Abstract
Reviewed by: Carla Locatelli, University of Trento, Italy.
Pasolini’s corpus is understood, possibly, as the most ideological and controversial in Italian literature and cinema; furthermore, it is often read on the basis of autobiographical interpretations, i.e., by readers’ projections constructing the “Pasolini-man” as a key to his works. On the one hand, ideological analyses try to appropriate his work for a variety of causes: religion, communism, (homo)sexuality, historical and anthropological values, etc. In fact, it seems that Pasolini’s work entices readers to provide une réponse engagée, in the Sartrean sense of responding ideologically to art as cultural production. On the other hand, autobiographical readings conflate the persona with the man, using records of his life as explanations of his work. Even when a thematic focus is established (Italian politics, Catholicism, sexuality, etc.), the risk of placing Pasolini between traditional folk morality and innovative social ethics, makes it hard to approach his work in an innovative way. Basically, too much has already been said. Thus, the critical challenge becomes: can anything really new be said about Pasolini?
Benini’s work provides an affirmative answer to this question because she chooses a restricted but crucial anthropological focus to highlight in his works: “The Sacred”. She defines it in the light of major thinkers who have influenced Pasolini: Mircea Eliade and Ernesto De Martino (Chapter One). Furthermore, her method deserves praise, inasmuch as it uses Pasolini’s written and filmic words, both extensively and systematically. The extent of direct quotations from Pasolini’s essays, interviews, poems and scripts makes this a precious mapping of the author’s interpretation of his own work, as well as an informed display of the wealth and diversity of his contribution to the arts in the twentieth century. To my knowledge, there is a similar merit also in documenting the variety of critical positions recently grown, and still growing, around Pasolini’s work (the list is too long to mention here, but Benini refers to it extensively), and the theoretical issues they imply (from Bataille to Deleuze; from Girard to Nancy; from Zizek to Agamben etc.). In short: Benini’s focus is a specific lens telescoping a Pasolini universe. She develops a broad view, while focusing on different themes: “The Passion and the Incarnation” (in La Ricotta and The Gospel according to Matthew, Chapter Two); “The Words of the Flesh” (in Blasphemy, Chapter Three); “The Mad Saint and the Anchorite: Theorem”(Chapter Four); “The Franciscan Model” (in Blasphemy and Uccellacci e Uccellini, Chapter Five); “The Pauline Model” (in San Paolo, and “From Sant’Infame to Petrolio”, Chapter 6). It would take too much space to account for the intricate web of references and correlations Benini makes while concentrating on different Pasolini works (mostly films). However, her unifying paradigm of investigation is “The Sense of the Sacred,” and she shows how Eliade and Di Martino helped Pasolini valorize “the Archaic,” which he found in sub-proletarian popular culture, and “the Christian,” with which his entire production contends, from the fifties to the seventies.
Benini’s original stance locates Pasolini’s Sacred in the immanent dimension of an “incarnate flesh”, neither “the sodomitical flesh”, nor Christ’s Incarnation: “the sacred does not belong to a transcendental horizon, but, rather, pertains to a hic and nunc corporeal dimension” (p. 8). This immanence becomes progressively defined in Pasolini’s oeuvre. His “Sacred Flesh” highlights the connection he steadily makes between institutions and personal religious experience, even after the death of utopia, and even after his bitter disillusionment about neo-capitalism, which transformed the archaic sub-proletarian innocent hero into a voracious bourgeois. The idea of Christian Agape, progressively revisited, and culminating in the unfinished work on Paul (San Paolo) reiterates Pasolini’s life-long valorization of the wretched and the marginalized, in the light of “The Scandal of the Cross” and the “Scandal of Sickness” (i.e. how Paul refers to his plausible homosexuality). In a powerful synthesis of Pasolini motives, Benini writes: “The paradigm of the Crucifixion represents the expression of this radical death-drive that characterizes all of Pasolini’s characters”(p. 210). She furthermore explains that he “transforms the vocation to truth and charity to the point of martyrdom into the paradigm of ‘the freedom to choose death’. That freedom is for Pasolini the true destiny of the director-spectator relationship - but is also emblematic of the relationship between the artist and the public, between the intellectual and the body of the nation, between the martyr and the crowd, between God and humanity” (p. 210).
In Pasolini’s cinema the Sacred is, in the words of André Bazin, a “hyperbole of incarnation”, i.e., more realistic than realism, but, according to Benini, it is also “one of the mythical devices available to modern man to escape history” (p.35). Ultimately, Pasolini’s myth does not escape history, but radically challenges the idea of a linear and progressive notion of history. Myth does not merely resist the Hegelian utopia of dialectics, but conveys the strength of a sacred imagination that makes (and not just reads) myth as real. In Pasolini, myth is made cinematically real at the cost of the death of the artist, of the director, of the intellectual.
Methodologically, Benini is never clamorous about her claims, and it is precisely her “montage” of Pasolini’s words, and of the many critical contributions she connects and correlates that defines her analytical gaze as the one of a competent scholarly critic. The book stands against the background of prefabricated ideological stands, and furthermore valorizes Pasolini’s “languages”: “His corpus was cinematic, literary and poetic” (p.4). Benini displays a great attention for the cinematic and poetic languages in Pasolini, and uses his poems, essays, interviews, and film scripts, in order to examine semiotic issues related especially to his film production and his cinematic theory. This methodological choice yields a rather innovative “autobiographical” reading, in the sense that Pasolini quotations produce something that I would call “mediated autobiography.” Benini acts as a “go-between” from author(ship) to textuality. This is, in my opinion, the greatest value of her non-categorical work.
Benini succeeds in carving out an innovative space for interpretation, so that her work is an interesting addition to the huge bulk of Pasolini criticism. Furthermore, her work can benefit those who are interested in “meeting” the “organic intellectual” Pasolini, an agent of Italian cultural history for over fifty years.