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Figura lacrima
(2012)
Hervé Joubert-Laurencin’s article 'Figura Lacrima', which explores Pasolini's figure of Christ, consists of two interconnected parts. The part called 'Lacrima' argues that Pasolini's Christ sheds a small tear which is analogous to the salvific tear of Dante's Bonconte da Montefeltro. This heretical tear is not explicitly referred to or shown but can only be perceived through the coherent text represented by the ensemble of Pasolini's films. The part called 'Figura' argues that Pasolini invents the new concept of 'figural integration', which extends beyond Erich Auerbach's analysis of medieval figural and typological interpretation and allows him to conceptualize a kind of non-dichotomous tension between the poles structuring his thought and art. Joubert-Laurencin argues thereby that Pasolini's scandal of Christ's small tear is not the simple provocation of a sinful Christ, but the utopian image of a West that frees itself from its own closure through the promise of another world, coming not from somewhere else but from the powers of an outside that it possesses within itself.
Pasolini's literature, film, theatre, and essays engaged with Classical tragedy from the mid-1960s onwards. As Bernhard Groß shows in his paper 'Reconciliation and Stark Incompatibility: Pasolini's "Africa" and Greek Tragedy', this engagement forms a modality in Pasolini's politics of aesthetics that seeks to grasp the fundamental transformation from a rural-proletarian to a petit-bourgeois Italy. Since the mid-'60s, Pasolini was concerned with the bourgeoisie and its utopian potentials, which he sought to make productive by reading Classical tragedy as a possibility to make contradictions visible. Pasolini realized his reading of the Classical tragedy by having 'Africa' and 'Europe' - as he understood them - confront one another without mediation. By means of film analyses and film theory, Groß argues that this confrontation, especially in the films on the ancient world, generates an aesthetic place where the incompatible can unfold in the spectators' experience.
The body of the actor : notes on the relationship between the body and acting in Pasolini's cinema
(2012)
Agnese Grieco's paper 'The Body of the Actor: Notes on the Relationship Between the Body and Acting in Pasolini's Cinema' deals with the specific physiognomy of the actor within Pasolini's 'cinema of poetry'. It argues that Pasolini's films allow the spectator to experience directly a complex and polyvalent reality beyond the traditional idea of 'representation'. As a fragment of that reality, actors quote and present themselves beyond and through their interpretations of a role. Instead of conceiving of the actor as a 'professional of fiction', Pasolini employs a variety of actors who are able fully to convey their own anthropological history. It is particularly the body of the actor, Grieco concludes, that becomes a door opening towards a deeper reality. For instance, the figure of Ninetto Davoli can push us back towards Greek antiquity, and the codified art of the comedian Totò or the iconic fixity of Maria Callas can interact with the African faces of the possible interpreters of an African Oresteia.
Astrid Deuber-Mankowsky's paper 'Cinematographic Aesthetics as Subversion of Moral Reason in Pasolini's Medea' explores the 1969 film "Medea". Pasolini's Medea, masterfully played by Maria Callas, betrays her homeland and her origin, stabs both her children, sets her house on fire, and dispossesses Jason of his sons' corpses. But Deuber-Mankowsky argues that it is ultimately not these acts that render the film particularly disturbing and disconcerting, but, rather, the fact that the spectator is left behind in suspension precisely because Medea cannot be easily condemned for her acts. Pasolini's film and its cinematographic aesthetics thereby not only subvert the projection of Medea into the prehistorical world of madness and perversion, but also undermine belief in the validity of the kind of moral rationality developed and constituted in an exemplary way by Immanuel Kant in his "Critique of Practical Reason". In particular, Pasolini seems to relate conceptually to Nietzsche's artistic-philosophical transfiguration of Dionysus and to accuse belief in a world of reasons of failing to grasp the groundlessness, irrationality, or even a-rationality of reason itself.