This article is a contribution by Giuliano Vivaldi, a translator, and blogger on film, cultural history and philosophy. This article is an insightful, lucid and crisp exploration of Pasolini's choice of background in his films and his literary work. According to the Centro Studi Casarsa Della Delizia dedicated to learning about the life of Pier Paolo Pasolini, he had hid with his mother in Versuta during the Second World War, while the Germans bombed the town centre of Casarsa. At the beginning of 1945 in Versuta, the Academiuta di Lenga Furlana for the preservation and the promotion of friulian language and culture was founded. Pasolini was one of its members and founders.
The Casarsa of the Mind: Pasolini’s Friuli and Parallel Elsewheres
In
Memoriam Angela Felice
Of the settings associated with the
multifaceted output of Pasolini it is the Roman borgate which have most
been written about. After all, this is the location of his most well-known novels
such as Ragazzi di Vita and La Vita Violenta as well as his early
films (most notably Accattone and Mamma Roma). Later works may
highlight the South (whether the Italian South or the global South which from Pasolini’s
perspective had not yet been fully incorporated into the consumerist hell of
Neo-Capitalism[1])
or they may depict parts of the Italian North as lifeless symbols of this very
hell (as, for example, the Milan of his 1968 film Teorema) or as the
oncoming return of fascism (in his final frenzied fresco of despair Salo’)
and yet in our conventional imagination the setting where we imagine Pasolini a
Roman setting: either the borgate, Ostia or other districts of Rome such
as EUR (and whether it’s Abel Ferrara’s camera, David Grieco’s or Nanni Moretti’s
that has been retelling us the story of Pasolini, the location is fixed in our
minds). Yet Rome became Pasolini’s home only in the past two and a half decades
of his life- a period which, more or less coincided with Pasolini’s frenetic search
for other elsewheres pointing to other human histories and human destinies.
Pasolini’s biographical and geographical peripeteia are
dizzying but if one looks to his early years then only Bologna and Friuli merit
a truly significant role in his biography and it is, perhaps, Friuli, or the
Friuli of less than ten square kilometres centred around the town of Casarsa that
marked what we could call the subsequent subconscious of Pasolini’s way of
grasping the world around him. Despite the fact that Friuli represented the other,
that other which Pasolini was searching throughout his entire adult life and to
which Pasolini had a rather unique relation to. This other which corresponded
with the culture and language of the mother and a truth which was outside the
bourgeois reality and discourse of the Father. As Emanuela Patti argues this other
was first present in regional Friuli:
The author identified the “other”
reality, external and excluded from bourgeois culture, in a primitive world, associated
first with Friulan rural society; then, during the time of his political
commitment, with the Roman borgate; and finally transferred the identification
to either a mythic or a geographically remote space (the Third World), both
outside bourgeois history.[2]
.
The
Friulian of Pasolini’s first poems was, in all so many ways, a translated
language. As Sam Rohdie points out it could only be an ideal language:
Friulian
was not Pasolini’s language, but the language of an ‘other’, the peasantry, his
mother, which Pasolini brought in or brought back by a complex exercise of
translation and identification, a miming by which Pasolini … fictionally
assumed another identity and another language, each doubled whose origins were
made obscure by a borrowed, adopted persona[3].
(Photograph Credit: Elio Ciol)
Both Friuli and Friulian as a setting
and as a kind of lost utopian truth were sought again and again in Pasolini’s later
years. It is extraordinary, though, that Friuli is such an unexplored theme in
the ‘image’ of Pasolini outside of Italy (and even in Italy a specifically
Friulian contribution to Pasolini’s world was not genuinely recognized until years
after Pasolini’s death). Until very recently Pasolini’s collected poems in Friulian
had never been translated into another language. The fact that it was a Russian
poet, Kirill Medvedev, who undertook this task is in many ways fitting[4].
The Pasolini scholar and poet, Francesca Tuscano, has shown Pasolini’s fascination
for Russia (along with Russian and Soviet culture) was a deep one. Uncovering facts
of Pasolini’s visit to Moscow in 1957, she found an account by an Italian
journalist Biscardi where the connection in Pasolini’s mind between Friuli and
Moscow became explicit:
Biscardi recalls ... how one evening, I
went with Pasolini in the company, of course, of poor ‘Valia’ his interpreter to
Serebrjanniy bor, near the river Moskva. The poet wanted to have a swim in the
river, as he had in Casarsa in the Tagliamento and he was “strangely happy”. One
can imagine what joy Pasolini felt in rediscovering, among the reeds and shacks
of the Moscovite fishermen, a place which so intensely called to mind the life
of his childhood and his youth. And even the subsequent ‘strangeness’ of that
evening...played a part in evoking such deep emotions in the writer who ‘physically’
discovered a peasant Russia like that of his Casarsa[5].
There
is no doubt that Pasolini also explicitly established a connection between Rome
and Moscow. After all, he would call Moscow “an immense and familiar” Garbatella,
a district of Rome which served as the location for many scenes of Pasolini’s
novel A Violent Life. More recently Pasolini’s enthusiastic gaze of
Moscow has been reciprocally repaid by the Russian author Alexandra Petrova who
evoked and foregrounded Pasolini’s Rome in one of the most significant Russian
novels of recent years, Appendix[6].
She renders her explicit homage to the author and filmmaker in her portrait
of the imaginary parallel country and landscape of Yailati (the habitat
of those living at the margins, or in the Italian language ‘ai lati’). Pasolini’s
existence at the margins of Italian society was brutally symbolized by his
expulsion from Friuli in 1950 after accusations of him committing, what in
Italian legalese is termed, ‘obscene acts in a public space’. That the impulse
behind Pasolini’s first legal persecution was undeniably political does not
detract from the fact that Pasolini found little defence among his political comrades
in the Italian Communist Party (and indeed was expelled from the Party) given
the underlying homophobia of all political forces in the post-war years (a fact
which would take decades to change).
Friuli was, importantly, the setting
for his political awakening – where Pasolini became a communist, discovering
and championing the struggles of the agricultural labourers (the ‘braccianti’) in
Friuli. In his brief period of active party political engagement, he would become
one of the most active and intelligent militants of Casarsa’s Communist Party. His use of dazibao-like wall proclamations near the Fourteenth Century Loggia at San Giovanni di Casarsa (another district of the town of Casarsa) in both Italian and the Casarsan varaint of Friulian"(the use of Friulian
displeased some of the local Communist bureaucracy who insisted that Italian was
to be the language in which they spoke to workers and peasants) would earn him
the bitter enmity of the opposing Christian Democratic Party and the bigoted
hierarchy of the Catholic Church whose interests they represented. Even in this
Friulian period Pasolini’s vision, though centred on a vision of the local Friulian
realities, looked outwards and looked south. An unpublished poem of that time
(written in 1949) refers to a massacre by Italy’s riot police of Calabrian braccianti
(in one of Italy’s poorest and most southern regions) who had marched on lands of
the great estates intent on occupying them in the wake of unfulfilled promises
of land reform by the post-war government. Pasolini chose as the narrator of a
poem in their memory a Friulian seller of the Communist newspaper L’Unita’.
The poem’s subject matter ranged from Friuli to Calabria and encompassed that
great explosion in the East of that year, namely the Chinese Revolution.
It is to the Pasolini scholar and former director of the Pasolini Centre in Casarsa, Angela Felice to whom one owes the final pointer of the place that Friuli held in the imaginary of the poet and filmmaker. In an unpublished piece (but included here) introducing the photographs by Roberto Villa of Pasolini’s filming of Arabian Nights[7] she takes us on a detour through Pasolini’s final work prepared for publication (and which was to be published just after Pasolini’s murder) The Divine Mimesis[8]. In her article she focuses her attention on the final photographs of this “fascinating terminus text”, a “’yellowed iconography’ (Pasolini’s term) showing evidence of an adjunctive and allusive ‘visual poetry’”.
The final two photographs are of the square of the main church in Casarsa and of a group of children against the background of an African landscape. Here, it seems, we come full circle, albeit a full circle which Pasolini had already anticipated in the early 1960s. Instead of his Gospel According to
Matthew, Pasolini had been preparing to shoot another film entitled The
Savage Father[9] in
which the presence of Pasolini’s pedagogical experience in Friuli can be
strongly sensed[10].
Pasolini’s interest in the ‘global South’ and in Africa, in particular, was
attested to in a large number of texts often hard to unpick from a contemporary
perspective. One of the most systematic studies of Pasolini and his engagement
with what was then known as the Third World has been undertaken by Luca
Caminati who has coined the term ‘heretical Orientalism’ to describe Pasolini’s
relation. In another essay, Giovanna Trento, argues that there was another way
of positing Pasolini’s complex stance- she uses the concept of the Pan-Meridional
to the ever present dialectic of Pasolini’s creation of the ‘other’ that,
nonetheless, had its roots in this early Friulian variation of the ‘dialectal
and rural world’:
starting from an early Friulian, rural, and dialectal
vocation which had already been asserted, Pasolini’s device for the creation of
the ‘other’ brilliantly, but problematically, ended up encompassing, almost by
osmosis, the African interlocutor. Africa, like the suburbs of Rome, Naples and
all the so-called Third World, was indeed a variation on the elemental Friulian
dialectal and rural world[11].
While Pasolini can easily appear to straying into a
kind of ‘orientalism’ here[12],
his forging of a Pan-Meridional construct and his building of “a
deterritorialized and idealized never-ending South” led to an “unstable
and fruitful” tension between the Italian and the transnational which took
on strong anti-colonial nuances. His preface, for example, to an anthology of
anti-colonial African, Afro-Caribbean and Afro-American poetry La
Letteratura Negra draws explicit parallels between the anti-colonial
resistance and the anti-fascist resistance of the 1940s and stating that that
the “future glance” which had been typical in the Italians of the 1940s can be
found here with that same “freshness almost without shame” (quasi impudica
freschezza). In a poem of 1960 Pasolini will refer to Africa as “my only alternative”.
And as though to reaffirm this strange identity between contemporary of the
1960s and Friuli of the 1940s, the final chapter of Pasolini’s film script The
Savage Father is entitled A Dream of Something (a citation of the
young Marx first used by Pasolini to give a novel written in the late 1940s a
title but not published until 1962; a novel drawing upon the experiences of the
Friulian peasant class of those born in 1927 who had been politicized in the forties).
If as Angela Felice puts it “both Casarsa and
Africa refer us back to two ‘elsewheres’, temporarily and symbolically out of
sync: the former, an elsewhere peasant and popular, by now erased and lost; and
the latter an elsewhere from “Africa, my only alternative” a hypothesis and
mirage of a geography to move further on, or further down, to search for human
truths dying out”, then one is confronted by the figure of the “despondent
but unyielding Pasolini of the final phase” as the “word caves in and
hell relentlessly advances”. Nonetheless, two figures come to mind from the
works of Pasolini with a contradictory vision of the present. If the machinations
of Power call to mind the character of Aldo Troya in Pasolini’s uncompleted
novel Petrolio, an alias of the Friulian born Eugenio Cefis[13],
one of the most powerful and, arguably, nefarious eminence grises of
Italy’s shady establishment of the 1970s personifying the razza padrona (the
‘boss race’), then an altogether different portrait (typical of Pasolini’s paradoxical
elegiac tone) is drawn of Ali degli occhi azzurri[14],
an immigrant who, “with the Pope and the sacraments will travel to the
North West with the red flags of Trotsky in the wind”.
[1] Though by
the 1970s Pasolini’s view was changing and he feared that most of the Italian
South was undergoing its own “anthropological mutation” (in his mind only
Naples was partially saved from this fate).
[2] Emanuela
Patti: Mimesis: Pasolini’s Will to Be a Poet
[3] Sam
Rohdie: https://www.screeningthepast.com/2012/08/i-racconti-di-canterbury-pier-paolo-pasolinithe-canterbury-tales-geoffrey-chaucer/
[4] His
collected translations of Pasolini’s Friulian poems into Russian was published
in late 2016 by his own publishing house the Free Marxist Press (some
translations of these into the Rusyn language were made by Denis Pilash).
[5] Francesca Tuscano, La Russia
Nella Poesia di Pier Paolo Pasolini (Book Time).
[6] Her
novel Appendix was published in 2016 to great acclaim. An English translation
by a collective of translators is being prepared. https://jordanrussiacenter.org/event/alexandra-petrova-migrations-rome-appendix/
[7] https://www.royalbooks.com/pages/books/134058/pier-paolo-roberto-villa-pasolini-director-photographer/pier-paolo-pasolini-in-on-the-set-of-il-fiore-delle-mille-e-una-notte-arabian-nights-original-press
[9] Pasolini
himself attributed his failure to shoot this film to the legal persecution he
suffered at the time including blasphemy charges brought against him in
connection with his short film La Ricotta https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_ricotta
[10] Pasolini
first taught at the Academiuta which he set up to promote the Friulian language
of Casarsa lending literary merit to what had hitherto been only a spoken language
and then at Valvesone from 1947-1949, continuing to teach in Rome in the early
fifties. In the script of The Savage Father the two main protagonists
are a sincere and democratic western teacher and his most intelligent and
sensitive student who is, therefore, the most hostile to the teacher’s methods.
[11] Giovanna
Trento Pier Paolo Pasolini and Pan-Meridional Italianness. https://www.ici-berlin.org/oa/ci-06/trento_pan-meridional-italianness.pdf
[12] Michael
Hardt and Toni Negri in their volume Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age
of Empire (pp.127-9) explicitly damned Pasolini for his Eurocentric
gaze on India reflected in his account The Scent of India.
[13] David
Grieco’s film The Ploy (an alternative reading to Abel Ferrara’s
interpretation of Pasolini’s final days before his murder) https://cineuropa.org/en/newsdetail/306367/rl/1/
imparts the figure of Eugenio Cefis with a sinister role in the story of the
murder of Pasolini. Cefis, was one of the shady figures of the Italian power
structure who succeeded Enrico Mattei as head of ENI, was a significant figure too
in the notorious P2 Masonic Lodge.
[14] A
translation of the poem dedicated to “Blue-Eyed Ali” Prophesy can be
found here (the final quotation is from this translation): https://paralleltexts.blog/2015/09/26/profeziaprophecy-by-pier-paolo-pasolini/
0 Comments
What are your perspectives?