Pasolini and Death: Pier Paolo Pasolini 1922-1975~ISBN 3-7757-1633-5 U.S. $45.00 / Hardcover, 8.75 x 10.75 in. / 208 pgs / 30 color and 60 b&w. ~Item / February / Film The mark which has dominated all my work is this longing for life, this sense of exclusion, which doesn't lessen but augments this love of life. --Pasolini

Before his mysterious murder in 1975, Pier Paolo Pasolini had become famous—and infamous—not only for his groundbreaking films and literary works but also for his homosexuality and criticism of capitalism, colonialism, and Western materialism. In Pier Paolo Pasolini: Performing Authorship, Gian Maria Annovi revisits Pasolini's oeuvre to examine the author's performance as a way of assuming an antagonistic stance toward forms of artistic, social, and cultural oppression. Annovi connects Pasolini's notion of authorship to contemporary radical artistic practices and today's multimedia authorship. Annovi considers the entire range of Pasolini's work, including his poetry, narrative and documentary film, dramatic writings, and painting, as well as his often scandalous essays on politics, art, literature, and theory. He interprets Pasolini's multimedia authorial performance as a masochistic act to elicit rejection, generate hostility, and highlight the contradictions that structure a repressive society. Annovi shows how questions of authorial self-representation and self-projection relate to the artist's effort to undermine the assumptions of his audience and criticize the conformist practices that the culture industry and mass society impose on the author. Pasolini reveals the critical potential of his spectacular celebrity by using the author's corporeal or vocal presence to address issues of sexuality and identity, and through his strategic self-fashioning in films, paintings, and photographic portraits he destabilizes the audience's assumptions about the author.

Pasolini was a controversial film-maker, poet and essayist, best known for his films narrating myths, such as Oedipus Rex, Medea, Theorem, The Canterbury Tales, The Decameron and A Thousand and One Arabian Knights. This book is a personal account of Pier Paolo Pasolini's cinema and literature, written by the author of Antonioni and Rocco and his Brothers.

This illustrated book accompanies the exhibition Pier Paolo Pasolini : Subversive Prophet (Neuberger Museum of Art, February 12 to May 31, 2020). Pier Paolo Pasolini (Italian, 1922-1975) is widely known in Europe for his prolific work as a poet, writer, and film director. A true humanist, his interests encompassed literature, art, history, classic tragedy, psychoanalysis, and politics. For Susan Sontag, Pasolini was "indisputably the most remarkable figure to have emerged in Italian arts and letters since the Second World War. Whatever he did once he did it, had the quality of seeming necessary." Outspoken and subversive, Pasolini made no concessions and at times deliberately provoked his contemporaries, either through challenging political articles or through his films. Violently murdered in 1975 under enigmatic circumstances that shocked Italy and intellectual circles worldwide, Pasolini left three decades of artistic production full of complex and rich themes that are as relevant today as they were then: the universal homogenization of society; the dangers of capitalism; excessive consumption; growing inequality between poor and rich; the relegation of the underprivileged to the outskirts of the city; hypocrisy and repression in the social and political spheres.The exhibition opens with artistic homages to Pasolini by two Latin American artists: the Chilean, New York-based artist Alfredo Jaar, and the late Uruguayan artist Antonio Frasconi (a former Purchase College professor). Both artists pay tribute to Pasolini's outstanding work and denounce his assassination in 1975. This first section also explores the reception of Pasolini in the Americas: in Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, and the United States-including his first visit to New York, in 1966. A second and larger gallery is devoted to the powerful creativity of Pasolini, featuring his poetry, novels, paintings, and drawings as well as an introduction to his most important films. The exhibition also showcases original film costumes designed in Rome by Farani, including the one used by Pasolini in The Canterbury Tales, in which he plays the role of Geoffrey Chaucer, the author of the original book by the same title.

"This book casts the poet and filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini in a fresh light: his life and work in relation to the visual and performance arts of his time in both Europe and the US. Lavishly illustrated with both documentary and fine art images, it shows how essentially conservative Pasolini was politically and aesthetically despite his reputation as an avant-garde writer and filmmaker. But it also shows how truly advanced Pasolini was when it comes to interdisciplinary art, making him enormously relevant today"--

How spectacular visions of physical suffering in post–World War II Italian neorealist films redefined moviegoing as a form of political action

. . . 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.