" I do not believe you can call my poetry "civil". It is not this by definition, inasmuch as it is poetry is of continual opposition, almost a priori, while "civil" poetry, as understood and practised up to now, has always been poetry accepting institutions, or opposing them with reforms"
Pier Paolo Pasolini
Thinking of films and documentaries that in the course of the years have contributed to the growth of Italian culture, it is impossible to dwell on all those faces which the film world has bequeathed to our memories.
Faces of women, babies, or entire peoples that history has completely blotted out, but who continue to live in works of directors sensitive to changes in society;
Among the masters of Italian cinema, Pier Paolo Pasolini and Gillo Pontecorvo have contributed more than others to producing works able to represent perfectly some social realities, even if adopting individual points of view.
In fact, Pasolini remained a poet, even when he chose the cinema as his medium, and his interest was directed always towards words. In particular, he loved to speak of those pure and expressive faces that lived on the outskirts of Rome. Theirs was an evolving language, continually re-invented. A live language, which expressed a living thought, and the poet would invite everyone to observe it, and listen to it with attention because he perceived its fragiliy. He wished to capture it before it completely died out.
The role of words, often shouted, and of babies is an element which is common to the works of
Pasolini and of Gillo Pontecorvo.
So if Gillo, in The Battle of Algiers (1966), makes women use traditional Arabic - shouts which deafen and disturb us - Pier Paolo Pasolini heightens cries, transforming them into musical sacrificial choruses. Then they are not always words, in some cases, used as words, but sounds, cries.
The cries that come from the Casbah (market) are sacrificial cries. Here everything is at stake, and the search for freedom requires a revision of historical processes and traditional daily habits. So babies are sent for, to augment the chorus. Their cries constitute the first attempt to cleanse society, by driving out a drunkard.
While Africa is the symbol of liberty for Pontecorvo, for Pasolini it is a city suburb. However, even here, it is babies, sometimes on the outskirts, who cleanse squalid places speaking of love with a verve and grace so great as to make us think of public assemblies.
We do not know if the two artists ever met to talk about political militancy, the political use of the
cinema as regards Africa and the processes of liberation of the fifties and sixties. But,
if they did, we would all have been able to learn a lot from what they said to each other...
In effect, there are differences between the reflections of Pontecorvo and Pasolini on the African and society as they saw it and wished to treat it in their films. While the remarks of Pasolini on Africa never appeared in the militant leaflets of the party, the work of Pontecorvo, became an emblem of a rebellion against the system.
In Pasolini the "weapons" of poetry were always used to elevate those of thought, seeking an uninterrupted experimental tension which enables us to get on to the "road of love". For him the sense of Marxist ideology changes with time. The class struggle, the proletariat revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat, became merely revolutionary expressions masking an unconsciously anti-revolutionery attitude.
So Pasolini distances himself from the P.C.I. and slowly moves towards anarchy, an anarchy which leads towards political isolation. Both Pasolini and Pontecorvo had the desire to look to the future and elsewhere. So, being interested in Africa, they wished to appropriate the look and passion which it was still possible to find there. This pushed the poet to write in the early sixties a scenography on the birth of "New Africa", the Savage Father and a documentary entitled Notes on an African Oresteia, set in Tanganika and Uganda.
Pasolini hoped to discover the faces of Greek tragedy capable of re-creating the transformation of the Furies in the Eumenides, and sacred places which evoked the splendour of the temple of Apollo, where Orestes was to be judged by man and not as one protected by the gods.
"The Masai" said: "They live in primitive, objective, real, experimental happiness. They are animists and pastoral nomads.
If captured, they die, like certain kinds of birds or like the boy of
Boccaccio who decided to die of pain "fighting to the last breath". The Masai says "No thankyou very much!" to our culture. Essentially, Pasolini was seeking in Africa those local ambiences he could no longer find on the outskirts of Rome. Moravia commented: "Pier Paolo Pasolini feels for black Africa the same poetic and original sympathy as he he felt for the suburbs of Rome and the Roman sub-proletariat";
The element which was lacking now in Italy was social solidarity-- fragmented by time and the disillusionment of politics. Both for Pasolini and for Pontecorvo.this element still lived in the movements of dance, in theatrical gestures, in a thought, in a song or a visible suggestion. The places described by Pontecorvo are different from those described by Pasolini, scenes of flight where, however, there is still hope. The shacks below the ruins of Mandrione, are places of instability, just as those where the tragedy of the Medea takes place: sunny, devoid of beauty, so bare as to generate a profound sense of oppression. Pasolini lived in miserable conditions and knew first hand what life was like in the suburbs of Rome.
He knew, as he later said, all about dust and filth, in those dusty shacks backing on to the acquaduct, where he found his Africa. Pasolini encountered many obstacles in making a film on Africa and, after different attempts and refusals, he did not manage to complete the project and get it produced. All that remains is notes and little else. The work was to have been produced and distributed as a documenary, to be enjoyed above all by the people. The language had to be journalistic for the film to be distributed.
Who knows if the real obstacles to be overcome were not the machinations of Marxist parties which looked with suspicion on artists who were not politically alligned.
Pasolini in fact did not wish to merge his identity with that of a group, much less with the cinema market, so he never changed his particular technique of shooting films which he judged to be
his essential trademark.
Pasolini wished to criticise the negative aspects of society and rejected the idea of being tolerated without generating discussions. He prefered a repressive world to a tolerant one, inasmuch as amidst repression great tragedies live. Sanity and heroisim are born, while amidst tolerance diversities are defined, analysed and anomalies isolated, ghettoes created "I would rather be condemned unjustly than be tolerated."
Of the same opinion was Jean Genet, who found in the Palestinian people a new home, far from Paris, all lights and no soul. And also Albert Camus, who defended Algerian independence.as few others did.
Who was Pier Paolo Pasolini? A poet who embraced the cinema because he loved to reproduce life and became a master thanks to his own experience and wisdom.
