PASOLINI: CENSORING THE BODY OF IDEOLOGY

by Pasquale Verdicchio, UCSD

Pier Paolo Pasolini, writer, film-maker, and essayist, is possibly the most controversial figure in modern Italian culture. His debut in writing consisted of a slim volume of verses written in his mother's dialect of the Friuli (an economically depressed region of Northeastern Italy), previewing the author's subsequent interest in subaltern cultures. In the late ‘40s, as a teacher and active member of the Italian Communist Party (PCI) in the Friuli, he began to suffer the animosity of conformist forces of the time. Pressed by a local priest to resign from the PCI or else, he refused. As a result of this he was denounced for making advances on his young male pupils. The ensuing scandal caused him to be relieved of his teaching position and to be expelled from the PCI in 1949. That incident brought into even greater conflict the already seemingly contradictory dimensions of Pasolini's life: homosexuality, Marxism, and Catholicism. This would colour Pasolini's artistic expression and his rapport with Italian society until his controversial death in 1975.
From 1949 to 1977, two years after his murder, Pier Paolo Pasolini was the subject of approximately 33 trials on various charges brought against him, his writings and films. These include: "offensiveness toward good customs and to the common sense of morality and decency" (for Mamma Roma, 1962); "contempt toward the state religion, under the pretext of cinematographic description, by mocking the figure and value of Christ through musical commentary, mimicry, dialogue etc." (for La Ricotta, 1963); "scenes offensive to the public decency in the depiction of intercourse between the guest and the maid, the woman of the house, and with the male components of the household, as well as the homosexual tendencies of the head of the household, the father, which are contrary to every moral value, social and familial." (for Teorema, 1968); "blasphemous, subversive, pornographic, indecent, etc." (for The Decameron, 1971); "a film full of obscenities ... nothing more than a series of vulgar exhibitions of sexual organs, all very clearly photographed." (for Arabian Nights, 1973).
While all charges take aim at what may most obviously be offensive to a sector of any population, they hide a more insidious challenge to cultural and ideological diversity. As a cursory viewing of any Pasolini film will reveal, the author does not merely seek to shock for its own sake, but rather to present a world view that is ideologically conflictual and compromising for the dominant culture. In order to negate the presence of alternative cultures, the dominant takes refuge in catch-phrases such as "public decency" and "common sense of morality and decency." So as to expose this strategy, in the article "Pornography is boring," (1969) Pasolini presents his own view of pornography in order to differentiate his work from it, and qualifies his dislike for pornographic films as a matter of aesthetics. While he condemns the censors who take it upon themselves to protect the morality of others, rather than pornography, which he considers dangerous to him as author. Because of the possibilities for censorship that pornography allows, it also functions to justify restrictions in all forms of expression. As a result, Pasolini argues, pornography becomes the pretext by which ideological expression is attacked and silenced.
What exactly is subversive in Pasolini's work? What scandalizes? Simply, the effectiveness of this artist's production lies in what he portrays, "it is something that scandalizes for its being what it is. It scandalizes because of its nature: because for one reason or another it is a diverse nature.” Pasolini proposes and produces art "as an exploration of the unsaid in common and official ideological discourses;" of great importance to this art is the author's own concept of "diversity." "Diverso," which would literally translate to "different," carries with it the secondary meaning of "diverse," and is used in Italian as a colloquialism in reference to homosexuality. In order to diffuse the negative connotations of the word, Pasolini set himself the task of infusing it with a sense of cultural importance and militancy. While the concept was largely biographical at its inception, with time it acquired cultural and political dimensions by which the author sought to bridge various kinds of "diversity" (his homosexuality, the subproletariat, the Third World) in a common oppositional front against official cultures. As such, censorship, applied to a cultural expression not condoned by officialdom, becomes strictly a political exercise.
In Pasolini's view, the subjects of marginalized cultures, products of specific socio-economic conditions and/or a-historicity, represent their condition by their physicality, their bodies and sexual organs. And, since "the language of action or simply of offensive presence [is a] stage of pre-revolutionary contestation," official culture finds it necessary to silence and render these bodies invisible. The uninhibited display of subproletarian bodies present in most of Pasolini's films is offensive to societal norms because it offers a code of being that demystifies the ideal body of bourgeois representation. The "language of action," aside from signifying the potential for revolution represented by those bodies, is also, literally, the spoken language, the dialects, the modes of expression of those marginal masses; these too stand as infractions to accepted cultural codes of conduct.
For Pasolini, the diverse yet bourgeois intellectual, it becomes essential that he give up his own language and be initiated to a revolutionary one if he is to establish a bond with the groups he represents in his art. Initiation into language takes place twice for Pasolini: once into the language of Marxism, and then into the language of marginalized cultures (such as Friulano). The two are integrated and then restated in the author's own language of social critique which, through literary and filmic production, privileges specific sites (the body of the subproletariat, for example) to engender a discussion of marginality, exclusion, repression, and confrontation. Pasolini's works are an attempt to dissipate the officiality of particular discourses by juxtaposing them to disparate elements. For example, in Accattone (his first film), the verses of Dante or the music of Bach, very definitely representative of a dominant cultural code, are used as backgrounds to the actions and bodies of subproletarian characters. Such acts of transgression are not easily forgiven by the keepers of the code; as a result, the bodies scripted by Pasolini in his films, and the language that emanates from them, become the focus of the scrupulous defenders of the "common good."


Abjuration and Confrontation

The Decameron (1970), Canterbury Tales (1971), and Arabian Nights (1974) form Pasolini's "Trilogy of Life," a series of films in which the author's scope was to represent the revolutionary power of subproletarian bodies, and highlight their potential through the highly imaginative narratives of tales and fables. In his "Abjuration from The Trilogy of Life," Pasolini comes to deny these films as an error in judgment. But this abjuration was by no means a surprising turn for Pasolini. He had described the frustration of not being understood in these verses from "A Desperate Vitality"(1964):

Death lies not
in being unable to communicate
but in the failure to continue being understood.
(14)

This then developed into feigned adaptation and conformism, as in this "Communiqué to ANSA [stylistic choice]" (1971):

I have ceased to be an original poet, it costs
freedom: a stylistic system is too exclusive.
I have adopted accepted literary schemes
to be free. For practical reasons, of course.

In his renunciation, Pasolini takes a very cynical stance by which he claims that the bodies, meant to represent the last stand in opposition to the subculture of mass media and consumerism, were in fact doomed long before he made the film. The culprit was none other than the famed "economic boom" of the 60s, a phenomenon that threw Italy into the realm of post-industrialism and neo-capitalism, which Pasolini blamed for its cultural and anthropological deterioration.
However, criticism of his work, and accusations of a nostalgia for an irretrievable past, continued to be leveled against him. Pasolini's response to those who called for him to describe contemporary society, to show a conscience of the present, results in the rhetorical abjuration of the “Trilogy” that in effect comes to justify his last project: Salò (1975).
A loose adaptation of Sade's 120 Days of Sodom, Salò was Pasolini's way to revive the last days of fascism during W.W.II, as an instrument by which to suggest a matrix for contemporary fascism's homogenization and objectification of the human body and being. The degradation of bodies, their use and abuse, torture, sadism, the corruption of eroticism and sexual relations, are the subjects of Salò. In effect, Pasolini believed that the fascism that had found fertile ground during the early to mid part of the century was never shed, it merely changed form. Consumerism, the new fascism, had, in his opinion, decimated the Italian subproletariat as it threatened to decimate the populations of the so-called Third World. Of course, Salò was no less susceptible to censorship than previous works. While Pasolini's early works had been threatening for their portrayal of the pre-revolutionary potential of the subproletariat, Salò is subversive in its out and out identification of the perverse power of fascism.
That fascism works its spell by insinuating itself as protector of accepted norms, order and clarity is addressed ironically by Pasolini in the previously quoted "Communiqué to ANSA." Freedom through "accepted ... schemes" is, of course, not at all freedom, but Pasolini succeeds in subverting this too in Salò. In fact, he gives prominence to the narrative of fascism by having each set of atrocities prefaced by the narrative voice of the captors. The scheme in Salò is much more direct than in other films and, as the fascist initiation of stories degenerates into the subjugation of the unsaid subjects, the "practical reasons" of Pasolini's rhetoric come to light.
Thus, one distinction between the "Trilogy" and Salò can be made at the level of communication. The works of the "Trilogy" still preserve a hope in the dialectic potential of the eroticism of subproletarian bodies, as communicative of their condition. Salò, on the contrary, dismisses any chance for communication through the total objectification of sexuality. The dialectic is wholly disrupted and interjected for the sole function of a system of consumption. Communication, or the lack thereof, defines eroticism and pornography respectively, and Salò becomes Pasolini's accusatory finger by which he links fascism, censorship, and pornography. The film elicited a negative reaction even from those who had been supportive of Pasolini. Italo Calvino, in "Sade is Within Us," suggests that

A "moral" effect can be drawn from Sade only if the "accusation" keeps its finger pointed not at the others but at ourselves. The "place of action" can only be in our conscience (111).

Complaining about how Pasolini was wholly discounting of Sade's intentions in The 120 Days of Sodom, and of how poorly that text transfers as a vehicle for the recounting of the last days of fascism in war torn Italy, Calvino suggests that the film-maker was out of touch with the world in which he lived. But Pasolini was painfully aware of his inescapable situation as a privileged bourgeois intellectual in society, and the effect that the maintenance of the status quo has on those considered expendable. Calvino's suggestions may in fact be symptomatic of the very loss of diversity in contemporary society, and the conviction that pedagogically we are restricted to the lessons of the dominant culture.
In closing, I would like to suggest a reading strategy for Pasolini's films that undoes the accusations listed at the beginning of this piece. This strategy is dependent on an aspect of the filmic process itself, as outlined by Pasolini in "Observations on the Sequence Shot," where editing is described not merely for its practical function in putting together a film, but also as a descriptive concept for life, production, and death. In that 1967 article, Pasolini insists that the life of an individual, or a person's work, is comparable to the long sequence shot, that only takes on significance after its completion. Death becomes an important editorial component by giving a sequence its significatory start. In Pasolini's words: "Until I die, no one can guarantee to really know me, that is, to be able to give a meaning to my actions, which therefore, as a linguistic moment, can be deciphered only with difficulty ... Death effects an instantaneous montage of our lives." In concurrence with this definition, any attempt to edit an author's works before the end of his discursive reality is a premature act that can only be qualified as censorship. It is, in fact, as applied to works such as Pasolini's, a premeditated act meant to distort and question their worth and integrity. Partial or total censorship led to the removal of the films from theaters, to the cutting of scenes in some versions, or to the films being shown in porno theaters rather than regular run movie houses.
Salò, in conjunction with the author's death, provides a revelatory glance backward that gives Pasolini's works a strength that may escape if the films are viewed as individual moments of expression. This is not to diminish their value as singular pieces, merely a suggestion to provide yet another viewing angle for this complex corpus. By splicing together the parts that spurred official censorship one may in fact have, as an end result, Pasolini's ideology represented most clearly. A censorship in reverse which brings to the foreground that which we would ordinarily not be allowed to see would both legitimize the excerpts, and deny censorship. By focusing attention on something other than the forbidden, censorship diverts attention from the true subject of the work as well as from its own function. In fact, in acting upon selected portions of a film or a body of literature, it becomes an act of violence against the ideas that the work seeks to represent. What we are not meant to see or hear are the parts that are connected by the interstitial frames upon which the accusations are based.
What we have in conclusion is a correlation between censorship and pornography, both of which negate communication and deny presence. Eros, on the other hand, is the possibility of reaching outside of a given system, of reaching outside of the norm in order to savour alternative presences. Eros is the force that strains a system and foresees its death. The move to censor the revolutionary eroticism of Pasolini's subproletarian bodies is also aimed at disrupting their communicative power, the threat of their presence. In Pasolini's eyes, the subproletarian body represents a challenge to consumer society's advance; its test of society brings upon it charges of subversion, making it a most likely subject for censorship.