Pier Paolo Pasolini ─ Performing Authorship

Mysteriously murdered in 1975, Pier Paolo Pasolini became 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, Gian Maria Annovi revisits Pasolini's multimedia oeuvre, which includes poetry, narrative and documentary film, theater, and painting, as well as provocative and often scandalous essays on politics, art, literature, and theory. Annovi focuses on Pasolini's representation of himself as an author and the cultivation of a radically antagonistic stance toward what he saw as forms of artistic, social, and cultural oppression. He interprets Pasolini's authorial performance as a masochistic act that elicited rejection and generated hostility to highlight the contradictions that structure a repressive society.