Issue # 2

Cutup

Pasolini's Crime

A scene from La Ricotta (The Curd Cheese, 1963). Journalist approaches director of a grotesque film adaptation of the Passion of Christ. Director, played by Orson Welles, spouts ironical pastiche of Pasolini’s own intellectual positions.

Journalist: What do you want to express with this new work of yours?

Director: My profound, inmost, archaic Catholicism.

Journalist: And what do you think of Italian society?

Director: We have the most illiterate masses, the most ignorant bourgeoisie in Europe.

Journalist: And what do you think about death?

Director: As a Marxist, it is a fact which I do not take into consideration.

Journalist: Fourth and last question: what is your opinion. . . of our great Federico Fellini?

Director: He dances. . .he dances!

La ricotta resulted first in a trial and then in a four month suspended prison sentence for Pasolini. "I still can't say exactly why they tried me at all, but it was a terrible period for me. I was slandered week after week, and for two or three years I lived under a kind of unimaginable persecution." The "clerical-fascist" state, as Pasolini came to term the political regime that ruled post-war Italy, ostensibly reacted to the blasphemous depictions. Could it be that it missed the point of this short film, that it was not so much a denigration of the Christian faith as an expose of consumerist denigration in contemporary culture? "Woe to him who doesn’t know/ this Christian faith is bourgeois,/ in every privilege, every rendering,/ every servitude; that sin is/ only a crime against offended/ daily certitude, is hated because of/ fear and sterility; that the Church/ is the merciless heart of the State."

In the years leading up to his murder in November 1975, Pasolini lashed out against the omnipotent Democratic-Christian regime that had dominated post-war Italian politics. Long before the obscure web of corruption and organised crime that sustained the regime became the quotidian political spectacle of the early 90s, Pasolini was asking the questions others feared to ask. Delirious and reckless, he asked them on the front page of Italy’s most influential and widely read newspaper, Corriere della Sera: "I know the names of those who, between one mass and the next, made provision and guaranteed political protection ... I know all these names and all the acts (the slaughters, the attacks on institutions) they have been guilty of ..." At that time there was no proof, not even a clue, that Pasolini could muster for his case. Instead he claimed the artist’s prerogative of an imaginative statement of political reality: "I know because I am a writer and an intellectual who tries to follow what goes on, to imagine what is known and what is kept quiet, who pieces together the disorganised fragments of a whole and coherent political picture, who restores logic where arbitrariness, mystery and madness seem to prevail."

First question: Was it a political assassination or just a cheap street murder? It could just be a street murder, something that stupid and thoughtless, that takes away my life: despite what your parents taught you when you were a kid, there’s no reason anything should be a certain way in our lives; as far as you’re concerned there’s no reason why you should get anything good. Justice is our leaders' hype. No reason for you or anyone else to have any preconception whatsoever. You will get used to this, and if you don’t you will surely perish all the sooner. Part of the evidence suggested something even more sinister, that there had been others involved in the murder. For some unknown reason this evidence was dismissed. Maybe the judge was in his right mind, for the chances were that had he decided otherwise he would have become yet another prominent corpse. When I, Pasolini, was murdered I was perhaps out of my right mind. I had just finished making Salo, a film that sought to realise a new extremism in art, a film that even the broadest minds would have difficulty with. In Salo human male sexual desires especially homosexual and sadistic are raised both within the movie and in the movie’s audience at the same time that I’m showing the close connections between these desires and fascism. Because the state’s now fascistic, sexual desire is totally reasonable that is separate from caring. This is great for a pornographer to say.

The extremity of Salo is sometimes mistaken as straightforward pornography. The use of pornographic elements is primary to Pasolini’s attempt to create unwatcheable cinema, a film that could not be consumed, let alone digested. It is only those who are insensitive to the subtleties being expressed through the extreme depictions who condemn the film as yet a further example of a kind of libertarian excess inimicable to the moral fibre of society. It is quite likely that Pasolini was aware that Salo was the kind of film that courted this kind of marginalisation, that the misanthropic universe that emanates from it with so much formal precision sets the film up as the product of a passionate but deluded mind. From this place of extreme opposition, Pasolini challenges contemporary political discourse to break out of its cycle of repetition whereby it can offer nothing more than predictable and irrelevant responses to outrageous transgressions.

We are gathered before the mansion where the crimes against our youth will be committed. The grotesque figures of our immanent oppression are informing us of our fate from the balcony. We have been gathered here for the vile rituals which will constitute the amusement of our captors. There is no escape, we are told. We must do as they say, eat shit when they say, submit to sodomy on command, and in the end we will be rewarded by being scalped in the courtyard, bound spread-eagled to steaks on the ground, and fucked yet gain. Why should this depiction be allowed to exist, this slander against right-thinking folk, this terrible provocation against civilized appearances, this crude analogy of sadism and fascism? The cruel fascists are extremists, but more precisely they are extreme depictions. They are not so much figures from the past as hyperbolic figurations of a present danger. Though this danger received its particular context in the extreme political climate of Pasolini’s Italy, it continues to be re-enacted in other locales in the vast conspiracy of subterranean forces that is neocapitalism. Marxism is long dead but neocapitalism lives ferociously in a new and malevolent silence that denies all alternatives.

If we were allowed the license of an ideal abstraction, one could imagine a conspiracy of pale criminals, neo-capitalists, whose ultimate intent is the dumbing-down of the populace, perhaps by restricting them to a modest dose of biblical instruction but more likely through a superabundance of shit broadcast into their homes. They could manufacture themselves as pious citizens intent on maintaining moral fibre, cocooning themselves within a hazy glow of ignorant rectitude. These ideal figures, who obviously don’t exist in real life, could thereby continue their other activities, perhaps over time convincing even themselves with the flimsiest semblance of a clear conscience.

What OTHER ACTIVITIES?... CRIME!

Of course these people don’t exist, nor does the conspiracy, and perhaps that makes for a massive delusion. There is no alternative but to bow and be reasonable.

Crime, if it exists, is under control,

criminals, if they exist, are being punished.

All is as it should be.

We can sleep.