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Al-Ahram Weekly 13 - 19 May 1999 Issue No. 429 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 13 - 19 May 1999 Issue No. 429
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Profile Features Books Travel Living Sports People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters History, myth and the marginal
By Mohamed El-Assyouti
The work of Pier Paolo Pasolini -- poet, novelist, theorist and film-maker -- is grounded in modern linguistic theory and in the Marxism of Antonio Gramsci, the communist leader imprisoned for 13 years in Fascist Italy to whom Pasolini dedicated his first major poem.
"I made all these films as a poet," professed Pasolini. Yet in his maturity, and influenced by Neo-Realist approaches to film in post-World War II Italy, it was cinema that he embraced as the most appropriate medium to express reality, celebrating its ability to by-pass a host of cumbersome signifiers, relishing the ability to represent specific cultures in their own surroundings, without the mediation of language.
And, with camera, he travelled far and wide, to Ethiopia, Yemen, Persia, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Madagascar and Morocco -- always favouring the marginal and the peripheral, and including people from these countries in his cast. In a way he represented those denied the right to self-representation. And since he believed that an "epic-religiosity" governed his poetry, rather than naturalism, his realism is constantly undermined by elements of the baroque, as he consciously utilises the strange and grotesque as a means to escape rigid cultural reference.
In Edipo re (Oedipus The King), produced in 1967, the historicism invoked by Moroccan landscapes and bizarre costumes is later shattered by a finale set in modern Bologna's streets, and dressed in contemporary outfits. Bolognese both by birth and education, this autobiographical touch is to be found in many of Pasolini's films. Three years earlier he had cast his own mother as the Virgin Mary in Il vangelo secondo Matteo (The Gospel According to Saint Matthew).
Then came Edipo re, which Pasolini himself considered the symbolic key to his autobiography, and which must be counted among the most intimate of all his films. Like Oedipus, Pasolini saw himself as "one who lives his life as the prey of life and his own emotions". And in Edipo re the basic operation was to project psychoanalysis into the myth -- psychoanalysis, curiously, being one of the few territories that Pasolini's theoretical writings never broach.
Edipo re sacrifices story for a vivid representation of myth -- focusing exclusively on what is essential, elemental and primitive in Sophocles' timeless tragedy. As in most of Pasolini's films, man is depicted as a vulnerable creature, one who can lose his way in the desert of life and be rendered blind by the burning sun. A typical Pasolini film, it seeks to move beyond the cinema, to be greater than the sum of its technical and ideological components, so as to challenge myth and history. And it does so not by directing the attention of the spectator outside the frame, as other film-makers might attempt, but by pushing against that frame and, in doing so, breaking free from it.
Pasolini's cinema pulls against what is normally understood to be cinematic, and against conventional narrative, giving rise to a fragmentation of the experience which heightens the sense of "the real". Pagan mythology and elements of contemporary reality are juxtaposed in such a way as to offer the spectator a part in the re-creation of the story -- of myth and of history -- despite the lack of complete knowledge which spectator and Oedipus share.
The interplay of myth and reality, and the tension it creates, are Pasolini trademarks, evident in many of the Italian director's most critically acclaimed films, including Il vangelo secondo Matteo (screened last Sunday in the Pasolini mini-retrospective), and in Medea (to be shown on 30 May).
Whether it was a deliberate choice by the Italian Cultural Institute to show only films from the 1960s in this retrospective is anyone's guess. Certainly, though, no account of Pasolini's oeuvre could be complete without screenings of his productions from the 1970s, though films such as Il Decameron (The Decameron), I racconti di Canterbury (The Canterbury Tales), and Il fiore delle mille e una notte (Arabian Nights) were widely criticised for their use of explicit sex and violence.
Shortly after the release of Pasolini's last film, adapted from De Sade's 120 jours de Sodom, the director was bludgeoned to death by a young man. After a lifetime spent criticising both Church and State, the subject of some 500 judicial proceedings, whether Pasolini's murder was for political reasons, or a crime of passion, remains an open question.
Oedipus The King will be shown at the Italian Cultural Institute next Sunday at 7pm.
