Pier Paolo Pasolini was one of the most complex auteurs of 20th-century cinema. In Italy, the scandal-ridden filmmaker (a defendant in court no less than 33 times) is considered a poet first and foremost. Poetry animated, haunted, and cross-contaminated Pasolini’s pursuits throughout his life. He theorized a “cinema of poetry,” brought the language of filmmaking into his poems, probed his own life and psychology in verse, and lived his defiant and conflicted poetic passion on nightly trips cruising among the ragazzi di vita—his spiritual, aesthetic, sexual, and cultural obsession. For Pasolini, poetry was the pursuit of “a language closer to the world.” In honour of his 101st birthday, the Criterion Collection is releasing Pasolini 101, a box set of his first nine features. Pasolini stated that he made these early films as a poet, and considering these works together one gains a privileged view of his cinematic, political, cultural, and, yes, poetic trajectory—one pursued in the complete embrace of his own “difference,” and waged through poetry on screen and in verse until his 1975 murder on the beach in Ostia, at the age of 53.
Pasolini’s first creative breakthrough came at an early age, writing poetry in Friulian,, the working-class suburbs of the Eternal City. Here, Pasolini discovered a world of physicality, naturalness, and sexuality that implicitly challenged the growing hegemonic domination of what he termed “neo-capitalism.” As he wrote in the collection of poems : “Yet from the world’s refuse, a new world is born: new laws are born where there is no more law, new honor born where honor is dishonor…Powers and nobilities rise from the piled up shanties, in the endless expanses where you think the city ends, where in fact it begins all over again.”
