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WSWS : Arts Review : Film Reviews

Why was Pasolini murdered?

A review of Pasolini, an Italian Crime

By David Walsh
20 November 1995

Pier Paolo Pasolini, the left-wing Italian writer and filmmaker, was beaten to death in November 1975. A youth, Giuseppe "Pino" Pelosi, whom Pasolini had picked up for sex, was convicted of the crime and served seven years in prison.

But had Pelosi, a slender 17-year-old, inflicted the devastating injuries by himself, or was he perhaps merely a fall guy? In April 1976 a four-court panel, on the basis of the physical evidence, found Pelosi "guilty of the crime of voluntary homicide in company with others not known." An appeals court in December 1976 overturned the first court's ruling as to a conspiracy. The official story, supported by the government and the media, was that Pasolini, whose sexual predilections were well known, had been killed in a quarrel over sex.

Marco Tullio Giordana's Pasolini, an Italian Crime is a dramatic reconstruction of the investigation and trial which followed the murder. The film argues convincingly that the police and government carried out a cover-up.

The film presents evidence of several different sorts. In the first place, Giordana makes clear that the police either ignored or failed to track down key witnesses, including one who saw a vehicle following Pasolini's car the night of the murder and another who asserted that he saw several individuals at the scene of the crime itself. They also failed to follow up leads which suggested the complicity of local thugs and neofascist elements in the crime.

The physical evidence gathered by Dr. Faustino Durante, a forensic pathologist hired by the Pasolini family, pointed strongly to the participation of more than one killer. The kind of blows Pasolini received suggested, in the words of one of his biographers, "not a fight between equals but the purposeful beating of a helpless man...." Durante asserted furthermore that the extensive damage to the cranium could only be explained by Pasolini having been beaten by one or more persons while others held him immobile.

But, as the film establishes, there is evidence of another kind: Pasolini's life and beliefs and the political situation in Italy in 1975.

Pasolini was one of the major artistic figures in postwar Italy. He first came to prominence in the 1950s as a poet and then a novelist. His great love and the subject of so many of his works were the slum youths of Rome, mostly of peasant background. After writing film scripts for Federico Fellini, Mauro Bolognini and others, Pasolini made his first and possibly his best film, Accattone, in 1961.

Pasolini's decades-long relationship with the Communist Party is far too complex to be discussed within the confines of this review. Suffice it to say that while he rejected elements of the Stalinists' policies and methods, he never went beyond petty-bourgeois radicalism. By the time of his death, Pasolini had reached the point of an almost pathological political demoralization.

Pasolini's great strengths, expressed above all in his poetry, his first novel ( Ragazzi di Vita) and a few of his films, were an unrelenting honesty about himself and about Italian society; great courage in the face of persistent attacks on his political views, his sexuality and his art; and a poetic imagination almost unparalleled in the postwar period.

Why was Pasolini killed? In the past several years, scandals implicating virtually every major political figure in Italy have revealed that the Christian Democratic Party, the principal Italian bourgeois party since the Second World War, is essentially a coalition of big business and organized crime.

The political situation in Italy in 1975 was extremely tense. The country, ruled by coalitions dominated by the Christian Democrats, had experienced three coup attempts by military men and neofascists in the previous four years. Terrorism by the extreme right was on the rise. In 1974, Italy experienced the highest inflation rate in Europe--25 percent--and a $9 billion balance of trade deficit. Workers responded with a massive strike wave.

One week before he was murdered, Pasolini suggested that the entire Italian ruling class be put on trial for "unworthiness, contempt for their fellow citizens, misappropriation of public funds, price-fixing for oil companies, industries, banking cartels, collaboration with the CIA, illegal use of intelligence agencies, responsibility for [neofascist] terrorism in Milan, Brescia and Bologna (given a seeming inability to punish the perpetrators), destruction, anthropological degradation, the disgraceful condition of schools, hospitals and every other basic public institution, the neglect of the countryside, the wildcat explosion of popular culture and of mass media, and the criminal stupidity of television."

Is it so difficult to imagine that elements within the Italian ruling class took Pasolini's accusations quite seriously, perhaps more seriously, unfortunately, than the artist took them himself?

Giordana has done an excellent job of assembling the evidence and recreating the political atmosphere which prevailed in Italy at the time of Pasolini's death. An Italian Crime is straightforward and concise. But something of Pasolini's fierce intelligence and passion emerges through Giordana's work. It is a film which works against the present social climate in Italy and elsewhere and argues for intellectual honesty and social liberation.

The film ends with a portion of one of Pasolini's poems, written in 1964:

Intelligence will never have much value

in the collective judgment of this public's opinion.

Not even the blood of concentration camps

could draw from a million of our nation's souls

a clear judgment of pure indignation.

Each idea is unreal, every passion unreal,

in a people who lost their unity centuries ago

and use their gentle wisdom

only to survive, and not to gain freedom.

To show my face--my leanness--

to raise a single, childlike voice,

makes sense no longer. Cowardice accustoms us

to seeing others die atrociously,

locked in the strangest indifference.

So I die, and this too causes me pain.

"I've tried to make films which bring fixed opinions into question"

An interview with Marco Tullio Giordana, director of Pasolini, an Italian Crime

DW: Why did you decide to make this film?

MTG: When Pasolini died his greatness wasn't recognized as it is today--his greatness as a moviemaker, writer, poet and so on. And so there was a tendency in fact to bury the significance of his death and to obscure his figure as a person, an artist. So the choice to make the film in a way is to repay a debt I owe to Pasolini as a teacher.

And since I couldn't add anything to his work, obviously, which speaks for itself, I wanted to talk about the fact that there was an injustice committed against him after his death.

DW: Was it also the present situation, for example, the emergence of neofascism in Italy, that triggered this interest in Pasolini?

MTG: The emergence of this new form of fascism is also one of the factors which led me to confront his death now.

DW: I understand that the investigation into Pasolini's death is going to be reopened. Is that correct?

MTG: They have reopened the case as of two weeks ago. I've undertaken for quite a while now, with the Pasolini family's lawyer, an investigation into the death, and this has produced some very concrete results. These results will be brought to the attention of the investigating magistrate if the case continues to be open.

DW: What attracts you to Pasolini's thought or work?

MTG: It's a difficult question to answer. I think one of the things that actually seduced me with him was his intellectual method. He remained totally free of ideologies, of preconceptions, and although he was a man of the Left, he was not a slave to left-wing ideology or any other ideology. This permitted him to be very free, to be very flexible and to exercise incredible imagination in seeing where Italian society was going and in analyzing Italian society and history.

His method is something we can imitate ourselves and use, but the other part is more difficult, more passive on my part. It's the way as an artist, a filmmaker, poet, novelist, he revealed to us worlds we didn't know about. That we really can't imitate, but it enlarges our whole world.

DW: It's very difficult to duplicate his artistry, but I think the film brings out his opposition, honesty and courage.

MTG: The aim of the film was not to recreate Pasolini's visionary nature or even to explore him as a person. Basically the small target I had was this: the state, the government, the judiciary say Pasolini died in this way, I'm telling you that he died in that way, which is totally different.

But I think the effect of the film is to make the audience, particularly the younger members of the audience, curious about knowing and reading Pasolini. That's the bigger target behind the small target.

DW: I don't think the film is quite as limited as you suggest. Because to a certain extent, in order to explain why Pasolini died, you have to explain who he was.

MTG: The film also tries to show what Italy was like in 1975. The little target radiates out and becomes big. I've tried to make films which bring certain crystallized, fixed opinions into question and open things up, instead of closing them down.

DW: What's the relevance of Pasolini's work to the present situation in Italy or elsewhere?

MTG: Pasolini, in his writing in the mid-70s, actually foretold in a way and analyzed in advance what's happened now, that media becomes so important, that television dictates everything, the new fascism has taken the form of an aspiration to a total consumer society with no other values. It takes the form of the desire for a petty-bourgeois life without any dimensions and that really is very directly

true and relevant in Italy today.

Then, he's still obviously relevant and pertinent as a poet, because if poets are good they're always relevant.

DW: What was the attitude of the Communist Party leadership to his death?

MTG: At that moment the Communist Party was moving toward the "historic compromise" with the Christian Democratic Party. Therefore, Pasolini was an extremely embarrassing figure in many ways. He declared himself a communist, but was not a member of the party. So they had this embarrassed and very, very critical attitude towards him and he had a critical attitude towards them. The upper echelons of the party were very distant from him and very critical. On the other hand, the Federation of Young Communists was extremely close. They, in fact, organized and promoted his funeral.

Naturally nobody explicitly says anything bad about Pasolini. In fact, they're all trying to claim him as one of theirs. Recently the Italian neofascist party has been saying extremely nice things about Pasolini, that he was a prophet and so on. Giulio Andreotti saw the film a few days before I left Italy and, in an interview, spoke in glowing terms of the film. And even Berlusconi has said very, very positive things about Pasolini.

These little maneuvers can go on as long as the truth hasn't been revealed and the investigation hasn't reached its logical conclusion, finding out what happened. Once the investigation reaches that point, then these hypocrites--some of them at least--will have to shut up or go to jail, or both.