The Heretical Landscape of the Body: Pier Paolo Pasolini and the Scopic Regime of European Cinema

Pier Paolo Pasolini, the Italian poet, novelist, and film director, is widely regarded as one of the most significant figures to emerge in postwar European culture. In this paper I focus on four of Pasolini's films, Mamma Roma, Theorem, Arabian Nights, and Saló, in order to explore the innate tension in his work between nature and culture emerging from his search for cultural authenticity and artistic autonomy. I show that his earlier concern with the superiority of rural life evolved into an emphasis on the body and sexuality as an ontologically privileged and prelinguistic source of meaning in his ‘cinema of poetics’. I suggest that Pasolini never successfully resolved the problematic place of the cinematic medium in relation to culture as a contested historical process of ideological signification. I conclude that the contradictions within Pasolini's work have implications for the contemporary critique of occularcentristn under Western modernity.