Photographs from Elsewhere: Marginal Notes to the shots by Roberto Villa ~ Giuliano Vivaldi

This article is a translation of Angela Felice's work by Giuliano Vivaldi, a translator, and blogger on film, cultural history and philosophy. This article, as a discontinuously relevant afterwards of what had been published on Pasolini's imagination of Friuli and other 'elseweres'. This brief piece beautifully builds a bridge between Pasolini's temporal battle with consumerism, the mid-twentieth century and the solidarity that he felt with the barbarians of the third world. The author captures the intensity of this conflict - the alienation that Pasolini felt within his immediate surroundings and the dialectic association with the alienation intensified by the opposition of the Gramscian identity of bearing witness to a generation of crises against "the neo-capitalist hell of post-history". 

Photographs from Elsewhere: Marginal notes to the photos by Roberto Villa 

 Angela Felice

There are unwritten rules (which are not for this fact less binding) in drawing up ‘parasitical’ texts which accompany the work of others. Generally it is a question of rendering homage to the author, providing a gloss of the probable intentions and provide some kind of cursory guide to it. 

But now for many reasons I will skip the facile conventions and set off on more personal and uncommon paths (and in their own way rather oblique ones) proceeding through allusions and elisions. Indeed motivated variously and primarily by my esteem for and friendship with the maestro Roberto Villa as well as the respect owed to his work which helps us relive, through these images, a decisive moment (arguably the most stimulating and adventurous one) of his long career as a photographer elevating it to the core of an  entire professional life and, why not, also of a sentimental and emotional one.  

I will take my cue, then, from The Divine Mimesis, an extraordinary prose poem by Pasolini published by Einaudi in November 1975 a few days after the brutal murder of its author. Not so much a posthumous work or last testament against his will, this text needs to be read rather as the last work organized and licensed by Pasolini himself, as a ‘document’ which he didn’t see in print or, rather, with his thoughts turned to Petrolio (this most clearly a posthumous work for all practical purposes) as a kind of formal anticipation to the latter. An experimental palimpsest of a text-project - fragmentary, stratified by horizontal accumulations, willfully flaunting itself in its unfinished nature qua antinovel or impossible novel.

It’s not necessary to enter into the entire gamut of meanings of this fascinating terminus-text for which Pasolini gathered material dating from 1963 and then others, jagged texts from subsequent years  in which he set himself the task not so much to imitate Dante’s Commedia (and how could this have been done in comparison with the ”iron ideology” which held up its solid medieval architecture?) but rather once again to create a work that was ‘other’ and all his own, mindful more of Rimbaud than of the sommo poeta (the supreme poet) whose poem was used, rather, as an allusive trail and as hypotext. Indeed in his Divine Mimesis, Pasolini drew up yet another balance sheet with himself bearing witness to the crisis of his own time and his self as a writer, in that irreparable divide between a Virgilian-self, fragile and  “withered” (ingiallito) and a Dantean-self lost in the dark “selva”(forest) of mercantile consumerism, that is between the 1950s and the 1960s. Between the civic Gramscian hopes of the former and the disenchantments of the latter corrupted by the neo-capitalist hell of Post-History and, for the poet, darkened also by the spectre of creative paralysis and by the repetition of past mistakes. 

The final blow, rather than being stated ideologically, encounters, in this way, its necessary expression in the same formal organisation of a text projected as a work in progress, in an anti-historicist evolution just as in life itself: a heterogeneous amalgam of words...notes, footnotes left blank, editorial afterthoughts which are ends in themselves. 

(Photograph Source: Dialoghi Mediterranei)

And nonetheless Pasolini decided to add in an appendix a dossier of twenty-five black and white photographs to this jumble of text unable to coagulate itself together, at the very final stage of the publishing project of 1975. A ‘yellowed (ingiallito) iconography’, as he defined it, showing evidence of an adjunctive and allusive “visual poetry”. On closer inspection, to the fluidity of the experimentally centrifugal word was opposed the fixed nature of the image which, in itself, is definitive, unequivocal and with a vaguely death-like tone which every snapshot dragged along with it. For Pasolini that was surely a device to enrich the documentary intention of the book even with a further linguistic layer – in this case a visual one, “moreover, one fairly legible”, as he himself remarked in a preface dated 1975. In effect he chose to line them contrasting these significant photos of his autobiographical path, and by extension, gave them a symbolic sense of the generalized tensions between the hopeful Fifties and the Sixties when disenchantment reigned.  

Nonetheless, in this curiously anomalous photographic gallery there is a surprise peeping out at us at the very end of this, as it were, subjective and yet collective album. This dossier ends indeed with a shock juxtaposition of the parish church of Casarsa facing onto a square desolately empty and on the next page a group of African children with tattered clothes, standing grave and dignified before a generic poor village of huts.  

For those who know Pasolini’s artistic and intellectual biography, the meaning of this unanticipated combination is not that elusive even though, at a first shot, it is not quite as readable as the author proposes. In those two final puzzle pieces of his “Iconography”, Pasolini vertiginously connects the Alfa and Omega of his existential and creative biography, sentimentally stimulated by a preponderant sensitivity and topographical sensuality. Yet here, on the one hand, we have an echo of an original inspiration from his Friulian youth but by now empty, abandoned and definitively ‘withered’, and on the other hand, an African fragment of a geography of hunger and truth to counterpose (still? and until when?) the Unreality of Western affluence. It is symptomatic that Pasolini should decide to seal his Mimesis, which was to prove his final work, with an enigmatic Third World projection, which, moreover, had no pretext in the mobile palimpsest of the verbal text as there had, however allusively, been for the other images of the gallery. So questions inevitably arise from its anomalous insertion. A ‘yellowing’ photo too, just like hope? Or rather a glimmer of a possible escape route from the consumeristic hell and the impasse of the word?

In fact, both Casarsa and Africa refer us back to two ‘elsewheres’, temporally 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. 

It was here, while meandering through this premise, that the text set its sights on and was attempting to arrive at. Here because those photos by Roberto Villa while following the film crew of the Arabian Nights on and off set were indeed also photos from elsewhere. They are photos, indeed, which, on the one hand, fix the work of the visionary director-anthropologist Pasolini who wrote that he knew Arabs better than he did people from Milan because his was an ‘existential’ knowledge rather than a bookish one and because in the traditional culture of those peoples of the Third World (“from Naples south”) he glimpsed ‘diverse’ islands of a survival of the archaic, however threatened, by homogenisation through ever more permeable frontiers. And they are photos, on the other hand, which Villa himself, who knows how far infected by the maestro, then shot his own photos to gather his own personal dossier of this ‘elsewhere’ impressed on the faces, bodies, gestures, and styles of clothes, locations, houses, colours. So this entire complex of images transmit a value surpassing a mere documentary significance which is also there (and very valuable it is too) as it goes beyond an indubitable technical perfection or aesthetic effect. Moreover, these appear sealed with the gift of a curiosity neither invasive nor intrusive, with the joy of discovery and guided by a principle of respect which today we would call ‘intercultural’,  veiled through then by an astounded admiration when the brilliant, feverish director Pasolini was present and photographed in the very nucleus of his creative hive in which he imposes his ‘other’ vision upon the ‘other’. 

So, in short, before their faultless layout, these photos amaze because, in the first case, they themselves have sprung from an amazement, which is the virtue and the engine of those who have been able to allow themselves genuine entrancement before the unknown, and wish not to adulterate it but rather to observe it and perhaps attempt to understand it while half outside and half inside, with a certain participating glance and a sentiment of unfamiliarity, in the knowledge that later, after the endgame, one should leave and re-enter the known carrying with one a mere fragment of mystery. 

One can take comfort, then, in resorting to words, dating from 1965 but still reused ten years later and with which Pasolini used to conclude The Divine Mimesis, from where I set off to compose these brief notes. Words which can function here as a heart-rending caption not only of the despondent but unyielding Pasolini of the final phase but also anyone who went in search of unknown realities (to photograph) and who is on a perpetual journey while truth remains elusive, the word caves in, and hell relentlessly advances. 

“I passed, then, as a wind behind the last walls or pastures of the city – or like a barbarian who came down to destroy and who ends up, distracted, looking at, and then kissing, one resembling himself – before deciding to turn back (1965)”.