings as world-renowned novelist (A Violent Life, The Ragazzi), poet, polemicist, and filmmaker. Photographs. Avertising.
Theorem, Decameron, and his last, desperate legacy, Salo). Informed by research into the murder of the man and the making of his myth, Pasolini Requiem gives a powerful account of the life and art of its subject, a crucial figure immersed in every social and cultural conflict of his time. Witness and protagonist, Pasolini was born the year Mussolini came to power (1922) and died when the Italian Communist Party almost achieved it (1975). His crowded fifty-three years saw.
"Superb. . . . In its careful handling of the biographical and the autobiographical, the factual and the speculative, this book will become a model for how studies of individual directors should be done in the future."—Peter Brunette, author of Roberto Rossellini
Most people outside Italy know Pier Paolo Pasolini for his films, many of which began as literary works—Arabian Nights, The Gospel According to Matthew, The Decameron, and The Canterbury Tales among them. What most people are not aware of is that he was primarily a poet, publishing nineteen books of poems during his lifetime, as well as a visual artist, novelist, playwright, and journalist. Half a dozen of these books have been excerpted and published in English over the years, but even if one were to read all of those, the wide range of poetic styles and subjects that occupied Pasolini during his lifetime would still elude the English-language reader. For the first time, Anglophones will now be able to discover the many facets of this singular poet. Avoiding the tactics of the slim, idiosyncratic, and aesthetically or politically motivated volumes currently available in English, Stephen Sartarelli has chosen poems from every period of Pasolini’s poetic oeuvre. In doing so, he gives English-language readers a more complete picture of the poet, whose verse ranged from short lyrics to longer poems and extended sequences, and whose themes ran not only to the moral, spiritual, and social spheres but also to the aesthetic and sexual, for which he is most known in the United States today. This volume shows how central poetry was to Pasolini, no matter what else he was doing in his creative life, and how poetry informed all of his work from the visual arts to his political essays to his films. Pier Paolo Pasolini was “a poet of the cinema,” as James Ivory says in the book’s foreword, who “left a trove of words on paper that can live on as the fast-deteriorating images he created on celluloid cannot.” This generous selection of poems will be welcomed by poetry lovers and film buffs alike and will be an event in American letters.
"This book casts the poet and filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini in a fresh light: his life and work in relation to the visual and performance arts of his time in both Europe and the US. Lavishly illustrated with both documentary and fine art images, it shows how essentially conservative Pasolini was politically and aesthetically despite his reputation as an avant-garde writer and filmmaker. But it also shows how truly advanced Pasolini was when it comes to interdisciplinary art, making him enormously relevant today"--
This is an expanded edition of Pier Paolo Pasolini's long out-of-print Heretical Empiricism. It includes a new Introduction by Ben Lawton that discusses the relevance of the book on the 30th anniversary of the author's death. It also features the first approved translation of "Repu- diation of the 'Trilogy of Life'," one of Pasolini's most con- troversial final essays.While Pasolini is best known in the U.S. as a revolutionary film director, in Italy he was even better known as poet, novelist, playwright, political gadfly, and scholar of the semiotics of film. "New Academic Publishing should be commended for making this expanded version of Pier Paolo Pasolini's Hermetic Empiricism once again available to the English-speaking public, especially in the light of the fact that the important essay, "Repudiation of the Trilology of Life," has been added to its contents. Thirty years after Pasolini's violent death on 2 November 1975, the appearance of this excellent translation and edition of his major writings on Italian film, literature, and language is most welcome. No figure has emerged in Italy since the writer/director's death that has aroused such passionate opinions from all sides of the political and cultural spectrum. The translations by Ben Lawton and Louise Barnett render Pasolini's sometimes complex prose accurately with ample explanatory notes to guide the reader without a firm grasp of the original essays in Italian. This book represents an important work to have in every library devoted to cultural criticism, cinema, and literary theory." -- Peter Bondanella, Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature and Italian, Indiana University "One of the greatest cultural figures of postwar Europe, Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922-1975), who is already widely known as a revolutionary filmmaker, was an equally important writer and poet. Pasolini's numerous works are published in some 50 volumes, which include poetry, novels, critical and theoretical essays, verse tragedies, screenplays, political journalism, and translations. With this successful and complete translation of Empirismo eretico (a collection of Pasolini's interventions on language, literature, and film written between 1964 and 1971), editors Barnett and Lawton have made a wide sample of Pasolini's most significant theoretical work available to the English-speaking reader. Essays on the screenplay, on the commercial and the art cinema, and on film semiotics make the collection of special interest to American film scholars and students. This volume is further enriched by an excellent introduction, carefully edited notes, a useful biographical glossary, and a thorough index. Given the contemporary interest in studying film, together with other cultural forms, within a broad social and historical context, Pasolini's "extravagantly interdisciplinary" writings beckon as a promising source of insight. A potentially seminal text that could contribute to the further evolution of interdisciplinary humanistic studies, Heretical Empiricism is highly recommended for university and college libraries." -- J. Welle, University of Notre Dame, CHOICE (1989)
Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922-1975) was both a writer and filmmaker deeply rooted in European culture, as well as an intellectual who moved between different traditions, identities and positions. Early on he looked to Africa and Asia for possible alternatives to the hegemony of Western Neocapitalism and Consumerism, and in his hands the Greek and Judeo-Christian Classics morphed into unsettling multistable figures constantly shifting between West and East, North and South, the present and the past, rationality and myth, identity and otherness. The contributions in this volume, which belong to different intellectual and disciplinary fields, are bound together by a fascination for Pasolini's ability to recognize contradictions, to intensify and multiply them, as well as to make them aesthetically and politically productive. What emerges is a "euro-eccentric" and multifaceted Pasolini of great interest for the present.
In the twenty years since his death, Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922-1975) has grown into a figure of defining importance in the history of post-war Italian literary and cinematographic culture. His extraordinary and continuing impact is explained by his capacity to appropriate and transform ordistort traditional genres, media, languages, and forms of art, and to bring them into stark confrontation with the deeply fractured social, political, and sexual landscape of modern Italy. Pasolini: Forms of Subjectivity aims at a global reassessment of Pasolini, examining in turn his journalismand essays, his poetry, his film theory and practice, and his sprawling, posthumously published narrative fragment Petrolio, all from the perspective of the complex shifting workings of subjectivity which animate every aspect of his work. Gordon provides a conceptual and interpretative frameworkwhich illuminates Pasolini's mastery of both the written word and the cinematographical world.
The primary objective of this collection is to examine the ways in which religion, culture and politics converge in configuring the contradictions of post-war Italy’s cultural history, starting from the assumption that conducting a critical reflection on Italian postwar visual culture requires investigating the inevitable impact of Catholic religion on everyday life in its social, political and cultural dimensions. The volume takes advantage of the privileged position of cinema to explore and critique religion’s influence on the Italian cultural landscape. This edited anthology thus seeks to probe how religion is experienced, practiced, criticized and represented from various methodological perspectives (historical, philological, aesthetic, psychoanalytical, popular studies, etc.) through four main sections: ‘Propaganda and Censorship’, ‘Framing Belief: Pasolini and Petri’, ‘Religion in Italian Popular Cinema’ and ‘Ancient Rituals, Modern Myths’.
