Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Manifesto per un Nuovo Teatro - an avant-garde theatre in the face of Bourgeois conventions (original) (raw)
Gray Mornings of Tolerance. Pasolini’s 'Calderón' and the Living Theatre of New York (1966-1969)
Studi Pasoliniani, 2011
This paper proposes a critical reading of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s tragedy Calderón against the background of the author’s contemporaneous collaboration with and subsequent abrogation of the members of the Living Theatre of New York. First, his tragedies and other works of the so-called «secondo Pasolini» period are contextualized by historicizing his dialogue with the Living Theatre, engaged writers like Ginsberg, and representatives of the American New Left. Second, a metatextual approach is taken in contrasting Pasolini’s theatrical manifesto (1968) with that of the Living Theatre. A productive theoretical framework (de Certeau, Lefebvre) is proposed in order to make sense of the seminal moment that was 1968 to both Pasolini’s worldview and oeuvre. Third, these insights are put to the test in a close reading and interpretation of Pasolini’s Calderón. The baseline of the present essay is that the tragedies, and Calderón in particular, are to be reconsidered as key texts for an understanding of both Pasolini’s political position with regards to the events of 1968, and his engaged literary aesthetic of the later years (e.g. Petrolio). As such, the less canonical position of theater within Pasolini’s late oeuvre is revisited.
Subjectivity and Politics in Pasolini's Bourgeois Tragic Theater
Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations, pp. 1-166, 2018
Italian author Pier Paolo Pasolini wrote his plays "Affabulazione," "Orgia" and "Porcile" during his shift to theater in the late 1960s as a critical response to consumer culture in Italy and the West more generally. For him, this expanding mass, petit-bourgeois civilization displaced Italy’s premodern cultures and their sense of the sacred. In his plays, his bourgeois protagonists re-experience the sacred and undergo conversion. The works engender his new “bourgeois tragic” genre, in which the sacred’s return destroys modern subjectivity. They offer a unique examination of this subjectivity, its radicalizing breakdown and the potential radical politics that could emerge from that breakdown. To further these significant insights, this study systematically theorizes Pasolini’s Bourgeois Tragic Theater – his dramatic genre and its production through his “Word Theater” practices – as one of bourgeois subjectivity and politics. It is the first of its kind among the Italian- and English-language criticism, framed through psychoanalysis and classical and twentieth-century Western theater. The predominant form of radical subjectivity and politics is “self-destructive otherness” and martyrdom, the latter of which will be a falsity and no politics at all. However, "Orgia" and "Porcile" in its drafts formulate a more critical radical subjectivity and politics: the transformation of self-destructive otherness into the “Logic of Otherness,” which looks to reconstruct Otherness as a new ideology of liberation. The protagonists ultimately fail to act on this Logic, and the plays end ambiguously, suspending catharsis. When Pasolini’s dramas are staged through his Word Theater praxis, his complete Bourgeois Tragic Theater looks to realize this Logic itself. It gives spectators the task of creating their own catharsis through its post-performance dialogue, which contains a Platonic pedagogy with radicalizing effects for subjectivity and politics. Pasolini’s theater will contradict the conclusion among scholars that his tragedies signal the “Second Pasolini,” one who is unable to propose any affirmative and effective form of resistance to modernization in this period. In fact, his theater will be his most rigorous and concerted effort at a radical political art, attempting to answer the crisis of both Marxism and the Church, with foresight of the pitfalls of the Student Movement.
University of Chicago Press, 2020
Recognized in America chiefly for his films, Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922-1975) in fact reinvented interdisciplinarity in post-war Europe: as poet, painter, journalist, novelist, art critic, film theorist, and unrelenting polemicist. Having studied with the distinguished art historian Roberto Longhi, Pasolini self-confessedly approached the cinematic image through painting. The numerous allusions to early modern frescoes and altarpieces in his films have been extensively documented. Far less understood, however, is Pasolini’s fraught relationship to the aesthetic experiments of his own age. In Against the Avant-Garde, Ara H. Merjian demonstrates how Pasolini’s campaign against neocapitalist culture fueled his hostility to the theory and practice of the avant-garde, even as his work drew upon its activity and helped to dynamize it in turn. An atheist indebted to the rituals of Catholic sacrality; a revolutionary Communist inimical to the creed of 1968; a homosexual hostile to the project of gay liberation: Pasolini refused the politics of identity in favor of a scandalously paradoxical practice. Like his theory of aesthetic “contamination,” these paradoxes prove vital to any understanding of his legacy, something Against the Avant-Garde examines through the lens of case studies from the 1960s and 70s: abstraction and informalism, pop art, Arte Povera and land art, and performance and body art, concluding with a reflection on Pasolini’s far-reaching consequence for contemporary art since the 1970s. Merjian’s volume not only reconsiders the work of Italy’s most prominent post-war intellectual, but also the fraught politics of the European neo-avant-garde as it grappled with a new capitalist hegemony.
Olga V. Solovieva, 2019
Fabio Mauri’s performance Intellettuale, set in the context of the opening of Leone Pancaldi’s new building for the Museum of Modern Art in Bologna, summed up a life-long collaboration and controversy between Pasolini and Mauri about the fate of Western art after World War II. Putting this performance in dialogue with Pancaldi’s building, this article discusses Pasolini’s and Mauri’s careers in the light of their aesthetic and philosophical divergences and convergences. In the context of Pancaldi’s building, Intellettuale throws into relief the cultural and ideological project of Pasolini’s film-making and its relation to the body art of the 1960s-70s.
Marginalità e omologazione. Le classi subalterne nell’opera di Pier Paolo Pasolini
Moderna. Semestrale di teoria e critica della letteratura, 2012
The main aim of this essay is to analyze Pasolini’s representation of subaltern groups throughout his career, from the early 1940s to 1975. Three recurrent elements may be underlined: Pasolini’s attention to dialects and popular cultures, the importance of the peasantry and subproletarians from a political viewpoint, and his “creatural” approach to arts and politics, with reference to Erich Auerbach. It is suggested here that there is a close connection between Pasolini’s lifelong reflection on subaltern groups and the formulation of his theory on anthropological change.
Manifesto Poetico: Toward New Theatrical Languages
ASAP/journal, 2020
TOWARD NEW THEATRICAL LANGUAGES M ANIFESTO POETICO is an international theater research group and production company that proposes a theater "for and with the people." 1 Their work began twenty-two years ago after artistic leader and founder CARLOS GARCÍA ESTÉVEZ was provoked by his teacher, the renowned theater innovator JACQUES LECOQ, to delve more deeply into the tragic depth of Commedia dell'Arte and masked performance. After years of research and collaborations with such artists as DONATO SARTORI, DARIO FO, TAPA SUDANA, SIMON MCBURNEY, and MIQUEL BARCELÓ, CARLOS became a recognized authority on Contemporary Mask Performance. A contributor to the Routledge Companion to Commedia dell'Arte, 2 CARLOS has taught masked performance all over the world and presented at major conferences and festivals including at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, the International Encounter of Theatre of the Oppressed, and the International Commedia dell'Arte Festival. In 2010-responding to a growing disassociation between the theater and more popular cultural forms-he was inspired to entirely reinvent his practice. What was necessary, he recognized, was not more or different forms of theater-that is, more or different depictions of human experience within a previously established representative mode-but new languages, new ways of communicating experience that could accommodate and employ the techniques and effects of our rapidly changing technologies, social realities, and points of view.
Theory by other means: Pasolini's cinema of the unthought
International Social Science Journal, 2012
Basta, c'è da ridere. Ah oscure tortuosità che spingono a un «destino d'opposizione»! Ma non c'è altra alternativa alle mie opere future [Enough, this is laughable. Oh obscure Entanglements that push to a "destiny of opposition" There is no other alternative for my future work] (Pier Paolo Pasolini, "Il progetto di future opere", in Pasolini 1982, p.198) Pier Paolo Pasolini was probably the most prominent dissident Italian intellectual of the 1960s and early 1970s. The targets of Pasolini's criticism were many and distributed across the political spectrum: globalisation, mainstream neoliberalism, the Catholicism of the Italian Communist Party (PCI), the students' bourgeois intellectualism, and Operaismo-the Italian Marxist workerism movements. For example, in his 1968 poem "The Communist Party to the Young" on the violent struggle between the student movement and the Roman police, Pasolini took the side of the police. He acknowledged that the police were on the wrong side, but supported them "because they [were] the sons of the poor", unlike the students whom he saw as bourgeois. Similarly, in 1975 he vehemently reacted to the debates over the legalisation of abortion, since it equated sexuality and life with consumption in the culture of disposability. Writing before the legalisation of abortion, Pasolini (see 1981, p.98) stated, "Oggi la libertà sessuale della maggioranza è in realtà una convenzione, un obbligo, un dovere sociale, un'ansia sociale, una caratteristica irrinunciabile della qualità di vita del consumatore [Today the sexual liberation of the majority of people is, in reality, a convention, an obligation, a social duty, a social anxiety, an inalienable factor in the life of the consumer]." This, however, did not stop Pasolini from developing a Marxist critique of capital (mainly through Gramsci) or aligning himself with Lotta Continua-the new radical Left in the early 1970s. The unconventional positions he developed in relation to progressive and radical politics make it difficult to situate him in the postwar trajectory of the European Left, even in that fractured landscape generated by the clashes between the traditional Marxist-Leninist Communist parties, such as the Italian Communist Party (PCI), and emerging workerist and autonomist movements. On account of his open homosexuality, the PCI's traditional Stalinist Left considered him a "degenerate bourgeois". An article in the party's newsletter, l'Unità, on 29 October 1949 explained, La federazione del Pci di Pordenone ha deliberato in data 26 ottobre l'espulsione dal partito del Dott. Pier Paolo Pasolini di Casarsa per indegnità morale. Prendiamo spunto dai fatti che hanno determinato un grave provvedimento disciplinare a carico del poeta Pasolini per denunciare ancora una volta le deleterie influenze di certe correnti ideologiche e filosofiche dei vari Gide, Sartre e di altrettanto decantati poeti e letterati, che si vogliono atteggiare a progressisti, ma che in realtà raccolgono i più deleteri aspetti della degenerazione Borghese. Kriss Ravetto-Biagioli is in the Department of Cinema and Technocultural Studies, University of California at Davis, USA. She is the author of The Unmaking of Fascist Aesthetics (University of Minnesota, 2001), has completed a book on Mythopoetic Cinema on the Margins of Europe, and is currently working on the Spectres of the Digital. She has published articles on film, digital culture, and performance art in Screen, Camera Obscura, Representations, Leonardo Electronic Almanac, Film Quarterly, Performance Arts Journal, Third Text, and numerous other journals and collected volumes.