Date of Award
Spring 2023
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
Italian
First Advisor
Marcus, Millicent
Abstract
This dissertation is a study of how Pier Paolo Pasolini pioneered representations of otherness through a new kind of mimesis of the gaze. For the poet-filmmaker, cinema offered a liberating way to represent plural subjectivities through expressive modes that transcend verbal language. Central to his theory of poetic cinema is free indirect discourse, a literary technique wherein a narrator temporarily enters a character’s frame of mind and adopts their distinct point of view. When adapted to film, it becomes a strategy for representing alternative perspectives which allows the audience to experience concrete social difference and highlights nuances that may otherwise go undetected, liberating us from the confines of a singular vision. The pivotal role of free indirect discourse has been largely overlooked, as scholars of Pasolini’s poetic cinema theory have primarily focused on its reception rather than its development. My study addresses this disjunction by examining how Pasolini’s early artistic output intersects with his social commitment to portraying unrepresented communities, leading to a unique formulation of film theory. I argue that through his postwar poetry, prose, critical essays, and films, Pasolini constructs an intermedial praxis that seeks representative fidelity to class-bound ways of speaking and seeing. Chapter 1 highlights three understudied aspects of Pasolini’s first foray into film theory with “Il ‘Cinema di poesia’”: the key role of free indirect discourse in representing the gaze on screen, how class difference affects representational ethics, and the subtle but clear distinction between his own cinematic practice and that of the peer filmmakers he cites. I propose that Pasolini celebrates several distinct poetic cinemas to foreground the plurality of his theory. Chapter 2 articulates Pasolini’s idiosyncratic definition of free indirect discourse in his critical essays on poetry and prose. I show how Pasolini views free indirect discourse as a vital tool to avoid the violence of overidentification between artists and their subjects. Chapter 3 explores tensions between postwar Italian Marxist ideals and Pasolini’s alternative morality that incorporates the physical realities of disenfranchised people in his 1954 poem “Le ceneri di Gramsci.” I posit a poetics of affiliation that Pasolini enacts by rejecting hermeticism to recover the political valence of poetry, embracing Romantic ideals of nature to counter excessive recourse to logic. Chapter 4 considers how his 1955 novel Ragazzi di vita combines Roman dialect with a high literary style to inscribe more authentic portrayals of social outcasts in high literary culture. I reframe Pasolini’s linguistic and stylistic innovation as a revision of the pastoral genre that insists on the limits of identification. Finally, Chapter 5 studies how Pasolini foregrounds dueling approaches to filmmaking in his short film La ricotta, which reimagines Jesus as a member of the Italian working class. I argue that Pasolini stages various failed attempts at mediations between literature, painting, and cinema, to skewer representational purity and doctrinal hypocrisy. This study constructs an intellectual history of Pasolini’s landmark theory of poetic cinema by mining his practice and critical engagement in the decade before its 1965 debut to further nuance his idiosyncratic set of representational strategies. His artistic experimentation in this period reflects ongoing efforts to depict marginalized points of view and preserve what makes them, in Pasolini’s view, sacred.
Recommended Citation
Atkinson, Sarah, "The Making Of Pasolini's Poetic Cinema" (2023). Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations. 913.
https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/gsas_dissertations/913
