the utopian in pasolini's documentaries

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Beyond objectivity: the utopian in Pasolini'sdocumentariesFabio Vighi

Online Publication Date: 01 December 2002To cite this Article: Vighi, Fabio (2002) 'Beyond objectivity: the utopian in Pasolini'sdocumentaries', Textual Practice, 16:3, 491 - 510To link to this article: DOI: 10.1080/09502360210163444URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09502360210163444

Fabio Vighi

Beyond objectivity: the utopian in Pasolinis documentaries

Introduction

Pier Paolo Pasolini is better known for his ction lms than for his docu-mentaries, and perhaps the very definition of documentary should bequestioned when approaching his non- ctional productions. Phillip Lopate,referring to Pasolinis Appunti per un Orestiade africana (1970), writes of a very personal subgenre dened by its own transitional status, that is, a sortof celluloid notebook into which the lmmaker puts his preliminary ideasabout casting, music, or global politics about a project that never came topass.1 The notion of an intermediary project conceived as a mediationbetween literary language and cinematic language is a particularly relevantand stimulating one for Pasolini, as his 1965 essay La sceneggiatura comestruttura che vuol essere altra struttura [The script as a structure that wantsto be another structure] clearly testi es.2 Here, Pasolini de nes as volontrivoluzionaria (revolutionary will) the dynamic tension at work in the script,for it forces the reader to think by images, thus causing the contradiction andsubversion of an entire stylistic system (that of literature).

It is also true, though, that the celluloid notebook is only one amongseveral different non- ctional formats recognizable in Pasolinis lmography.One should not underestimate the scope and breadth of such a diversedocumentary production: during the whole length of his controversial careeras a director of ction lms, which lasted approximately fteen years (1961to 1975), Pasolini constantly engaged in the shooting of non- ctional lms.In this alternating mode, Pasolini is certainly closer to such lm-makers asWim Wenders and Werner Herzog than, say, Krzysztof Kies lowski, whoabandoned documentary for feature lm; that alone is a clear indication ofhis belief in the genre.

His documentaries are, in chronological order, La rabbia [The Rage](1963), a collection of newsreel and photographic materials commenting oncontemporary world history; Comizi damore [Talking About Love] (1964),

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an extended journalistic survey on the themes of love and sexuality;Sopraluoghi in Palestina (1964), a record of Pasolinis travels through theHoly Land in search of locations for Il vangelo secondo Matteo [The GospelAccording to Mathew] (1964), his well-known lm on the life of Christ;Appunti per un lm sullIndia [Notes for a lm on India] (1968), a record ofPasolinis travels through India, researching for a ction lm that was nevershot; Appunti per unOrestiade africana [Notes for an African Orestes] (1970),another set of notes with commentary about a lm in Africa that was nevershot; 12 dicembre [12 December] (1972), a militant documentary intendedto unmask government misconduct; Le mura di Sanaa [The walls of Sanaa](1974), a fourteen-minute documentary commenting on the defacement ofthe Yemenite town.

The aim of this article is to investigate the theoretical implications of Pasolinis conspicuous engagement with the documentary form. Such an investigation nds a natural operative framework in Pasolinis own 1960swritings on cinematic language. However non-systematic, such semiologicalwritings provide an essential starting point for any serious attempt to shedsome light on Pasolinis unconventional notions of realism and repre-sentation. This is not to say that they should be regarded in an uncriticalfashion. Rather, issues of objectivity and referentiality, as well as historicaldocumentation and preservation, always at the heart of any plausible analysisof the non- ctional form, will be addressed both from within and outsidePasolinis own predicaments. It would be preposterous as well as disingenuousto consider such speci c cultural products without testing the epistemologicalterrain of the documentary as an autonomous medium of expression.

The history of non- ction lms is both an abundant and a compositeone, having negotiated distinctive theories and practices all the way throughthe twentieth century. Academic interest around the cultural status of thedocumentary film has recently rekindled, as a number of scholars haveenthusiastically engaged in compiling bibliographies and lmographies witha view to understanding the various textual functions at stake. It seems,therefore, that the traditional marginalization of the non- ctional lm, stillsubscribed to by Christian Metz in his pioneering studies on cinematiclanguage,3 is coming to an end. More precisely, what has emerged in recentcritical literature is the view that fictional and non-fictional categoriesfunction according to the same discursive patterns and share the sameaesthetic as well as ideological concerns. Such a viewpoint tends to efface the traditional claims made for the documentary to see, know and informthe public on specific sociopolitical or, more generally, historical issues. In the attempt to establish a theoretical contextualization of Pasolinis ownnon- ctional work, my analysis draws mainly on two collections of criticalessays, both published in the USA in the course of the 1990s: TheorizingDocumentary 4 and Beyond Document: Essays on Non ction Films ; as well as

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on Brian Winstons (1995) compelling study Claiming the Real: TheDocumentary Film Revisited .5 These particularly significant studies not only offer a comprehensive historical contextualization of the non- ction lm, but more to the point strive to legitimize its cultural value by challengingits all too frequently taken for granted factuality and functionality, scepticalas they are of a realism which, as John Tagg puts it, offers a xity in whichthe signi er is treated as if it were identical with a pre-existent signi ed.6

Arguing against the traditional superimposition of truth and refer-ential realism, many contemporary commentators reject the Griersonianfaith in the didactic powers of the documentary to promote a moreproblematic understanding of its role and identity.7 The general ideologicalperspective adopted is that the duplications of given realities, howeverhistorically pertinent and objective, are always if not ctional, at least ctive,by virtue of their tropic character (their recourse to tropes or rhetorical gures).8

These introductory considerations alone should legitimize aninvestigation of a philosophical nature. Clearly, at the heart of recentapproaches to the documentary lies an old question, one that has concernedthe whole course of Western rationality from Aristotle to Derrida: that of the representation of reality. Equally evident is that recent critical perspec-tives tend to privilege a postmodern/poststructural approach, in that theyemphasize the functions of mediation and signi cation so as to destabilizethe presumed cognitive wholeness of the mediated, consequently exposingthe bad conscience, or simply the untenability, of any cinematic truth claim.In actual fact, the demolition of the concept of cinematic realism as a wholestarted in the 1960s, when Metzs structural deconstruction was echoedrather programmatically by influential film journals such as Cahiers duCinema and Screen, which exposed from a leftist point of view the dangersof equating representation with reality. From then on, the term realism, incinema, has mainly been accused of complicity with illusionism, and hastherefore lost the progressive connotation it possessed when it was used byAndr Bazin and the Italian neorealist tradition.

While acknowledging the cultural signi cance of todays general anti-realist mood in lm criticism, my discussion of Pasolinis use of documentarymaterials argues for an alternative response to poststructural theory. As I will endeavour to show, Pasolinis use of the non- ctional camera seems tobe underpinned by the ideological attempt to preserve a speci cally chosendimension of the historical real; and, what is more signi cant, to record adimension of the real that by its own nature de es discursive appropriation.Despite his formal experimentalism, I would argue that in both his ctionand non- ction lms of the 1960s and 1970s, Pasolini worked at rescuingthe word realism from its epochal disgrace. As he himself put it: I believethere is a reality to evoke indeed, we are guilty if we fail to evoke it.9

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What should be verified is the philosophical impact of Pasolinis notion of reality. Although partially subscribing to semiotics proclamation of theevils of old-style representational realism, it seems to me that the directorconcurrently strove to assert the pertinence of his own ideas on what is real(rather than stressing what is not real), and consequently elaborated what I believe is a theoretically original and deeply signi cant notion of mimeticrealism.

My analysis will concentrate on three speci c lms: La rabbia, Appuntiper unOrestiade africana and 12 dicembre. Each of them, in line with theauthors will to experiment, is representative of a different stylistic approachto non- ctional cinema. Nevertheless, I would argue that all of them, in spiteof their formal differences, keep faith with the fundamental principle ofmimetic realism. To come to terms with the concept of cinematic mimesis,we need rst of all to understand the historical and philosophical implica-tions of Pasolinis recourse to indexicality. Far from guaranteeing or evenfacilitating the construction of a naively informational taxonomy, Pasolinisinsistence on the authenticity of the referent (which undoubtedly echoessome passages from Bazins classic The ontology of the photographicimage),10 paradoxically points towards mimesis as a fantasmatic, utopiansubstance reverberating from the sudden revelation of the subjectivedimension which sustains the symbolic order of outer reality. It is the samefantasmatic substance that Slavoj ZN izNek, in his Lacanian reading of filmtheory, calls the objet petit of the filmic image: the subjective elementconstitutive of objective-external reality, that very traumatic Real whichforever blurs our picture of reality.11

Before discussing the signi cance of this notion of mimesis in Pasolinisdocumentaries, I would like to focus on the speci cally utopian bent of thedirectors own writings on cinema, since I believe that it is exactly by clarifyingtheir scope that we can gain a deeper understanding of how he conceived therelationship between reality and lm.

Realism and the camera

Pasolini expounded his theory of cinema in a series of semiological essayswritten between 1965 and 1971, and collected in the third section of thevolume Empirismo eretico, first published in 1972. Despite the scepticalcritical reception generally reserved for these essays,12 I believe few otherPasolinian writings would enable one to grasp the essential philosophicalforce that underpins his notion of realism. Challenging a rigorously scienti capproach, Pasolini insisted that the language of cinema is the language ofreality, arguing that the smallest units of cinematic language coincide withthe real objects of real life, the very physical matter that inescapably de nes

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our living experience.13 Despite the ambiguity of such a claim, the wholeedi ce of Pasolinis semiological theory stands on a very simple, axiomaticbelief: that among all other artistic languages, from painting to literature,cinema is the most likely medium to evoke absence of mediation; that is, in Pasolinis typically cryptical expression, reality itself: When I make a lm. . . there is no symbolic or conventional lter between me and reality, asthere is in literature.14

Pasolini was not as naive as we would perhaps assume from thesepreliminary observations. After all, he was very aware of Christian Metzscontribution to the semiological study of cinema, and expressly of his originalsintagmatic model exposed in 1966 at the second edition of the Pesaro FilmFestival.15 Adopting a linguistic approach, Metz had claimed that the smallestcinematic unit, a single shot, still retained much more complexity, in termsof meaning, than the smallest verbal unit. Thus, a shot could not be madeto correspond to a word, as the latter was deemed unable to explain themagmatic complexity of the former. From these considerations, Metz wenton to conceive of a structural grammar of cinema that not only provided amodern and instrumental model of textual analysis, but also ignited a seriesof extremely fertile theoretical debates. Pasolini, who in those years alsoexposed his theories at the Pesaro Film Festival, was one of the rst to evaluateand reply to Metzs ideas. In his writings, he acknowledged repeatedly thatreality is a coded system of signs, and that as such it is determined throughcultural mediation; yet at the same time he maintained that the only way tovalidate intellectual mediation is by conceding that the object itself, that is,reality in its physical presence, ultimately defies mediation. Free indirectdiscourse is, in Pasolinis writings, the linguistic operation through which anauthor can indicate absence of mediation.16 This, in Pasolinis theory andpractice, is achieved when the narrator/director abdicates from their vantagepoint of control over the narrative to adopt whole-heartedly the psychologicaland linguistic point of view of one of their characters in order to see theworld through its eyes.

What is at stake here is that going beyond the subjective and the objective pointed out by Gilles Deleuze,17 or else holding fast to thatpromise of reconciliation with nature/matter (promesse du bonheur)18 that,according to Theodor W. Adorno, is the truth content of authentic works ofart. What Pasolinis theory desperately tries to salvage is the indefinabledimension of the object, and it does so by positing and catching, through thecinematic image, the fleeting moment of identity between subjectiveconsciousness and the world-ambient. As he himself explains, the Ur-codeof reality, the code acting at the deepest level in the system of signs thatconstitutes culture, depends on sensorial perception rather than rationality.Semiology, as Pasolini objects to Umberto Eco, has so far acted as a typicallybourgeois science, because it has failed to realize that beyond the net of


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rationally describable interrelationships determining culture there lies, as he puts it, un burrone, a precipice, in other words a phenomenological and essentially non-rational component.19 By way of mimetic forms of repre-sentation, cinema, and artworks in general, can resist, however momentarily,being defined by reason, and therefore restore the legitimacy of what is without concept. The advantage that the language of cinema enjoys overthe other forms of artistic expression consists in its being based on visualcommunication, which is essentially mimetic:

whilst instrumental communication, which is at the heart of poeticand philosophical communication, is an extremely articulated andhistorically complex system visual communication, which is at theheart of cinematic language, is, on the contrary, extremely raw andimmediate, almost animalistic. Both mimetic, raw reality and thedreamy mechanisms of memory, are almost pre-human facts, certainlypre-grammatical and pre-morphological ones. . . . The linguisticinstrument on which cinema is based is therefore irrationalistic, whichalso accounts for the profoundly oneiric quality of cinema, as well asits absolutely objective concreteness.20

According to Pasolini, therefore, referential realism in cinema is essen-tially mimetic and non-conceptual. The aesthetic experience triggered bythis type of realism serves as a warning against the inherent irrationality of any hyper-rational systematization of the real. If the sacred, unde nable,oneiric, essentially non-rational dimension of reality were to be obliteratedfrom the collective memory of the subject (and, to the author, this is preciselythe danger faced by modern civilization), instrumental reason would posititself as second nature, turning absolute and totalitarian. Rationality, in otherwords, can acquire legitimacy only by acknowledging and introjecting itsown constitutive limitation, determined by the non-conceptual quality ofmaterial reality. Cinemas essential contribution to culture, Pasolini seems toimply, depends on a notion of subjectivity which is fundamentally Hegelian:the cinematic image is conceived of as having the potential to push thoughtbeyond self-consciousness, towards an encounter with the subject matterthrough which thought first loses, then consciously transforms itself. Asstated in the Preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit, the freedom of thoughtdepends on its ability to absorb itself in the material stuff 21 of the content,before emerging enriched from it. For Pasolini, it seems, knowledge emergesprecisely from this dialectical movement between subject and object thatcinema has the potential to exploit. Crucial to the working of such dialecticsis mimesis, or else what Adorno calls, drawing on psychology, cathexis, thatis, thoughts affective investment in the object, which is not extrinsic tothought, not merely psychological, but rather the condition of its [thoughts]

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truth.22 Elsewhere, referring to works of art, Adorno calls this investment theephemeral appearance of reconciliation, that is, the nonconceptual af nityof a subjective creation with its objective and unposited other.23 Ultimately,I believe it is this notion of reconciliation, to be read as a utopian marker,that typi es Pasolinis approach to documentaries.

Pasolinis most recurrent writing of the utopian involves the use of theterm sacro, the sacred. Challenging mainstream semiology, he constructs hisown linguistic model on the evidence of the sacred dimension of reality. Inhis brief but revealing piece entitled Il non verbale come altra verbalit(The non-verbal as other verbality), for instance, he argues that

Man has always dissociated the written-spoken language from Reality. In the long history of cults, every object of reality has beensacralized and yet, this has never happened to language. Language hasnever appeared as manifestation of the sacred. . . . As far as I know, thewhole of scienti c linguistics, structuralism included . . . , when itcomes to de ning the relationship between sign and meaning, hasalways ignored the magical moment of the origins.24

From this perspective, the cultural contribution of cinematic languagedepends on its unique ability to uncover, though surreptitiously, the sacreddimension of reality; that very dimension which bourgeois culture andbourgeois history have, in a quest for civilization driven by domination overnature, learned to deny. By assigning to the filmic image the potentiallyrevolutionary ability of restoring the link between the non-rational real andculture, Pasolini, echoing Adorno and the Frankfurt School, intended totake a radical Marxist position against the absolutization of instrumentalreason that he regarded as the fundamental weakness of modernity.

Such an unlocking of secularized reason was only pursuable, for Pasolini,if inscribed in a class-related analysis of reality. Yet, defying the orthodoxMarxist approach, not a politicized proletariat, but an unpoliticized sub-proletariat was to be regarded as the revolutionary social subject. For it wasthe sub-proletariat, partially or even totally spared by bourgeois ideology,that he saw as endowed with the anthropological and behavioural qualitiesexploitable by the lmic image; in other words, the mimetic element thatcould act as a reminder of the underlying sacredness of the real would emergeonly through the representation of the ones who live on the margin of, andoutside, Western civilization.

In the light of these considerations, I believe that the key to under-standing Pasolinis lm theory, with particular reference to his documentaries,lies in our ability to assess the cultural role played by the mimetic/utopianelement that systematically emerges in each of his works. Because of whatseems to be the common epistemological terrain of Pasolinis cinema,


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differentiating between ction and non- ction is problematic and, for thepurpose of my discussion, irrelevant. On the one hand, critics have oftenstressed the documentary flavour of many Pasolinian fiction films, withparticular reference to the so-called national-popular period of the early1960s.25 On the other hand, later lms like Uccellacci e uccellini (1966) andTeorema (1968) display stylistic contaminations between fiction anddocumentary. All in all, it seems to me that the question of the representationof the real is central to all of Pasolinis lms, and that this question can bediscussed most productively by looking at his documentaries.

Editing newsreel footage: La rabbia

La rabbia (1963) consists of a series of newsreel clips and archive photographsaccompanied by Pasolinis prose commentaries and poems read respectivelyby writer Giorgio Bassani and painter Renato Guttuso. The project had been nanced by producer Gastone Ferranti, who had asked both Pasoliniand Giovanni Guareschi (the author of the popular Don Camillo series and a champion of Italian conservatism) to compile some newsreel footagein response to the question Why is our life dominated by discontent, byanguish, by the fear of war, by war? Pasolini and Guareschi, in the eyes ofFerranti, were bound to provide two documentaries fuelled by diametricallyopposed ideologies; this antagonism, in turn, would have helped thecommercial success of the film. On the contrary, La rabbia encounteredmany distributional problems and never became accessible to a vast audience.Despite its failure at the box-of ce and its status as a minor lm, MaurizioViano regards it as one of Pasolinis highest achievements26 on the groundsthat the author succeeded in creating an original cinematographic form bycombining a choice of documentary footage he did not shoot personally27

with his own ideological and poetic commentaries.The documentary unquestionably retains a strong historico-political

focus, as it comments on world events between 1956 and 1963. Pasoliniclaimed he was attempting a Marxist critique of society, and, as the imagesquickly document scenes of civil war and devastation in Hungary, the Congo,Egypt, Cuba and Algeria, this claim seems con rmed by the ideological bentof the commentary.

Yet, apart from the self-evident political underpinnings, the mostpoignant aspect of the lm lies in its stylistic con guration. Beyond Pasolinisraw political anger, what strikes us here is his effort to construct an experi-mentally sophisticated piece of film-making. From a stylistic viewpoint,voice-over, sound-track, choice and assemblance of shots and photographscombine to promote an extremely subjective and articulated montage lm,one whose narrative tension exceeds the relatively easily accessible political

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message. On rst impression, this tension appears to be played, in typicallyPasolinian terms, upon the counter-position of the horrors produced bycapitalist and communist imperialisms alike, and the new hopes generatedby an international sub-proletariat which has emerged suddenly fromhistorys depths to capture everybodys mediatic attention. Thus, imagesportraying humble folk from Cuba and Algeria attain an obvious ideologicalstatus as they are starkly pasted to either images of middle-class indifferenceor military power.

However, it seems to me that to understand La rabbia we need toconsider the very specific way in which poetic subjectivity informs theindexicality of the documents. The result of the poetic, formal manipulationof the documents is not naturalism, but rather the suggestion that a utopiandimension is at work beneath the visual representation of a given referent (the sub-proletariat). What I would like to argue, though, to partially rectifyDeleuzes de nition of Pasolinis cinematic image as a pure Form which setsitself up as an autonomous vision of the content,28 is that the process ofaesthetization of the referential does not liquidate the concept of referentialityitself, but rather potentiates it by legitimizing its underlying non-rational,auratic dimension.29 Pasolinis camera here hangs on to a realism which isvalidated by its sensuous and therefore material status, the more so, with theadvent of the modern age, the authenticity of experience withers into globalvirtuality.

In truth, Pasolini anticipated many poststructuralist thinkers inacknowledging the growing dif culty of maintaining the old economy oftruth and representation30 in a world dominated by the all-pervasive,alienating power of capitalist ideology. However, no other Italian intellectualresisted, as vehemently as he did, the process of de-realization brought aboutby modernity. Pasolini never subscribed to the ideological agnosticism whichwas to become so fashionable with poststructuralist discourse analysis, and which was in many ways pregured by structuralism. On the contrary,he rst located realism on to the Roman sub-proletariat, which he had knownsince his move to the capital in 1950. Then, as he realized that by the early1960s the sub-proletariat was being co-opted by the consumer values ofItalian neo-capitalism, he looked to the Third World to nd and promoteanthropological authenticity, which to him was qualified by its existingoutside the reach of capitalist ideology.

With La rabbia we are precisely at this stage, in the sense that Pasolinilinks political resistance and social rebellion to a speci c representation of thebody as unspoken, non-verbal knowledge. The Algerian revolution, as wellas the upheavals in the Congo, are referred to not only through the politicallymeaningful representation of the revolutionaries and their armed enemies,but also through the seemingly unaware, unpoliticized, naturally joyousbodies of African children. The anti-capitalist approach is therefore preserved


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because of its utopian swing: the body stands firm against the reach ofcapitalism and, more generally, of the Western logocentric tradition, as avector of a historical truth that exceeds verbal and rational discourse.

One episode of La rabbia that we can take as an ideal channel forPasolinis poetics of the body is the lyrical meditation on Marilyn Monroesdeath. This episode, signi cantly, is inserted between two images of nuclearexplosion, and a number of other newsreel documents chosen to suggestviolence and torment (boxers exchanging punches in a ring, a self- agellatingChrist in a religious procession). Painter Renato Guttuso reads a poetic text written by Pasolini where Marilyn Monroe is described as a symbol oflost beauty, a beauty that belonged to the past and which the modern worldhas destroyed.31 As the verses are read, a series of photographs and lmeddocuments narrating Marilyn Monroes life appears. The combination ofmontage and poetic commentary turns Monroes suicide into a hauntingsymbol of refusal and resistance against the co-opting machine of the cultureindustry. Through this juxtaposition of images and poetry, Pasolini is ableto reformulate his most recurrent theoretical claim: that of a utopianplenitude associated to the themes of the past, the body and death. Theineffable beauty of Marilyn Monroes body is associated with the anonymityof her past before Hollywood, as well as being encapsulated in the non-discursivity of death. Moreover, the photographic visualization, togetherwith the elegiac Adagio by Albinoni played in the background, secures a senseof sacred gravity to the whole sequence. Photography, here, seems particularlyfunctional to Pasolinis intent if we acknowledge, with Roland Barthes, thatrather terrible thing which is there in every photograph: the return of thedead.32

As the poetic meditation on Marilyn Monroe shows, in La rabbiaPasolini aimed at pushing certain signs beyond their most obvious, imme-diate signi cation, challenging subjectivity to engage with an otherness thatde es de nition. His apocalyptic rage, therefore, seems directed at a modernidea of culture and progress that, by suppressing the very notion of anabsolutely external otherness, turns all reality into the dark nightmare of theever-same, foreshadowed by the often-repeated, eerie images of the atomicmushroom. This is reality is Guttusos simple remark over the lines andshapes of the atomic cloud, suggesting a future not only dominated bydestruction, but, more incisively, by abstract logic.

The notebook documentary: Appunti per unOrestiade africana

From a formal point of view, Appunti per unOrestiade africana and thesimilarly constructed documentaries Sopraluoghi in Palestina and Appuntiper un lm sullIndia may be regarded as experimental exercises born out of

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the authors passionate concern for specific issues. All three projects, in fact, are conceived as preparatory works for autonomous narrative films.Appunti per un lm sullIndia introduces the draft of a story about a maharajawho decides to sacrifice his body to starving tiger cubs; Appunti perunOrestiade africana is conceived of as a rehearsal for Pasolinis intention toadapt Aeschylus Orestes into a contemporary setting; Sopraluoghi takes us to Palestina where Pasolini was carrying out on-location research with a viewto his ction- lm Il vangelo secondo Matteo (which was eventually shot inItaly). In each lm, the experimental and even tentative character of Pasolinisshooting comes to the fore, as the author-narrator regularly reminds us of itsfuture trasposition into a more accomplished ctional narrative.

Technically, Appunti per unOrestiade africana is a combination of three different sets of filmic materials. First, we are introduced to somefootage shot by Pasolini in Tanzania, which is matched by the authors voice-over explaining his idea to adapt Aeschylus tragedy into an African setting;this is followed by Pasolinis interview with a group of African students at theUniversity of Rome, who are asked to evaluate critically the significance of the parallel between Aeschylus myth about democracy and the newlyacquired independence of many African countries; nally, the documentaryends on a twelve-minute free jazz session composed and performed by GatoBarbieri (sax) with Donald Moye (drums), Marcello Melio (bass), and singersYvonne Murray and Archie Savage. The musical composition is supposed torepresent Cassandras presaging dream from the Orestes.

It seems to me that the documentary follows intentionally a three-movement narrative, which is reminiscent of Hegels founding philosophicalscheme of thesis, antithesis and synthesis. In the rst part Pasolini lays outhis thesis by summarizing the Orestes and developing from it his central ideathat the modernization of black Africa should not trigger the culturalcolonialism of the West but, on the contrary, inject into the old and weakenedWestern rationalism the vigour and authenticity of African subcultures. This rst movement is followed by a counter-argument (antithesis) that could be interpreted as Pasolinis self-criticism. The African students in Rome arereluctant to agree with the directors connection between Greek myth andthe historical development of the African continent; in fact, on more thanone occasion they dissent openly with him, observing that Africa is not justone nation but an enormous continent with differing cultures and histories.The interviews, on the whole, represent what seems to be an almost embarras-sing rejection of Pasolinis initial thesis by highlighting its naively generalizingteleology; indeed, I would suggest that the director was consciously, almostmasochistically trying to account for the gulf that separates a Westernintellectual from the African world. The most intriguing aspect of theoperation lies in discovering how Pasolini follows the antithetical oppositionof the two movements through to their synthesis. In other words, how are


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we to interpret the diegetic session of free jazz that ends the documen-tary? If we bear in mind its enigmatic resonance as a musical rendition ofCassandras dream, it would appear that with the third movement theWestern intellectual does not offer any synthetic explanation, but, rather,stages his rational frustration in the name of the true essence of the (African)Real. Pasolini himself in an early 1970s interview confirmed: Thesis?Antithesis? Synthesis? I think it is too easy. My dialectics is no longer ternary,it is binary. There are only unreconcilable oppositions.33

In the light of these considerations, the director seems to promote anidea of subjectivity informed by the persistence of what is without concept.Not accidentally, the lm answers its questions only through visual estrange-ment, constructed both through montage and recourse to mimetic realism.The concatenation of the sequences suggests that the lm is a hybrid, in thatit consciously refuses to take an autonomous configuration and, rather,oscillates between documentary and fiction (as a script stands betweenliterature and cinema), producing in the spectator both a sense of deludedexpectation and a desire for meaning. Spectators are thrown into anideologically very dense, progressive narrative, and are asked indirectly tovisualize the outcome. But the desire for a palingenetic meaning raised by the sheer intensity of the narration, as we understand in the final move-ment of the lm, constantly eludes the viewer. The emphasis remains on the unsaid, on the story to come. Mimetic realism is equally effective inproducing estrangement, as especially the rst part of the lm attests. Here,the shock-wave combination of fragmented documentary footage shot onlocation with a handheld camera (this is the main difference from La rabbia)and highly subjective, poetic voice-overs reminds one of Pasolinis love forthe disappearing peasant subcultures with their barbaric and prehistorictraditions. More precisely, he empathizes with what these cultures represent.When we see an African woman running away from the camera andstubbornly refusing to be lmed, or the prolonged shots of wild African treesshaken by the wind and compared by Pasolini to the irrational force of theErinyes in Aeschylus work,34 we understand what the camera is suggesting:the Real is what resists becoming a meaningful image in a rationallyconstructed narrative, and yet it is an image that demands our utmostattention, because it is a sign that faithfully mirrors the non-rational qualityof its referent and invites thought to emphathize with it, to invest in itselusiveness. As is often the case with Pasolinis cinema, the spectator isrequired for a moment to abandon his or her hegemonic control over thenarrative, and enter into a relationship of almost mystical correspondencewith the objects of his or her gaze. Here, the insistent gaze of the camera onthe silent, smiling African face advocates the elimination of the spectatorsprivileged perspective, as it is a gaze that asks for the aesthetic sublimationof desire rather than cognitive annexation.

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Pasolinis camera therefore keeps faith with an idea of mimesis understood as the momentary and precarious identity between the non-conceptual dimension of what exists outside subjectivity, and the rationalityat work in art; as Adorno maintains, true art, by means of sudden andephemeral mimetic impulses, manages to incorporate otherness within itsformal structure and consequently resist absolute rationalization. What is uniquely poignant about Pasolinis work is its consistent use of mimesis for a historically based critique of Western rationality. With a documentarysuch as Appunti per unOrestiade africana, Pasolini demonstrates that in the late 1960s he still believed in a critique of Western civilization from outside, when by outside we understand that otherness of ancestral African blackness intertextually linked to mythology and rescued by arts ickering mimetism. Hence his scandalous identi cation of mimesis withtruth.

The mimetic dimension in a documentary such as Appunti perunOrestiade africana is ideological precisely because it opposes the unprob-lematised acceptance of cinematic mimesis;35 that is, the acceptance of a rationally constructed attempt to show reality as it is. Because Pasolinismimesis is both ephemeral and non-conceptual, it creates a healthy distancebetween the viewers rational approach and the object of their gaze. Byrefusing to crush the object under the weight of logical reductionism, themimetic mode safeguards the indeterminate dimension of the real, triggersour imagination and makes it an indispensable component of the operationof understanding. Only insofar as reason combines with imagination inacknowledging the Real as an ever-elusive other, Pasolinis documentary seemsto suggest, can we speak of objectivity. The status of objectivity in thedocumentary lm is therefore legitimized not only by its acknowledging thefailure of any ontological gaze over the Real, but also by its ability to overcomethat failure by hinting at mimetic reconciliation as utopia.

Mimesis and reportage: 12 dicembre

Seeking full legitimization in the power of referential realism, 12 dicembreseems to be an orthodox example of documentary reportage. This lm wasonly partially shot by Pasolini, between 1970 and 1972, in association withGiovanni Bonfanti and other members of the extra-parliamentary left-wingorganization Lotta Continua. It has been edited and released posthumouslyby the Fondo Pier Paolo Pasolini in Rome, where the full extent of theshooting is currently stored. Despite claims that at least half of it was shotby Pasolini, it is dif cult to identify the actual sequences. On the cover of thevideotape we read, above the title, From an idea of Pierpaolo Pasolini, whichwould seem to impress the auteurial trademark on the project.


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The documentary investigates various contemporary sociopoliticalevents, starting from the death of the anarchist Giuseppe Pinelli, who wasarrested in relation to the Piazza Fontana bombing of 12 December 1969,36

and was then reported to have mysteriously fallen from a window during a police interrogation (many interpreted this incident as a police cover-up,as did Dario Fo in his famous play Accidental Death of an Anarchist). The lmshows interviews with Licia Pinelli and Rosa Malacarne, respectively wifeand mother of the anarchist, as well as other people involved in the incident.The lm then proceeds with anti-state accusations from members of LottaContinua and disgruntled allegations from ex-partigiani in Sarzana(Liguria), ex- ghters in the Resistance who conclude that their expectationsfor a democratic country, after Italys liberation from fascism, have come tonothing.

The grim journey through early 1970s Italy continues at Carrara,Tuscany, where a group of marble miners denounce their physical andeconomic exploitation. We then move to the steel plants of Bagnoli, nearNaples, with Pasolini interviewing a group of unemployed who blame thegovernment for lack of support. Moving further South, we nd ourselves inthe middle of the Reggio Calabria civil war of 1970,37 and then back up tothe Pirelli (Milan) and Fiat (Turin) plants, as internal migrants from theSouth denounce their struggling conditions.

Overall, the lm may be safely regarded as an intensely militant accountof some tangible dysfunctions of Italian society during a particularlyturbulent historical period. Formally, what strikes the viewer is the sombreobjectivity of the narration, which is rendered through interviews and without the support of external commentaries or explanations. The tech-nique is therefore largely that of direct-cinema (or cinema-vrit), one thatPasolini had already employed in his reportage Comizi damore (1964) andin the opening scene of his feature lm Teorema (1968). Shooting with ahandheld camera, avoiding stylistic ourish as well as external interpretativesuggestions, the authors of 12 dicembre clearly aimed at providing a maxi-mum of authenticity and credibility so as to stir the moral and politicalawareness of the viewers. A pre-existing reality speaks for itself, to echo the old neo-realist adagio, and the authors seem content that meaning will follow.

What is there to say about Pasolinis contribution? First of all, the only reliable evidence we have for his participation in the lms direction is the feeling of his physical presence behind the camera, as at one point we brie y hear his voice posing a question to the Neapolitan unemployed atthe Bagnoli steel plants.38 The setting is meaningful. Naples was the townPasolini had elected as the last receptacle, within the national con nes, ofthose values of anthropological authenticity he believed modernity wascynically destroying.39 Here, in a deprived district, he talks to a group of

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unemployed Neapolitans, prime examples of the sub-proletarian type he hadalways portrayed in his literature and ction lms. They are blaming thegovernment and the trade unions for lack of support.

The interview opens with a shot of an unemployed man displaying astrong speech impediment. This is perhaps the only instance in the filmwhere we feel the hand of the author, as some kind of artistic elaborationshould be allowed for in a scene where we hear shrill vocal noises well beforethe image of the stuttering man appears, at the end of a panning shot on thesky. The effect is somehow disturbing and estranging, not so much for whatthe man says, which remains incomprehensible, but for the decontextu-alization of his oddly lamenting voice, which recalls that of a woundedanimal. When the camera focuses on him desperately trying to articulatecoherent sentences, the feeling of estrangement stays with us, for we still failto locate meaning, even more so as we discover that the source of those noisesis a human being. Despite his wild gesticulations, the man cannot makehimself understood and continues to howl. The only knowledge we areallowed to grasp concerns the anger of his tone and behaviour.

Although one cannot doubt the spontaneity of the man, there is enoughevidence here to discuss Pasolinis highly articulated notions of objectivity and realism as previously exposed. How does the author want us to read the obscure utterances of the disabled man? If it is clear from his very rstsyllables that no logical meaning will ensue from his speech, why does thecamera linger on what gradually grows into a painfully disturbing spectaclefor the viewer to behold? Perhaps the mans disability could be read, in fairlyorthodox sociopolitical terms, as symbolic of the impotence of the under-privileged; or, along the same ideological lines, as an intimation of the lackof communication between the unemployed and the ruling class.

However, possibly more signi cant is what follows the brief bewilderingprelude, when we discover that, as a matter of fact, the fellow-unemployedwho surround him can actually decipher his noises, and subsequentlytranslate them into suf ciently clear Italian for the bene t of the audience.It is difficult, despite the brevity of the sequence, not to see the mark of Pasolinis typical elaboration of the sub-proletariat as the locus ofanthropological otherness. The disabled man speaks a different, privatelanguage that only he and his fellow-unemployed can understand. Theotherness of their status is impressed in the non-verbal, pre-grammaticalcharacter of the mans speech, a linguistic signifier that can be read andinterpreted exclusively by those who share with him the same social condi-tion. Paradoxically, and yet consistently with Pasolinis theories, resistance torationalization legitimizes the physical, anthropological truthfulness of thesub-proletariat as portrayed by the camera. Because the disabled man cannotrelease meaning, we are allowed to penetrate the deeper, hidden truth abouthim: not a rational truth, but a spiritual and empathetic one.


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The Gramscian solicitation on to the intellectual to move towards themost indigent people in order to understand their world and empathize withtheir needs, as a precondition for class struggle, seems here to have a strongimpact on Pasolinis camera. However, Pasolini alters Gramscis equation byincluding and indeed highlighting the non-verbal addendum through anincisive metonymic reference to the language of the poor. What theenlightened intellectual discovers via contact with the underprivileged is thatthey do not participate, linguistically and therefore ideologically, in Westerncivilizations disenchanted logic of domination and detachment from theworld-ambient, but rather remain in touch with the Real and its non-rationaldimension. Unlike the civilized and the integrated, culturally reassured by their secular faith in scienti c empiricism, these poor have preserved themimetic function, which signals their closeness to the mysterium of life. Themumbling and gesticulating of the unemployed Neapolitan, as a matter offact, must have seemed to Pasolini a perfect opportunity to reassert his theoryof the non-verbal as another form of verbality. Seizing the opportunity, healludes to a form of mimetism, captured in the exaggerated body languageand the incomprehensible utterances of the Neapolitan, which, according tohis linguistic theories, should become communicative by remaining what itis, mimetic.

The fact that we perceive it as disturbing or absurd, therefore, may well speak for our cultural inhibition, if not scorn, towards images thatassociate ourselves with nature. Precisely because, in line with Adorno andHorkheimers Dialectic of Enlightenment,40 the power of Western rationalityresides in dominating nature and neutralizing the threat of its unanswerablequestion, the image of what is powerless within ourselves becomes alien tous, itself a threat. Pasolini, it seems, uses cinematic mimesis as a form ofpassive protest against the overpowering, alienating force of modernrationality: the disability of the Neapolitan speaks only for the disability ofour ratio.

More evidence for this comes from further analysis of the samesequence. After the opening shot, Pasolinis camera repeatedly cuts fromanother group of Neapolitan unemployed to children running in the streetswhile happily singing revolutionary anthems. Again, the stark juxtapositionof sub-proletarian political discontent and a vividly realistic representationof southern youth as a repository of natural vitality is reminiscent of Pasolinisconviction that revolutions are authentic only insofar as they incorporatethe utopian urge we nd in mimetic behaviour. Political ideology is againreformulated in accordance with the authors latent theoretical claim.

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Conclusion

The three documentaries I have discussed above seem united by the sametheoretical underpinnings, although they adopt different stylistic approachesto the genre. For their ideological signi cance and degree of experimentaldynamism, these documentaries are certainly worthy of critical attention, tothe point that, I would argue, they can hardly be deemed minor works inPasolinis lmography. Both the Appunti series and La rabbia, which, unlike12 dicembre, Pasolini had full auteurial control over, are hauntingly inspired lms, displaying an intensity of commitment towards the lmed reality thatis undoubtedly compatible with, and comparable to, that of the directorsbetter known fictional production. On the evidence of Pasolinis notion of cinema as the written language of reality, it is difficult objectively todistinguish between the philosophical claims of his ction and non- ction lms. If anything, by its own nature the documentary form permits us toapproach more condently the intricate question of the authors cinematicrealism.

As my reading of his uninterrupted engagement with documentariessuggests, Pasolini was reluctant to abandon mimetic realism, even more sowhen, from the mid-1960s, lm theorists started exposing the inconsistenciesof referentiality. Under the severe inspection of semiotics, the concept ofreality was rapidly losing its ontological status, and any representationalpractice that rested on a fixed and commonly shared understanding of a pre-existent real was unsympathetically dispensed with. The structuralistconception of representation held that a text, of whatever nature, could notre ect faithfully a pre-given, external reality but rather it produced both itsown concept of objectivity and, inextricably linked to it, the point of viewfrom which the object was perceived. As lm theory was turning its back onthe classic realist text and increasingly concentrating on questions of self-re exivity, with the intention of debunking the reactionary nature of anyhypostatized representation of outer reality, Pasolini, defending his ownpoetics, refused to liquidate cinemas potential to imitate what exists outside,beyond textual conventions. On the contrary, in a manner reminiscent of lateLacan, he strove to recuperate to semiotic analysis the non-symbolic andconstitutionally non-conceptual xity of the Reals hidden dimension. Hencehis provocatory use of the term reality in formulations such as reality onlyspeaks to itself , and one cannot escape reality, because it speaks to itself, andwe are in its circle.41 Precisely because of its non-conceptual con guration,therefore, Pasolinis recourse to mimetic realism did not aim at imposing an ontologically rigid view of reality, but rather wanted to undermine anyclaim of rational hypostatization of the real through the unveiling of what,in empirical reality itself, defies reason. His hopes to revive realism wereideologically consistent as they were founded on cinemas power to evoke,


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through mimesis, what eluded and hence resisted the pervasive logic ofWestern rationality and, more to the point, of capitalism. The ultimate objectof his heretical semiotics was, I believe, the establishment of a dialecticbetween rationality and reality that would eventually expose the falsecoherence of the logic of capital. In this respect, it would be hard to deny that Pasolinis cinema is, as a whole, an ideological statement. Inextricablyde ned by its will to convey, momentarily and unrhetorically, the ineffableauthenticity of bodies that persist, with their existential truth, outside thein uence of the exchange law, his use of mimetic realism, far from being aself-suf cient practice, seems aimed ultimately at guaranteeing a progressive,open-ended commitment of reason to the understanding of reality, includingits sociopolitical sphere.

Notes

1 P. Lopate, In search of the centaur: the essay- lm, in C. Warren (ed.), BeyondDocument: Essays on Non ction Film (Hanover and London: WesleyanUniversity Press, 1996), pp. 24370 (p. 257).

2 See P. P. Pasolini, Empirismo eretico (Milano: Garzanti, 1995), pp. 18897,esp. p. 195. All translations from Empirismo eretico are mine.

3 See esp. C. Metz, Film Language: A Semiotics of the Cinema, trans. MichaelTaylor (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974), p. 94.

4 M. Renov (ed.), Theorizing Documentary (New York and London: Routledge,1993).

5 B. Winston, Claiming The Real: the Documentary Film Revisited (London: BFI,1995).

6 J. Tagg, The Burden of Representation (Amherst: University of MassachusettsPress, 1988), p. 99.

7 John Grierson is regarded by many as the father of non- ctional productions.Active in the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s with lms such as Drifters (1929), Listento Britain (1943), Fires Were Started (1944) and A Diary for Timothy (1945),he is said to have introduced the word documentary in its common usage.Grierson always insisted on the sociopolitical function of the documentary as ameans of mass education. His ideal was that of combining the artistsimagination and creativity with commitment to social realism.

8 M. Renov, Introduction: The truth about non- ction, in TheorizingDocumentary, p. 7.

9 Pasolini, Empirismo eretico, p. 140.10 A. Bazin, The ontology of the photographic image, in What is Cinema?, trans.

H. Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), pp. 916.11 S. ZNizNek, The Fright of Real Tears (London: BFI, 2001), pp. 55 and 656. 12 See U. Eco, La struttura assente (Milano: Bompiani, 1968), pp. 15060;

E. Garroni, Semiotica ed estetica (Bari: Laterza, 1968), pp. 1417, 434; S. Heath, Film/cinetext/text, Screen, 14 (12) (springsummer 1973), pp.10227. These scholars criticize Pasolinis essays as semiologically naive,arguing that Pasolinis persuasion that elemental cinematographic signs thatcoincide with the real objects reproduced on the screen contradicts the basic

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aim of semiology, which is that of reducing the facts of nature to facts ofculture, and not vice versa (see esp. Eco, La struttura assente, p. 151). Pasolinireplied speci cally to Ecos critique with his essay Il codice dei codici(Empirismo eretico, pp. 27784), insisting on the fundamental culturalimportance of the non-rational component of reality.

13 See Pasolini, Empirismo eretico, p. 202.14 Oswald Stack, Pasolini on Pasolini (London: Thames and Hudson in

association with the British Film Institute, 1969), p. 29.15 Metzs text was published three years later in Italian in AA.VV., Lanalisi del

racconto. Le strutture della narrativit nella prospettiva semiologica che riprende leclassiche ricerche di Propp (Milano: Bompiani, 1969), pp. 20525.

16 See Pasolini, Il cinema di poesia, in Empirismo eretico, pp. 16787, where thelinguistic notion of free indirect discourse is translated for the cinema as freeindirect subjective.

17 G. Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson andBarbara Habberjam (London: The Athlone Press, 1986), p. 74.

18 See T.W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984),p. 430.

19 See Pasolini, Empirismo eretico, p. 279.20 Ibid., p. 169.21 G.W.F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller (Oxford:

Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 35. 22 T.W. Adorno, Opinion delusion society, in Critical Models: Interventions and

Catchwords, trans. Henry W. Pickford (New York: Columbia University Press,1998), p. 109.

23 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, p. 80.24 Pasolini, Empirismo eretico, pp. 2634. 25 I am referring here to Accattone (1961), Mamma Roma (1962), La ricotta

(1963) and Il vangelo secondo Matteo (1964), lms that Pasolini always claimedto have shot in the name of the Gramscian notion of a national-popularculture.

26 M. Viano, A Certain Realism. Making Use of Pasolinis Film Theory and Practice(Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1993), p. 114.

27 The newsreel footage was taken from the archives of Gastone Ferrantiscinegiornale Mondo libero.

28 Deleuze, Cinema 1: the Movement-Image, p. 74.29 The word refers to Walter Benjamins conception of the aura as a state of

opaque, enigmatic correspondence between the gaze of the subject and theobject: To perceive the aura of an object we look at means to invest it with theability to look at us in return, in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (London:Collins/Fontana, 1973), p. 190.

30 C. Norris, Whats Wrong with Postmodernism: Critical Theory and the Ends ofPhilosophy (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), p. 166.

31 For an almost identical version of the poem see Pasolini, Bestemmia. Tutte lepoesie, pp. 177072.

32 R. Barthes, Camera Lucida, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill andWang, 1981), p. 9.

33 P. P. Pasolini, in Antologia di interviste (Roma: Bulzoni, 1977), p. 99.34 The Erinyes are infernal deities who torment Orestes after he kills his mother

Clytemnestra, who in turn had murdered his father Agamemnon after his


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return from the Troyan war. Orestes is saved thanks to the intercession ofAthena, the Goddess of Reason, who decides that he should be judged in aregular trial. Orestes is acquitted, but the Erinyes, who have lost the case, donot disappear. Instead, Athena transforms them into the Eumenides, whorepresent the survival of irrationality and instincts in the new world of reason.The myth was particularly fascinating for Pasolini, as it incorporates hisfavourite dualism between rationality and irrationality. Indeed, he pointed out that in the sixties, the years of the Thirld World, the years of negritude,the burning problem and question is the transformation of the Erinyes intoEumenides. Aeschylus genius foreshadowed all this. All advanced peopletoday agree that archaic civilisations super cially referred to in terms offolklore must not be forgotten, despised or betrayed (translated from P.P.Pasolini, Note per lambientazione dellOrestiade in Africa, La citt futura, 23(7 June 1978), p. 9).

35 Winston, Claiming the Real, p. 6.36 The bomb exploded in the Banca Nazionale dellAgricoltura in Milans Piazza

Fontana; sixteen people died, eighty-eight were wounded. The anarchists wereimmediately held responsible for the massacre, by both the police and theMinistry of the Interior. Giuseppe Pinelli was arrested on the rather feebleevidence given by a taxi driver. His death on 15 December was reportedof cially by Marcello Guida, the Milanese police chief, as suicide: Pinelli hadapparently jumped from the fourth-oor window of the police of ce after hisalibi had proved false. Six years later, however, the court cleared Pinelli of allcharges, and the truth about his death, as well as the Piazza Fontana massacre,is still an open issue. In the meantime, new evidence was beginning to emergewith regard to what was later termed the strategy of tension. The ItalianSecret Services (SID) were linked to neo-fascist groups based in the Venetoregion. Most of Italian public opinion became persuaded that the bombexplosions were aimed at creating panic and hysteria in the country, so as toproduce the need for the intervention of the army and the establishment of anauthoritarian regime.

37 Among the numerous revolts that erupted in the South between 1969 and1973, the Reggio Calabria incidents were the most serious. When, in thesummer of 1970, the central government decided that the town of Catanzarowould become the new regional capital instead of Reggio, demonstratorserected barricades and took control of the railway station as a sign of protest.Behind its direct political causes, the protest was meant to highlight theconditions of extreme poverty and marginalization of the inhabitants ofReggio. Despite the violence of the incidents, which continued for over a year,the government decided to ratify Catanzaro as the capital of Calabria, but toallow the regional assembly to meet at Reggio.

38 In addition, the man framed from the back while interviewing a southernfamily in Turin, in the closing shot of the lm, seems to be Pasolini, althoughthis is not certain.

39 See esp. P.P. Pasolini, Lettere luterane (Torino: Einaudi, 1976). 40 T. W. Adorno and M. Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment (London and

New York: Verso, 1997). 41 Pasolini, Empirismo eretico, pp. 238 and 246.

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the utopian in pasolini's documentaries

Documents