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Der Aufsatz von Manuele Gragnolati und Christoph F. E. Holzhey "Aktive Passivität?" über Pier Pasolinis Theaterstück und seinen gleichnamigen Film "Schweinestall" (Italien 1969) setzt an der Auseinandersetzung von Julian, dem Protagonisten mit dem ihm im Traum erscheinenden Spinoza an. In dem Gespräch mit Julian, das im Film nicht vorkommt, diesem jedoch zugrunde liegt, tritt Spinoza zunächst als eben jener rationalistische Philosoph auf, der für den bürgerlichen Rationalismus verantwortlich ist. In ihrer Lektüre zeigen Gragnolati und Holzhey, dass Pasolinis Auslegung von Spinozas Philosophie schließlich darin mündet, dass sie Julian ermutigt, sich seinen Affekten hinzugeben, die ihn zu den Schweinen ziehen, um sich von ihnen verschlingen zu lassen. Damit entwickelt Pasolini in seiner subtilen Abschwörung von Spinoza, wie Gragnolati und Holzhey argumentieren, avant la lettre eine queere Kunst des Scheiterns, in der Julian eine mögliche Form des Protestes und der Möglichkeit darstellt, sich der Teilhabe an der Macht zu entziehen.
The de-constitution of the 'I' is at the centre of Manuele Gragnolati's essay 'Differently Queer: Temporality, Aesthetics, and Sexuality in Pier Paolo Pasolini's "Petrolio" and Elsa Morante's "Aracoeli"'. The essay explores the relationship between temporality, aesthetics, and sexuality in the final novels of two twentieth-century Italian authors: Pasolini's "Petrolio" (1972–75) and Morante's "Aracoeli" (1982). Both novels mobilize a form of temporality that resists a sense of linear and teleological development and that instead appears contorted, inverted, and suspended. The article argues that both novels thereby allow for the articulation of queer desires and pleasures that cannot be inscribed in normative logics of completion, progression, or productivity. It shows how the aesthetics of Pasolini's and Morante's texts replicate the movement of queer subjectivity and dismantle the traditional structure of the novel but do so differently. The fractured and dilated movement of "Petrolio's" textuality corresponds to a post-Oedipal and fully formed subject who is haunted by his complicity with bourgeois power and wants to shatter and annihilate himself by replicating the paradoxical pleasure of non-domesticated sexuality. "Aracoeli", by contrast, has a 'formless form' ('forma senza forma') that corresponds to the position of never completing the process of subject formation by adapting to the symbolic order. The poetic operation of Morante's novel consists in staging an interior journey, backwards along the traces of memory and the body and at the same time forward towards embracing the partiality and fluidity of an inter-subjectivity that is always in the process of becoming.
Mit der Entgrenzung der Geschichtlichkeit bewegt sich Pasolini auf dem Sektor, der sein Filmschaffen - wenn auch in unterschiedlichen Variationen - wie ein roter Faden begleitet: dem Mythos. Allerdings handelt es sich nun um einen pervertierten Mythos, im Gegensatz zum archaischen Mythos, welchen Pasolini in 'Edipo Re' und 'Medea' noch in euphorischen Bildern gepriesen hatte. Die faschistische Pervertierung des Mythos in der Moderne dagegen, so führt zumindest 'Salò' vor Augen, transgrediere die Gewalt nicht mehr als Teil einer gemeinschaftlich begründeten Festivität und Verausgabung lebensfördernder Riten. Die heilige Gewalt des Mythos degeneriert in dem von Pasolini als ubiquitär verstandenen Faschismus zur ziellosen, heillosen Anarchie.
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.
Pasolini's first visit to a Third World country dates to 1960-61. His impressions and experiences during this journey are told in the collection of articles "L'odore dell'India", which, in Silvia Mazzini's opinion, also reveals his (perhaps characteristic) tension between being up-to-date and being out of time. This essay can thus be understood as a small journey through the author's travels in and relations with India. It argues that while in the 1960s the myth of India became a veritable spiritual fashion, for Pasolini this fashion trivialized the sharp contradictions of a country at once poor and splendid, full of traditions and subversive, rich with mysticism and pragmatic vitality. The collection of journalistic articles "L'odore dell' India" (1961) and the documentary "Appunti per un film sull'India" (1968), which originate from Pasolini's first journeys to the so-called 'Third World', intertwine sharp sociological analyses with instinctual observations and remarks. Mazzini shows that between the effluvia of incense and the adventures of a tiger, one can catch a glimpse of the Pasolinian vision of a humanity which is at once disruptive, archaic, and subversive, and which represents an alternative to the standardization of the consumerist society and its tendency to suppress and absorb any cultural difference.
Before completing his uncharacteristically hopeful filmic vision of an African Oresteia, Pier Paolo Pasolini invented a theatrical continuation of Aeschylus's trilogy. "Pilade" (1966/70) imagines what happens after Orestes, having being absolved by the Aeropagos in Athens, goes back to Argos. With its clear allusions to political developments in the last century - fascism, the Resistance, and Communist revolutions - the play reads as a mythical allegory for the situation of engaged intellectuals in thetwentieth century. As Christoph F. E. Holzhey's contribution '"La vera Diversità": Multistability, Circularity, and Abjection in Pasolini's "Pilade"' shows, Pasolini's imagined continuation of the Oresteia challenges an ideology of rational foundation and progress by moving through a series of aspect changes prompted by sudden events that allow for some integration while also creating new divisions. After all possible alliances among the principal characters - Orestes, Electra, and Pylades - have been played through, Pylades curses reason for its deceptive, consoling, and violent function and embraces his abjected position of true diversity beyond intelligibility. However, Holzhey argues, rather than functioning as the play's telos, this ending is an open one and participates in the paradoxical performance of a self-contradictory subjectivity and a circular temporality without entirely giving up hope for a truly different alternative.
Manuele Gragnolati's paper 'Analogy and Difference: Multistable Figures in Pasolini's "Appunti per un'Orestiade africana"' discusses Pasolini's preference for the figure of contradiction and his opposition to Hegelian dialectics by exploring his attempt to look at Africa's process of modernization and democratization in the 1960s as analogous to the synthetic transformation of the Furies into Eumenides at the end of Aeschylus's trilogy. Gragnolati shows that Pasolini is aware of the dangers of analogy, which risks imposing the author's or filmmaker's symbolic order onto that of the 'other' represented in the text or film, and he argues that Pasolini seeks to deal with this danger by constantly shifting back and forth between differing positions. "Appunti per un'Orestiade africana" can thereby be thought as a multistable figure that is left suspended and not only resists synthesis, but also problematizes its own feasibility and challenges its own legitimacy.