Damned Passion – Pier Paolo Pasolini on the 50th Anniversary of His Death
The year 2025 marks not only the 50th anniversary of the premiere of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s final film but also of his tragic death. The Italian artist remains a figure of controversy and debate, but this milestone anniversary offers an excellent opportunity to take a more critical and less conventional look at his literary and cinematic work – vast and complex – as well as his political and intellectual engagement.
The beginning and end of his directorial career, the bitter and symbolic “diptych” – Accattone (1961) and Salò (1975) – provide a lens for analyzing his persona. Both films, in very different ways, encapsulate the passion and ideology in which Pasolini believed as an intellectual, while also exposing – and concealing – the contradictions that characterized him. But contradictions also defined the country in which he lived: Italy in the 1970s, a land of political intrigues – both real and hidden – of which Pasolini ultimately became a victim. David Grieco’s The Plot (2016), created by Pasolini’s collaborator and friend, attempts to reconstruct this historical context along with the figure of Pasolini, marked by his tragic end. The filmmaker was beaten and murdered on a small soccer field near the beach in Ostia in 1975. This grim event left a mark on that era and, for years, could not receive a fair judgment.
So who was Pier Paolo Pasolini? Who is he today? The ritual of anniversaries is an incurable human need – one that both gathers and erases: remembering one thing always means forgetting something else. The era spanning the 1950s to the 1970s was a time when much of Italian society lived with the certainty that the people and communism represented the future. Pasolini passionately took part in this struggle. Today, we can count its victims, but that does not fully explain another key issue: the enthusiasm felt by those who took part in this movement. The Italian director voted as a communist and defended his choice until the end.
However, alongside this dream – a political and human vision of freedom and justice, of democratization of power and emancipation of the weakest – Pasolini also embraced a deeply personal concept of the ancient “purity” of the poorest, with their hysicality and sexuality, which he believed should be celebrated (see Accattone). At the same time, he opposed the contemporary capitalist bourgeoisie, seeing it as the destroyer of that purity and of society as a whole (see Salò). This contradiction haunted him for years, persistently and poetically. From the time he made Accattone, Pasolini increasingly saw himself as a “force of the Past”. By 1968, he rejected the protesting youth, seeing them as corrupted and lost. But Pier Paolo Pasolini himself also felt corrupted and lost, though he never admitted it – even as he screamed his opposition until the very end.
So who was Pier Paolo Pasolini? Who is he today? This is both an opportunity and an invitation.
Stanisław Bardadin
As part of the section Damned Passion – Pier Paolo Pasolini on the 50th Anniversary of His Death, the following films will be presented:
- Accattone, dir. Pier Paolo Pasolini, Italy, 1961
- Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom / Salò o le 120 giornate di Sodo, dir. Pier Paolo Pasolini, Italy, France, 1975
- The Ploy / La macchinazione, dir. David Grieco, Italy, France, 2016
The section is curated by Stanisław Bardadin.
