The writing career of Pier Paolo Pasolini coincided with events of immense literary and social importance in Italy. Like many of his generation--being born at the inception of Fascism, coming of age d...
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Pier Paolo Pasolini was a controversial presence in Italian letters from the early 1950s until his assassination in November 1975. Deliberately provocative, his work invariably sparked debate and prod...
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In the following interview, originally published in 1971, Pasolini discusses the poetic renewal that inspired Trasumanar e organizzar.
Pasolini the filmmaker had overshadowed for some time Pasolini...
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In the following excerpt, Thompson notes the development of Pasolini from "civil poet" to "kinetic poet" in Pier Paolo Pasolini: Poems
As a poet, Pier Paolo Pasolini was...
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In the following essay, Friedrich analyzes the imagery of Narcissus in Pasolini's Fruilian poems of La meglio gioventù.
La meglio gioventù [The best youth] is the volume, publi...
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In the following excerpt, Ahern demonstrates how Pasolini 's "whole poetic career can be seen as a doomed struggle with the violence of poetic language. "
It is easy to forget ...
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In the following excerpted review of Selected Poems, Wells notes that the strength of Pasolini's poetry derives from its openness and departure from hermetic lyric tradition.
"What st...
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In the following excerpted review of Selected Poems, Formis finds that Pasolini's "fracture between moral vocation and inner feelings, between reason and instinct" is not resolved...
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In the following excerpt, Greene surveys Pasolini's intellectual response to the thought of Antonio Gramsci, as reflected in his political verse.
Pasolini's great debt to [Antonio] Gr...
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In the following excerpt, Bongie observes the importance of the "authentic experience" in Pasolini's poems.
One cannot … speak of Pasolini during the early 1960's...
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In the following essay, O'Neill comments on Pasolini's use of Friulian dialect in his poetry, and on his Spanish and Italian poetic influences.
Perhaps the best synthesis of the world...
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In the following excerpt, MacAfee focuses on the appropriateness of Pasolini's civil poems to a post-fascist society.
Pasolini's Italian poems were made as civil poems, in bright cont...
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In the following essay, Mandelbaum comments on what he deems the "over-sympathetic relation between Pasolini and his audience"
Few poets have declared their own bankruptcy as resolute...
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In the following excerpt, Oldcorn examines the poet's formative years in Rome and how they are reflected in his work, particularly in the early verse journal, Rome 1950: A Diary.
The verse j...
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In the following excerpt, Sillanpoa investigates the influence of Antonio Gramsci on Pasolini's work.
When discussing those who perhaps most influenced the thought of the late Pier Paolo Pas...
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In the following essay, Colilli uses philological criticism to study the concept of death in Pasolini's poems.
The purpose of this paper is to investigate briefly the application of philolog...
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In the following essay, Agosti presents a phenomenological analysis of Pasolini's poetry, seeing his verse as both conservative and innovative.
It is probable (it is, at least in part, alrea...
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In the following excerpt, Jewell examines the poems "A na fruta," "Poesia informa di rosa," and "Nuova poesia in forma di rosa" in order to find a definition ...
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Critical Essay by Robin Bean
The world of the Roman pimps and petty thieves has been well explored by Pasolini in his scripts for [Mauro Bolognini's] La Notte Brava and [Franco Rossi's]...
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Critical Essay by Susan Macdonald
Pasolini always remains detached from his characters. He is not interested in interpreting behaviour. He describes what he sees. His objectivity is alarmingly emotiv...
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Critical Essay by Peter Whitehead
There are only two reasons for taking a myth and re-working it. Either because a variation on it will communicate a new depth of understanding about that particular ...
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Critical Essay by Roy Armes
Pasolini is no austere modernist carving out a resolutely independent style but an artist whose principal stylistic device is pastiche. His films, like those of Jean-Luc G...
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Critical Essay by Geoffrey Nowell-smith
[Accattone] is a film about the rejects of society, in the active and passive senses of the phrase; about those whom society has rejected and those who have re...
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Critical Essay by Robert J. White
Where Sophocles has succeeded in making his Oedipus Rex topical and relevant, Pasolini has aimed at making his Edipo Re strange and indefinite, outside any specific ...
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Critical Essay by Robert Asahina
[While] relatively modest in depicting more or less conventional (oral and anal) sexual acts, Salò is painfully explicit in areas previously unexplored on Amer...
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Critical Essay by Tom Allen
[The Arabian Nights fails] to resolve the immense contradictions already bequeathed by the director. Why did one of the world's least popularist, most problematic f...
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Critical Essay by J. Hoberman
More than a curiosity, but less than a fully realized work, Pier Paolo Pasolini's feature-length Notes for an African Orestes is an intriguing item that's ...
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Critical Essay by Robin Bean
[Mamma Roma] is one of the most vicious indictments of the complete insensitivity of human society as a corporate body to concern itself in a personal way with that eleme...
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Critical Essay by Stephen Snyder
While, in life, [Pasolini's] hunger for the "rough trade" of the Roman slums ended in a violent death, in film, his metaphor of life-as-ingestion...
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Critical Essay by Peter John Dyer
It is easy enough to pick holes in Mamma Roma as a cry of social protest. The plot, on the face of it, is mawkish…. The development is arbitrary, with Mamma R...
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Critical Essay by Stanley Kauffmann
Pasolini, the atheistic Communist, [has] beaten his opponents by making the best film about Jesus in cinema history. He has not given us a Marxist or merely humane...
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Critical Essay by Patrick Macfadden
The genre [of Uccelacci e uccellini (The Hawks and the Sparrows)] is the picaresque. And very much the moral-pointing literary picaresque of Eulenspiegel or Simpli...
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Critical Essay by Marc Gervais
[Edipo Re (Oedipus Rex) is a series of events], one following upon the other, unprepared, unexploited for their story values, in many ways even unexplained, but merely ...
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In the following review, Butcher asserts that "The Gospel According to St. Matthew is incomparably the most effective picture ever made on a scriptural theme."
Almost from the beginni...
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In the following essay, de Lauretis asserts that "for Pasolini cinema is precisely writing in images, not to describe (portray) reality or fantasy, but to inscribe them as representations....
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In the following essay, MacAfee discusses the relationship between Pasolini's poetry and American culture and art.
Pasolini's Italian poems were made as civil poems, in bright contras...
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In the following essay, Sillanpoa analyzes the relationship between Pasolini and the writings of Antonio Gramsci.
When discussing those who perhaps most influenced the thought of the late Pier Paol...
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In the following review, White discusses Enzo Siciliano's biography of Pasolini, Pasolini's work, and Pasolini's similarities to Japanese novelist Yukio Mishima.
Pier Paolo Pas...
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In the following review, Stille analyzes Pasolini's relationship with Italian society and politics.
Pier Paolo Pasolini, probably the most famous writer of postwar Italy, is best known in Am...
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In the following review, Steele considers a biography of Pasolini written by Enzo Siciliano and a collection of Pasolini's poetry, asserting that understanding Pasolini's work "is...
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In the following review, Thompson discusses Pasolini's Poems and Enzo Siciliano's biography of the poet and filmmaker.
As a poet, Pier Paolo Pasolini was an arch-traditionalist; as a ...
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In the following review, Robey discusses two of Pasolini's novels, Amado mio and Atti impuri, that were published posthumously and asserts that "The two texts are very close in style and...
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In the following review, Greenberg states that Pasolini's Les dernières parole d'un impie "is part autobiography, part analysis, part remembrance, part explanation, part (s...
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In the following review, Fantazzi discusses Pasolini's early novels, Amado mio and Atti impuri.
Preceding the completed novella Amado mio is another slightly longer piece, Atti impuri, which...
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In the following interview, Pasolini discusses how he approached his film The Gospel According to St. Matthew and explains his use of non-professional actors.
[BLUE:] I have been wondering what I s...
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In the following essay, Greene discusses Enzo Siciliano's Pasolini: A Biography, Paul Willeman's Pier Paolo Pasolini, Beverly Allen's Pier Paolo Pasolini: The Poetics of Heresy, a...
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In the following review, Thompson discusses the themes present in Pasolini's Lutheran Letters which he states focuses on the moral state of Italy since Mussolini.
Lutheran Letters is a posth...
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In the following review, Ahern provides an overview of Pasolini's life and poetry.
It is easy to forget that Pier Paolo Pasolini is a major poet. Between 1950 and his death in 1975 he publis...
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In the following review, Rice states that Pasolini's Marxism is evident in his novel A Violent Life, but asserts that in addition to the political overtones, "Tommaso's story has ...
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In the following review, McCarthy discusses what Pasolini's Lettere 1940–1954 reveals about the themes found in his work.
This first volume of Pasolini's collected letters cove...
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In the following review, Armstrong calls Pasolini's Petrolio "maddeningly incoherent and self-contradictory."
Pier Paolo Pasolini was murdered in 1975 by a 17-year-old male hoo...
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In the following review of Petrolio, Eberstadt asserts that "all of Pasolini's most passionate opinions—from the sanctity of poverty to the vileness of heterosexual couples—...
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In the following excerpt, Ragusa compares the works of Pasolini and Carlo Emilio Gadda and explores each writer's relationship with experimentalism.
The subject of this essay is threefold...
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In the following essay, Bragin discusses examples of Pasolini's work in the genres of the novel, film, and poetry.
Pier Paolo Pasolini was born in Bologna in 1922. His father was a governmen...
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In the following review, O'Neill discusses Pasolini's Biciclettone as an introduction to the themes and style found in his other novels.
One of the most interesting and original perso...
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In the following review, the critic states that Pasolini's "Empirismo eretico is the record of the intellectual activity of an individual struggling with a protean culture which changed ...
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In the following essay, Sarris discusses Pasolini's career and gruesome death.
Pier Paolo Pasolini, the 53-year-old film director, was murdered last week near Rome. His confessed killer, 17-...
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In the following essay, O'Neill traces the influences, themes, and stylistic devices of Pasolini's dialect poetry.
Perhaps the best synthesis of the world of Pasolini's dialect...
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Berlin (dpa) - A series of film screenings of Alberto Moravia's
works are being held in Berlin from Tuesday evening to mark the
centenary of the Italian novelist's birth.
...
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Rome (dpa) - "At the Oscars it's the money that counts, in Venice
it's the film-makers and actors," Hollywood star Sean Penn waxed
lyrical about the Venice Film Festival som...
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Castel di Tusa, Italy (dpa) - In a memorable scene from Akira
Kurosawa's 1990 movie Dreams, a man wanders around the paintings of
Vincent Van Gogh. At the Atelier Sul Mare h...
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Lucrecia Martel's La Niña Santa ("The Holy Girl"), from her own screenplay, slithers along as a highly controlled sex comedy that is unusually civilized in comparison to the more prevalent cru...
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Marco Bellocchio’s Good Morning, Night (Buongiorno Notte) happens to be the 24th film that the 66-year-old Italian filmmaker has turned out in his 40-year-career, which began with a bang in 1...
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Marco Bellocchio’s Good Morning, Night ( Buongiorno Notte) happens to be the 24th film that the 66-year-old Italian filmmaker has turned out in his 40-year-career, which began with a bang in ...
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