Pier Paolo Pasolini and Orson Welles (Ansa)
Half a century later, the death of Pier Paolo Pasolini it remains an open wound in the national conscience. Between mysteries, trials, retractions and conspiracy theories, the assassination of the poet, director and writer remains a symbol of the contradictions of a country that has never stopped being reflected in its shadow. On the morning of November 2, 1975 at the Idroscalo in Ostia, Pasolini’s tortured body lay in the mud. A woman found him at first light; his friend Ninetto Davoli recognized him, favorite young actor, a few hours later.
The “awkward” intellectual par excellence was 53 years old. He had been beaten and run over with his own car, an Alfa Romeo Giulia GT.
For 50 years, investigations, films and books have continued to dig. The director Marco Tullio Giordana in his film Pasolini, an Italian crime concluded that the young man could not have acted alone. Others, like the journalist and writer Oriana Fallaci already in 1975, they had hypothesized a broader, perhaps political, plot.
The hypotheses have multiplied: a settling of scores linked to the disappearance of some reels of the film Salò or the 120 days of Sodom, his denunciation of the economic and oil power in the novel Petrolio (released posthumously in 1992), the accusations of the dark plots of the strategy of tension. For others, however, the mystery does not exist. To kill Pasolini, they supported intellectuals such as Edoardo Sanguineti and Franco Fortini, it was the same life he led: the search for limits, the attraction to danger, the conscious exposure to risk. His cousin Nico Naldini dismissed the conspiracy theories as “hoaxes that devour each other”, arguing that Pasolini was the victim of a self-destructive passion, not a conspiracy.
On the occasion of this anniversary we are republishing our interview with an exceptional critic, the Jesuit Virgilio Fantuzzi, who we interviewed on the occasion of another anniversary: the 50th anniversary of the film The Gospel according to Matthew by Pasolini whose filming began in 1963.
Exactly fifty years ago, in early April 1963, shooting of the film began The Gospel according to Matthew by Pier Paolo Pasolini. In the imminence of the fiftieth anniversary of the release of the film in theaters (the following year, 1964), the professor Angela Felicedirector of the Pasolini Study Center in Casarsa della Delizia (Pordenone), invited to Friuli Enrique Irazoquiwho played the most important role in Pasolini’s film, that of Christ.
The occasion was the presentation in Casarsa of a documentary by Valeria Patané, entitled Album, shot last year in Cadaqués, the small town on the Costa Brava where Irazoqui now lives with his wife. The director filmed the meeting, half a century later, between Enrique, who was 19 years old at the time of the film, and Giacomo Morante (nephew of the writer Elsa), who in 1963, at the age of 15, played the part of the apostle John in the film. And the screening, on Friday evening, at Cinema Zero in Pordenone, of The Gospel according to Matthew.
Among the experts who took part in the event, the Jesuit Father Virgilio Fantuzzi, from Mantua, born in 1937, film critic of Catholic Civilizationformer professor of analysis of cinematographic language at the Pontifical Gregorian University, who was very close to Pasolini.
We talk to him about the Friulian author and his own Gospel according to Matthewa film dedicated “to the dear, happy, familiar memory of John XXIII”, which in the opinion of many remains the most beautiful film ever made on the life of Christ. But it caused more than one controversy at the time. Even in a historical phase, that of the centre-left, which saw the rapprochement of communists and Catholics, Pasolini’s choice to tackle the narrative of the life of Christ aroused suspicion and discontent both among the intelligentsia of the PCI (who accused Pasolini of ideological ambiguity and mysticism) and within the more conservative Catholicism (which did not appreciate the treatment of the sacred subject by an author far from the Church). While – it should be remembered – the OCIC (Office Catholique International du Cinéma) will award him its recognition at the Venice Film Festival.
Father Fantuzzi, in which aspects, in particular, lie the reasons for the beauty of Gospel according to Matthew by Pasolini?
«This is a one-of-a-kind film for more than one reason. First of all, philological fidelity to the biblical text. In the myriad of films made about Jesus, we often find works that easily descend into a certain mannerism, oleography and hagiography. Instead Pasolini focused everything on essentiality, a stylistic dryness that is in the wake of popular sacred representations, in which the other protagonist, alongside Christ, is the Christian people, the chorality of the faithful. Furthermore, Pasolini establishes a fruitful relationship with the iconographic tradition of religious art, a relationship underlined and amplified by the choice of music, Bach above all, for the soundtrack”.
How did Pasolini personally approach the sacred subject?
«He repeated that he was an atheist, but the level reached by his film cannot be explained without a profound emotional participation in the theme. It seems to me that it is as if Pasolini had identified, to a certain degree, with the very text of the Gospel of Matthew, which he translated into images, in what he called “cinema of poetry”.
What effect does seeing it again have on you today, fifty years later?
«When I saw him for the first time, in 1964, as a seminarian, it was a surprise for me. Over the years, every time I have seen him again, this surprise has not diminished.”
You hung out with Pasolini for a long time. How did you meet him?
«The first time in 1965. I was then a young theology student, I had joined the Society of Jesus ten years earlier and I was starting to take an interest in cinema. Having seen The Gospel according to Matthewthere was something that didn’t add up to me: Pasolini in fact defined himself as an atheist and materialist, while I had received a strong impression from that film on not only an artistic but also a spiritual level. So I was introduced to Pasolini and a series of meetings began in which we talked about literature, cinema, but also religion.”
What type of religiosity was his?
«The first thing I must recognize is the fact that he always demonstrated great solidarity towards my religious vocation. Those were the post-Council years, in which there was a dramatic decline in vocations, as well as the departure of seminarians and even priests. ’68 did the rest. Among us religious people we often hear people talk about an “identity crisis”. Well, on these topics Pasolini never had a less than delicate word with me. Indeed, I could say that my religious vocation was helped more by frequenting Pasolini than by certain academic lessons at the Gregorian University. He had feelings of respect and sympathy towards Pope Paul VI. In his work, moreover, there is no shortage of signs of a strong sense of the sacred, of a Christian humanism that had been a fundamental component in his education. His religiosity was also expressed in life. He was an extremely generous person, who certainly gave more than he received.”
