Pier Paolo Pasolini

Pier Paolo Pasolini (March 5, 1922 – November 2, 1975) was an Italian poet, film director, and writer, who often made films about the social outcast and rebels. He is known for casting actors with little or no acting experience.

Significance

Pasolini, as a director, created a sort of second neorealism, which deeply and constantly touched picaresque tones, showing a sad reality - hidden, but real, concrete - which many social and political lobbies had no interest in seeing brought to light. Mamma Roma, with an extraordinary Anna Magnani, the story of a prostitute and her son, is an astonishing punch in the stomach for the common morality of those times. The doubt that Pasolini often inserted in his works, that such realities are less distant from us than we imagine, is one of his major contributions to a change in the Italian psyche, and an unrepeated example of poetry applied to cruel realities.

Related Topics:
Neorealism - Picaresque - Anna Magnani

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The director also promoted the concept of "natural sacredness" in his works, the concept that the world is holy in and of itself, and does not need any spiritual essence or supernatural blessing to attain this state. Indeed, Pasolini was an avowed atheist. The contrast between public opinion and what Pasolini was able to show, focused on sexual moralism, was perhaps what made him encounter general disapproval and effectively he was perhaps the man who most suffered cultural discrimination for his homosexuality. Pasolini's poetry, lesser known outside of Italy, often deals with his highly revered mother and his same-sex love interests, but this is not the main and only theme. As a sensible and extremely intelligent man, he depicted certain corners of the contemporary reality as very few other poets were able to do.

Related Topics:
Atheist - Italy

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In politics too, or better, in the social debate, Pasolini was able to create scandal and debate with some assertions that were as much unheard as, at the same time, true: during the disorders of 1969, when university students were acting in a guerrilla-like fashion against the police in the streets of Rome, all the leftist forces declared their complete support for the students, and described the disorders as a civil fight of proletarians against the system. Pasolini, instead, alone among the communists, declared that he was with the police or, to be precise, with the policemen, the real proletarians who were sent to fight against boys of their same age for a poor salary and reasons which they could not understand because they had not had the fortune of being able to study.

Related Topics:
1969 - Guerrilla - Police

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