"Pagine corsare"
Pier Paolo Pasolini.
His life
.
Pasolini in Friuli
.
Pier Paolo Pasolini was born
on the 5th of March
1922 in Bologna. He was the eldest son of the infantry lieutenant Alberto
Pasolini and Susanna Colussi, a school-teacher. His father, from an old
family in Ravenna, spent the family's patrimony. He married Susanna in
1921 in Casarsa before the couple moved to Bologna.
"I was born in a family representative
of Italian society: the product of a genuine cultural mixing and Italian
unity. My father descended from an ancient noble family of Romagna. On
the other hand my mother comes from a family of Friulian farmers who have
become, step by step, lower middle-class people. The relatives of my mother's
father were distillers. The mother of my mother was Piedmontese, but that
didn't prevent her from having contacts with Sicily and the Rome region."(1)
The Pasolinis didn't stay
in Bologna for long; they moved to Parma, Conegliano, Belluno, Sacile,
Idria, Cremona, Bologna again, and other towns of North Italy.
"They have made a nomad of
me. I passed from one camp to another. I never had a fixed abode".
In
1925, in Belluno, the second born-son, Guido, was born.
Considering the family's
constant relocation, the only landmark for the Pasolinis was Casarsa.
Pier Paolo's relationship
with his mother remained friendly while the conflicts with his father increased.
"Every evening I dreaded
dinner time, because I knew that he would have done one of his scenes...
Then came my initial separation from my mother which created a childhood
neurosis. That neurosis made me restless, a restlessness in which I perpetually
questioned my own being (...). When my mother was going to bear, I began
to suffer from burning eyes. My father immobilized me on the table of the
kitchen, opened my eyes with his fingers and poured in collyrium. After
that symbolic event I was no longer able to love my father." (2)
Referring to his mother:
"She
told me stories, fables, she read them to me. My mother was like Socrates
to me. She had and has a terribly idealistic and idealized vision
of the world. She really believes in heroism, in charity, in piety, in
generosity. I have adopted all that almost in a pathologic way." (3)
He enjoyed a close relationship
with his brother Guido. Guido had a kind of veneration for his older brother,
who was good in his studies and in games with the other boys. That admiration
continued to the end.
During the boys' early school
years the family moved often but these moves failed to impede Pier Paolo's
progress. He entered elementary school a year early. In 1928 there was
the poetical exordium: Pier Paolo filled a little notebook with a series
of pictures. That little note-book was followed by others. It would ultimately
be lost during the war.
He passed from elementary
school to the grammar school of Conegliano.
In those years he wrote a
passage known as Teta veleta, that Pasolini later explained:
"It was in Belluno, I was
a little more than 3 years old. As the boys played in the public gardens
in front of my house what struck me most of all was their legs, particularly
the internal convex part of the knee, where the tendons stretch out while
running. I saw in those quick tendons a symbol of life that I hadn't yet
attained. That image of the running boy for me represented the grown-up
being. Now I know that it was a distinctly sensual sentiment.
If I re-feel it I feel with
exactness in my bowels the tenderness, the sorrowfulness and the violence
of the desire. It was the sense of the unreachableness, of the carnal -
a sense for which a name hasn't yet been invented. I invented it that time
and it was "teta veleta". Seeing those legs bent in their furious game
I told myself that it felt "teta veleta," something like a tickle, a seduction,
a humiliation." (4)
Pasolini indeed stated:
"My infancy ended when I
was 13. For all of us 13 is infancy's old age so it's a time of great wisdom.
It was a happy period of my life. I had been the cleverest in school. As
the Summer of '34 began, a period of my life had finished. I had ended
one experience and I was ready to start another. The days leading up to
the Summer of '34 were some of the nicest and most glorious of my life".
(5)
Pier Paolo finished high
school when he was 17 and matriculated in Literature at the University
of Bologna. During his high school years he created, together with Luciano
Serra, Franco Farolfi, Ermes Parmi (whose name was borrowed by Guido Pasolini
during his partisan activities in Osoppo), Fabio Mauri, a literary group
of the GIL of Bologna. During this period Pasolini wrote poems in Italian
and Friulian that were gathered in a first volume, Poesie a Casarsa.
Pasolini contributed to a magazine, Stroligut and together with
other literary male friends he created the Academiuta di lenga furlana
["little Academy of Friulian language", t.n.]. Dialect represented a sort
of opposition to fascist power:
"Fascism didn't tolerate
dialects, signs / of the irrational unity of this Country were I was born
/ inadmissible and imprudent relatives in the heart of the Nazis." (6)
The
use of dialect also represented an attempt to deprive the Church of its
cultural hegemony over the underdeveloped masses. In fact the Left preferred
to use the Italian language and excluding the sporadical cases of Jacobinism,
the use of dialect has been a clerical prerogative. Pasolini attempted
to bring to the Left a deepening of the culture of dialect.
The return to Casarsa during
his university years represented the return to a happy place for Pasolini.
He wrote to Silvana Ottieri in a letter of April '47:
"The fact that it was Holy
Saturday didn't matter at all. If you had seen the colours of the horizon
and of the countryside! When the train stopped to Sacile, in a very dense
silence, like the last Tule, I listened again to the bells. There, behind
the railway station of Sacile was, heading into the country, a road. I
had either run along it during my infancy or I had dreamed of it..."
____________________
(1) P.P. Pasolini, Il
sogno del centauro, by Jean Duflot, Editori Riuniti, Rome 1983.
(2) Interview to Dacia Maraini
in "Vogue", May 1971.
(3) Ibidem.
(4) Pier Paolo Pasolini,
in Nico Naldini, Cronistoria.
(5) Pier Paolo Pasolini,
in AA.VV., Pasolini, una vita futura, Ass. Fondo Pasolini, Garzanti,
Milan, 1985.
(6) Pier Paolo Pasolini,
Il
poeta delle ceneri, by Enzo Siciliano, in "Nuovi Argomenti" nn. 67-68,
Rome, July-December 1980. |
His life
Alive in the memory
Pasolini's works
The Pier Paolo Pasolini
Study Center
in Casarsa della Delizia
(Italy)
Books and VHS tapes;
a complete
bibliography in Usa;
a filmography
Salò or The 120
Days of Sodom,
The Institute of Contemporary
Arts
in London hosted a two-day
event
around Salò,
with screenings and
discussion about the film
Intelligence will never
have much value...
Books
Pasolini's Photo Gallery
|