Pier Paolo Pasolini, l'uomo arrabbiato: a route for the tragedy

Author(s)

Maria Rita Aguilar Nepomuceno de Oliveira

• Document type: Master's Dissertation
• Press: Campinas, SP.
• Institution: Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Instituto de Artes
• Defense date: 2010-08-19

Examining board members

Antônio Fernando da Conceição Passos; Fernão Pessoa Ramos; Milton José de Almeida

• Advisor: Maria Betânia Amoroso; Antônio Fernando da Conceição Passos

Abstract

This research rises and analyses aspects of the tragedy in Pier Paolo Pasolini's work, through analysis of his artistic production (documentaries, fiction, drama) and also of his life. The first chapter presents biographic aspects of his personal trajectory until the beginning of his film activity. The second chapter presents tragic aspects of his first films (Accattone, Mamma Roma, Il Vangelo secondo Matteo, the comic films with the actors Ninetto and Totó). The third chapter exposes Pasolini's idea of a "theater of the word" and how the tragic myth appears on it. The fourth chapter lays out his idea of documentary as "a film about a film to be make" and analyse the tragic aspects of his documentaries La Rabbia and Appunti per un'Orestiade Africa. The fifth chapter develops Pasolini's idea of cinema; his semiological approach (the cinema as the written language of reality), as well as his personal film style ( script, use of the "shot reverse shot" and his vision of the "cinema of poetry"). The sixth chapter articulates the possible consequences of the tragedy as an artistic form and a "feeling's structure" adapted to the cinematic instruments, aligning the concept of "modern cinema" with that of "modern tragedy". The seventh chapter analyses the tragedies filmed by Pasolini as fiction (Edipo Re and Medea) and the filmed "modern tragedy" Teorema, gathering critical information and evidences of the tragic vision in Pier Paolo Pasolini's films. We noticed that the possibility of the tragedy as an instrument of expression and a structure of feeling for the cinema is solved in Pasolini's work by the poetry (is the poetry that mediates the author's representation of the tragic myth in his dramas and films). Pasolini finds the tragedy in his poet's condition of diversity, in the scandal of sincerity and in the authenticity inside the "unrealistic" situation of the bourgeois world and its "normality". Thus the present Research analyses the author's ownership of the tragic myths articulating it to the feeling's structure (the tragic vision) of the authorisme in the "modern cinema" which Pasolini's work belongs (AU)