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Pasolini Requiem

Second Edition

Second Edition, Revised

Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922–75) was one of the most important Italian intellectuals of the post–World War II era. An astonishing polymath—poet, novelist, literary critic, political polemicist, screenwriter, and film director—he exerted profound influence on Italian culture up to his untimely death at the age of fifty-three. This revised edition of what the New York Times Book Review has called “the standard Pasolini biography” introduces the artist to a new generation of readers.

Based on extensive interviews with those who knew Pasolini, both friends and enemies, admirers and detractors, Pasolini Requiem chronicles his growth from poet in the provinces to Italy’s leading “civil poet”; his flight to Rome in 1950; the scandalous success of his two novels and political writing; and his transition to film, where he started as a contributor to the golden age of Italian cinema and ended with the shocking Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom. Pasolini’s tragic and still unsolved murder has remained a subject of contentious debate for four decades. The enduring fascination with who committed the crime—and why—reflects his vital stature in Italy’s political and social history.

Updated throughout and with a new afterword covering the efforts to reopen the investigation—and the legal maelstrom surrounding Pasolini’s demise—this edition of Pasolini Requiem is a riveting account of one of the twentieth century’s most controversial, ever-present iconoclasts.

656 pages | 32 halftones | 6 x 9 | © 2017

Biography and Letters

Film Studies

Gender and Sexuality

Literature and Literary Criticism: Romance Languages

Table of Contents

Part 1

1 The White Boats of Waxholm
2 Al Pommidoro
3 In Search of Gennariello
4 The Idroscalo, Ostia
5 Lunedi, 3.xi.75
6 Campo dei Fiori

Part 2

7 Colus di Batiston
8 A Model Boy
9 Friulian Rapture
10 Surviving the Intolerable
11 The Party’s Foot Soldier in the Garden of Alcina
12 Saint Sabina’s Day in Ramuscello
13 “At the City’s Far Edge”
14 In Rebibbia Exile
15 Anni Mirabili: Ragazzi di vita, Officina, Le ceneri di Gramsci
16 Lachrymosa: A Violent Life

Part 3

17 Accattone
18 Mamma Roma, the Golden Bullet of Bernardino de Santis, Blasphemy
19 The Cinema of Ideology: La rabbia, Comizi d’amore, and Il Vangelo
20 Christ according to Pasolini
21 A Maker of Fables
22 The Cinema of Poetry: Edipo re, Teorema, and a Saint Paul That Was Never to Be
23 Medea and Callas
24 The Trilogy of Life
25 Lutheran Letters to the Italians
26 The Collapse of the Present: A Question of Grief
27 Fast Fade to Black
 
Afterword
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Notes
Index of Names

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