Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Manifesto per un Nuovo Teatro - an avant-garde theatre in the face of Bourgeois conventions (original) (raw)
Related papers
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.
Towards a Cinema of Poetry - In the Mythical Imagination of Pier Paolo Pasolini
Film and Television Institute of India, 2020
Centered on the essay Cinema of Poetry, by Pier Paolo Pasolini, this short thesis will try to explore the ideas of myth and reality as they appear in the films of Pier Paolo Pasolini. In this particular essay Pasolini expands on his ideas of cinema and forges different connections. This paper does not only take these ideas as base point to take flight into the master's work, but also tries to use similar methodology. This thesis is thus about an intricate web of connections and relations, as Pasolini chooses to build them.
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.
Midwest Modern Language Association, Chicago, Illinois, 5 November 2010.
Session A 1. Teatralizzazione di un romanzo: i costumi di scena degli Indifferenti di Moravia Chiara De Santi, SUNY Fredonia 2. Pasolini e lo strappo nella coscienza dello spettatore Fulvio Orsitto, California State Univerisity-Chico 3. Lina Wertmüller regista-burattinaia Federico Pacchioni, University of Connecticut-Storrs Session B 4. Manzoni’s Count of Carmagnola and Kleist’s Prince of Homburg: History between Fiction and Factuality Maria Giulia Carone, University of Wisconsin-Madison 5. Teatro e teatralità nella poesia del primo Palazzeschi Daniele Fioretti, University of Wisconsin Madison 6. Mario Luzi’s Plays: A Plurality of Voices Ernesto Livorni, University of Wisconsin-Madison Session C 7. Distinctive Nature of Masques of Commedia dell’Arte in their Relationship with Food in 18th Century Paola Monte, Royal Holloway, University of London 8. Arlecchino is Lying: Deconstructing Goldoni’s II bugiardo Stefano Boselli, Gettysburg College 9. The Spectator in Dario Fo’s Performances: From the Foyer to the Post-Performance Debates Marco Valleriani, Royal Holloway, University of London
Pasolini's Accattone: A Poetic Elaboration of Reality
Celebrated as one of the most creative and most interesting minds of 20 th century, Pier Paolo Pasolini undauntedly attempts, throughout his multi-faceted artistic and literary expressions, to come to terms with the cultural shifts in post-war Italy. Overall, his artistic and literary production is to be treated as a multi-layered interpretative issue. His very narrow and elitist view concerning what is art is not at all dissimilar from the one adopted by the single most influential literary critic of his time, Benedetto Croce. In other words, Pasolini, the always backward-looking artist, ultimately believed in a certain exclusive form of art that is able to transcend the contingencies of war and of post-war Italy, while working within and not without the Italian literary tradition of the past. Therefore, in his endless struggle against the changes occurring in post-war Italian society, Pasolini becomes Italian contemporary culture's most counteracting force. While never homologizing to popular artistic attitudes, Pasolini assumes throughout his life different identities, constructed by himself for himself in order to maintain, at times though extreme measures, his status of "voice in the wilderness".