Pier Paolo Pasolini: Culture, Croce, Gramsci

Abstract

At first sight, the inclusion of a chapter on Pasolini in a volume on mass and popular culture in postwar Italy seems to need no justification.¹ It would not appear to offend good sense to suggest that Pasolini’s cultural activities can be deemed to encapsulate many of this book’s unifying concerns. His eclectic intellectual endeavour led him to be directly involved with the mass media, from radio to cinema, and from the press to television — the modern institution which he most loathed.² Furthermore, Pasolini’s notoriety, his succès de scandale, which in Italy received the ultimate, culturally chic accolade of being dubbed a caso (the phenomenon of the caso too might have made an interesting and relevant topic for our book³), was basically manufactured by the media or, more significantly, via the media.⁴ From the late 1960s onwards, Pasolini increasingly used his newspaper columns and, to a lesser extent, his films to reinforce and refine his public image as the ‘wild man’ of Italy: that strange amalgam of accuser, prophet, libertine, renegade Marxist, and poet. And of all the masks he assumed, perhaps that of poet — as we shall see — is the most revealing, not least because it seems to have embraced all this concept’s idealist, romantic and decadent connotations from poeta-vate to poète maudit.

Sometimes culture can produce feelings so strong that they are like the feelings produced by nature

(P. P. Pasolini)