This is a personal account of Pier Paolo Pasolini's cinema and literature, written by the author of 'Antonioni' and 'Rocco and his Brothers'.

. . . a keen and brilliant critical account of Pasolini's films and writings . . . --Italica Rohdie's personal, idiosyncratic critical style is backed up by serious scholarly research, as the rich bibliography attests. This is one of the most original recent additions to the ever-growing literature on Pasolini. --Choice . . . refreshingly personal and full of unpredictable tangents. --Film Quarterly Sam Rohdie has written a personal, wonderfully lucid account of Pier Paolo Pasolini's cinema and literature.

Most people outside Italy know Pier Paolo Pasolini for his films, many of which began as literary works—Arabian Nights, The Gospel According to Matthew, The Decameron, and The Canterbury Tales among them. What most people are not aware of is that he was primarily a poet, publishing nineteen books of poems during his lifetime, as well as a visual artist, novelist, playwright, and journalist. Half a dozen of these books have been excerpted and published in English over the years, but even if one were to read all of those, the wide range of poetic styles and subjects that occupied Pasolini during his lifetime would still elude the English-language reader. For the first time, Anglophones will now be able to discover the many facets of this singular poet. Avoiding the tactics of the slim, idiosyncratic, and aesthetically or politically motivated volumes currently available in English, Stephen Sartarelli has chosen poems from every period of Pasolini’s poetic oeuvre. In doing so, he gives English-language readers a more complete picture of the poet, whose verse ranged from short lyrics to longer poems and extended sequences, and whose themes ran not only to the moral, spiritual, and social spheres but also to the aesthetic and sexual, for which he is most known in the United States today. This volume shows how central poetry was to Pasolini, no matter what else he was doing in his creative life, and how poetry informed all of his work from the visual arts to his political essays to his films. Pier Paolo Pasolini was “a poet of the cinema,” as James Ivory says in the book’s foreword, who “left a trove of words on paper that can live on as the fast-deteriorating images he created on celluloid cannot.” This generous selection of poems will be welcomed by poetry lovers and film buffs alike and will be an event in American letters.

Now in paperback, a collection of the legendary filmmaker's short fiction and nonfiction from 1950 to 1966, in which we see the machinations of the creative mind in post-World War II Rome. In a portrait of the city at once poignant and intimate, we find artistic witness to the customs, dialect, squalor, and beauty of the ancient imperial capital that has succumbed to modern warfare, marginalization, and mass culture. The sketches portray the impoverished masses that Pasolini calls "the sub-proletariat," those who live under Third World conditions and for whom simple pleasures, such as a blue sweater in a storefront window, are completely out of reach. Pasolini's art develops throughout the works collected here, from his early lyricism to tragicomic outlines for screenplays, and finally to the maturation of his Neo-realism in eight chronicles on the shantytowns of Rome. The pieces in this collection were all published in Italian journals and newspapers, and then later edited by Walter Siti in the original Italian edition.

Pasolini's body was found in a deserted field outside Rome in November 1975. He had been murdered by a homosexual prostitute, but it is possible that the murder was in fact politically motivated. This is a study of one of the most remarkable Italian writers and artists since World War II.

This cross-disciplinary volume, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Framed and Unframed, explores and complicates our understanding of Pasolini today, probing notions of otherness in his works, his media image, and his legacy. Over 40 years after his death Pier Paolo Pasolini continues to challenge and interest us, both in academic circles and in popular discourses. Today his films stand as lampposts of Italian cinematic production, his cinematic theories resonate broadly through academic circles, and his philosophical, essayistic, and journalistic writings-albeit relatively sparsely translated into other languages-are still widely influential. Pasolini has also become an image, a mascot, a face on tote bags, a graffiti image on walls, an adjective (pasolinian). The collected essays push us to consider and reconsider Pasolini, a thinker for the twenty-first century.

The Italian film-maker Pier Paolo Pasolini was first and always a poet-the most important civil poet, according to Alberto Moravia, in Italy in the second half of this century. His poems were at once deeply personal and passionately engaged in the political turmoil of his country. In 1949, after his homosexuality led the Italian Communist Party to expel him on charges of "moral and political unworthiness," Pasolini fled to Rome. This selection of poems from his early impoverished days on the outskirts of Rome to his last (with a backward longing glance at his native Frill) is at the center of his poetic and filmic vision of modern Italian life as an Inferno. Pier Paolo Pasolini was born in 1922 in Bologna. In addition to the films for which he is world famous, he wrote novels, poetry, and social and cultural criticism. He was murdered in 1975.

"Superb. . . . In its careful handling of the biographical and the autobiographical, the factual and the speculative, this book will become a model for how studies of individual directors should be done in the future."—Peter Brunette, author of Roberto Rossellini

In Danger reveals the literary life of internationally renowned filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini

Italian novelist, poet, and filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini was brutally killed in Rome in 1975, a macabre end to a career that often explored humanity’s capacity for violence and cruelty. Along with the mystery of his murderer’s identity, Pasolini left behind a controversial but acclaimed oeuvre as well as a final quartet of beguiling projects that signaled a radical change in his aesthetics and view of reality. The Resurrection of the Body is an original and compelling interpretation of these final works: the screenplay Saint Paul, the scenario for Porn-Theo-Colossal, the immense and unfinished novel Petrolio, and his notorious final film, Salò or the 120 Days of Sodom, a disturbing adaptation of the writings of the Marquis de Sade. Together these works, Armando Maggi contends, reveal Pasolini’s obsession with sodomy and its role within his apocalyptic view of Western society. One of the first studies to explore the ramifications of Pasolini’s homosexuality, The Resurrection of the Body also breaks new ground by putting his work into fruitful conversation with an array of other thinkers such as Freud, Strindberg, Swift, Henri Michaux, and Norman O. Brown.