A poetic text about Pasolini, read and written by Jonas Bruyneel *
on May 11, 2025, at de Koer in Ghent.
On the occasion of the event/premieres of "Le Tombeau de Pasolini Vol II & III" for the 50th anniversary of
Pasolini's death (1975/2025) :
* Originally written in Flemish, the text was translated from Flemish into English by Jonas himself.
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Pasolini Engels
by © Jonas Bruyneel
Welcome to Le Tombeau de Pasolini, Vol II & III here at the Courier. Nothing better on a Sunday afternoon than an excellent combination of music, film and visual art. I had the pleasure of being forwarded the music, and after a week of listening, I am extremely eager to get started with this programme.
November 2 will mark 50 years since Italian filmmaker, poet, writer and thinker Pasolini was found murdered on Ostia beach. With 23 films to his credit, from his debut Accattone, over his world- renowned Trilogy of Life with the magisterial Decamerone, to the censored, acclaimed and reviled Salo in the year of his death, he emerged as one of the greatest filmmakers who helped Rome rise back from the ashes after fascism. Rooted in the neo-realism of Rossellini, Fellini's collaborator, he cannot really be pigeonholed, with his naive-looking, sometimes nostalgic style that he very consciously employed. Not to mention his impressive oeuvre of poetry collections, novels, plays, essays and polemics.
Later, I will have a quick chat with Christophe Guiraud. But first, let me take you briefly into Pasolini's poetic universe, which makes me particularly happy. Let me introduce myself, my name is Jonas Bruyneel, poet and author, and many of the sleepless nights in my dorm room, an eternity ago, I spent with Pasolini. As a poet, it feels almost natural to feel a kinship with the filmmaker. Not only was language the first love of a man who achieved worldwide fame mainly through his films - he wrote no fewer than 24 books of poetry and 14 novels. But above all, he confidently called his cinema a cinema di poesia. And a poet can appreciate that.
By this, he did not just mean that he made films with a poetic receptivity and sensitivity; above all, he used it to set himself off against other filmmakers. It is and always has been Pasolini: the man breathed to set himself off. As a child of fascism, he became a Marxist to kick against the shins. As a Marxist, he shook things up by manifesting himself as a Catholic Marxist. As a Catholic, he scandalised benevolent Rome by coming out as a gay Catholic. As a gay man, he went on to advocate the nuclear family. And as he wandered through the underbelly of Rome, through the sordid alleys of that unsavoury underworld full of wilted prostitutes, pickpockets, purse-snatchers, knife-wielders, knaves and rascals, he sang the hymn of immaculate, rural Italy. The man lived for confrontation and consternation, for every thesis he found a highly personalised antithesis in the hope that out of the synthesis beauty would blossom. Aesthetics through explosion. Sublimation from collision.
And so, averse to hits and hypes, he created cinema di poesia in a world that - then and now altogether - embraced cinema di prose. The compulsion of narrative. The argument of the suspense arc, the dictatorship of the clear narrative. Pasolini resisted the coercion of the unified, just as he and his brother had resisted his father and other men during the fascist heyday who dwelt on all that was grand and unified. One country, one language, one story: for Pasolini, it could not crumble soon enough. Away with the dullness of unity, let life bubble up in images that rise above narrative in their contrast, their details, their scuffs and villains. Poetry it must be, in language and tones, images that hint, touch through shades and tones. Everything crumbles in Pasolini's poetry. Everything fragments, the narrative, the language, the buildings and streets, the teeth, the dirty hands, the ragged edges of grief, all in close-up close-up, and the eyewitnesses are us. The world is crumbling, the untainted bucolic, the radical utopia of natural, vital energy. Everything splinters to the core. For Pasolini went in search of the smallest elementary particle in his cinema, the building block of poetry. Like a scientist in white lab coat, an alchemist, he wielded the camera as a particle accelerator to arrive at the essence that goes deeper than the shot, deeper than the line of verse. An essence that is the movement itself, the human being, stripped of frame and direction and stripped of language. All a shot or verse line had to do for him was to give reality a platform to manifest itself.
Pasolini believed in personal language. In uncaged language. In a language that hooks onto your body and is not thrown around you like a safety net. He wrote poetry in his mother's language, Friulan, to stay far from the tough voice of his father, that fascist swine. He debuted in Romanesco and bowed Boccaccio in Neapolitan, all in a search for a language that was his own. He was looking for a language that was not laden and stained with centuries. A poetry that bound writer and audience in a new alliance. That is why when Pasoloni met film as a poet in his forties-plus, he never stepped away from it. All his life he searched for language without rigid linguistics. And he found it in cinema, the most poetic form of language, because it puts the audience in direct contact with reality through images. Pasolini was a poet of the pure image. And that made him one of the last cinematographers to see film for what it essentially was: a visionary visual medium that had to be safeguarded from the dominance of narrative.
Pasolini is the raw, unfiltered body. Pasolini is time out of time, with scenes that flow and at the same time stand still for too long. Pasolini is the aesthetics of madness, the sacredness of secrecy, an eruption of eroticism. He wielded the camera as a brush. He painted with images. In a documentary urge, he left man the man, the animal the animal and the world the world. The loafers and criminals, the goblins, street daisies, pickpockets, purse-snatchers and knife-wielders in their shabby slums and shabby duffs, he showed them as Renaissance saints, as consecrated icons, toothless, with tanned and furrowed skin but sparkling eyes, erotic energy and an almost mystical aura. In Pasolini's universe, everyone mates, gardeners with nuns, priests with prostitutes, peasants with bourgeoisie, politics with Pontormo, Brueghel with Bosch, violencia with Vivaldi, hatred with passion and Giotto with the grotesque boys from the gutter. He opposed all that caged. Against the domestication of lust and members.
In his almost naïve poetry, he wrote about the underclass, the boys of the sottoproletarato, the ragazi divina who suffer una vita violenta in the caverns of Pietralata. The street vendors, the children in the shadows, the uneducated peasants. A cinema di poesia is not only one of aesthetics, but also of empathy and compassion. It is poetry that shows and does not lead and, above all, does not condemn. Which sketches and does not violate.
And throughout his poetics, Pasolini was above all political. Radically political. Whether it was about the gruesome republic of his youth, about fairy tales of a thousand and one nights or bawdy edifying tales from a distant past, he was looking for voice and stance in a world that was thickening at a rapid pace. Non ho piu speranza, he said of the derailing world he lived in, a world that eats up its own children and consumes its own wealth. Non ho piu speranza, I have no hope. He was unable to stop the future that he saw rushing towards him, that of hyper-capitalism, consumerism and corruption, mass media, monoculture and censorship. A filmmaker, in a world moving in the right direction, is supposed to lose relevance after his death, not increase it. Good, then, to continue celebrating cinema di poesia 50 years after his death, and to do so in the way Pasolini preferred: in a language untainted by history, narrative and convention. And that is what we are doing here this afternoon threefold, in a triptych of life: in music, in painting, and in film.
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