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The Sacred that Surfaces
While his contemporaries were concerned with re-shaping the form of cinema, Pier Paolo Pasolini was more interested in bringing primal forces to the surface in his work. Tony McKibbin explores the sex-and-religion soaked cinema of the radical Italian master.
Mira Liehm, in her book Passion and Defiance, suggests that the great Italian director, novelist, poet and theorist Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Theorem (1968) contains a paradox in its title. ‘This theorem’s logic,’ Liehm suggests, ‘rests entirely within the realm of the irrational, that is, of sex and religion’ – and then pretty much leaves it at that. But isn’t this a good place to start; not just to make sense of Theorem, but to make sense of Pasolini’s work more broadly? How better to understand this spiritual Marxist than to suggest his is an oeuvre trying to find not the rational, but rationales within the irrational?
Pasolini was obviously a filmmaker fascinated by sex and religion, as Liehm rightly proposes, but his interests lay less in the conventionally Catholic notion of sin and redemption, of crime and confession, and much more in a working through of spiritual necessity out of a bodily reality. Catholicism is a religion potentially much more sympathetic to the realities of the flesh than the austere demands of Protestantism that we find in Bergman and Dreyer, the Christian Orthodox ritualisations we find in Tarkovsky and Angelopoulos, or the Armenian iconography of a Paradjanov. What Pasolini seems to want to do is find the sacred out of the body, not insist that the body denies itself in relation to ritual. ‘The sacred is true; it is the only essential reality that preoccupies me’, Pasolini says. However, what is especially intriguing is the way the sacred must come through not the rarefied but the specific. As he adds, ‘All my work focuses on the relations of human beings with the sacred and on the presence of the sacred in daily life. The capitalist bourgeois society tries by all means to repress it, but it surfaces again and again.’ There is this idea, then, that it surfaces; not that it is superimposed. Is this really the difference between the personal rite and the social ritual, and has Pasolini’s oeuvre been the working-through of this problematic, this theorem if you like?
The full article is printed in Film Ireland 116.
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