By MANUFACTURING MARIAROSARIA*
More than a novel, Petrolio was supposed to be a mixture of graphic, figurative, photographic elements, etc., although only the narrative part reached the public.
Willem Dafoe stated, in an interview with Jorge Mourinha, that he had represented “not 'the' Pasolini but 'a' Pasolini”, when he played the role of the Italian writer and filmmaker on screen, thus highlighting the issue of the various possible interpretations of a public figure. The actor's statement is in line with the director's intentions. Pasolini (2014) by recreating the last days of the controversial intellectual.
A recreation glued to the events of Pier Paolo Pasolini's final moments, but also based on poetic licenses, since Abel Ferrara also tried to deal with two unfinished projects of his subject, which did not necessarily occupy him in those days: Petroleum e Porno-Teo-Kolossal.[1]
The film begins with the interview that the filmmaker gave to Antenne 2, on October 31, 1975, during which sequences of Salò o le 120 giornate di Sodoma (Saló or the 120 days of Sodom), to be released in France. On the plane that brings him back home, after the trip to Stockholm and the break in Paris, Pasolini is drawing a cinematic shot, and, over the images of him in a car driving through the streets of Rome, his voice rises, reciting a letter written to “dear Alberto” [Moravia], in which he explains the latest novel he is writing, asking for advice and emphasizing that the protagonist repels him, despite the “analogies of his story with mine”.
This triggers a sequence that appears to be detached from the diegesis, in which a man, at night, in a run-down place, approaches a group of young men to have sex with one, then another, and so on. It is with the condensation of “Note 55 – The Great Lawn of Casilina” that the American director begins to visualize for the audience some excerpts from the book. Petroleum, published posthumously (1992).[2]
The somber tone of this sequence is replaced by the brightness of three shots of EUR, the neighborhood where the filmmaker lived. We then see the intellectual waking up and having breakfast, chatting with his cousin Graziella, who gives him messages and reports on the tasks performed, and reading several newspapers, which feature headlines that speak of violence and death, subjects he dealt with as a polemicist.
The noise of the typewriter introduces a sequence about Carlo (who has the same name and the same appearance as the man on the lawn at Casilina), who, as he walks among the guests at a luxurious party, picks up snippets of conversations about burning issues. After a quick sequence in which Pasolini defines the book as a parable, the focus returns to Carlo, who now joins a more select group to listen to an intellectual narrate a story that ends under the sign of death, after stating that the narrative has died, echoing the same phrase expressed shortly before by the writer himself.
The spectator, once again, is faced with the staging of excerpts from Petroleum, which the author began to outline in 1972. More than a novel, Petroleum It should be a mixture of graphic, figurative, photographic elements, etc., although only the narrative part reached the public.
Returning to the diegesis, during lunch with the mother and cousins, they talk about the interviews to be given about Salò and the poet Sandro Penna, who should have been awarded the Nobel Prize. The arrival of Laura Betti, back from filming in Yugoslavia, brings some excitement to the quiet family gathering. A fusion marks the passage to a peripheral court, where Pasolini is playing soccer with a bunch of boys. The sequence seems more like a memory than one of the events of November 1st. It is one of the several moments in the film in which reality loses its contours due to the dreamlike language adopted by Ferrara, although this is more evident in other sequences: the first about Petroleum, that of night raids and that of death.
In the middle of the afternoon, Fulvio Colombo arrives for what will be Pasolini's last interview (“We're all in danger”), in which he once again speaks about violence and his hatred of institutions. The conversation between the two is very stiff, when in reality it was more informal, as the journalist himself noted in another article, in which he recalls that, when he received him, the writer was holding the recently released La scomparsa di Majorana (Majorana disappeared). His commentary on Leonardo Sciascia's book – which in the film is mentioned in the morning chat with his cousin, and is then focused on near the typewriter while Pasolini writes Petroleum – seems like an anticipation of the events that will follow six hours and thirty-five minutes from now:
“It's beautiful, it's beautiful majorana de Sciascia. It’s beautiful because he saw the mystery, but he doesn’t tell us, you understand? There’s a reason for that disappearance. But he knows that in these cases an investigation never reveals anything. It’s a beautiful book because it’s not an investigation, but the contemplation of something that can never be clarified.”
The final sentence of this appreciation of the Bolognese writer also leads us to think about the complex elaboration of his last novel, if Enzo Siciliano's interpretation is accepted: “The reader, when turning over those pages, has the sensation of penetrating a secret that does not want to be revealed”.
After the interview, Pasolini leaves to meet Ninetto Davoli in a bar and, on the way, he observes, from his car, the young men who prostitute themselves in the city center, to the sound of I'll take you there, a soul song that talks about the search for paradise. He talks to the owner of the place about the violence that plagues the streets and declares that Rome is over.[3] Look at the drawing he made on the plane and one of the cantatas of Luba Mass introduces a globe seen from space, on which rises the reading of the letter to Eduardo De Filippo when sending him the argument of Porno-Teo-Kolossal.
This prompts the insertion of the first sequence inspired by this film not made by the Italian filmmaker. There is a scene from Epifanio's family life, after which he goes to the market with his servant Nunzio, where he learns of the birth of the Messiah and sees the Guiding Star, which will lead him to leave his city.
After one flash with the arrival of Ninetto, wife and son at the restaurant, always to the sound of Luba Mass, we witness the arrival by train of the two wanderers in a city where men sleep with men and women with women, except on one day of the year. It is the Festival of Fertilization, to which Epifanio and Nunzio are taken by a fellow countryman who has adapted to the laws of the city. During the bacchanal, men and women mate in order to allow the perpetuation of the species, amidst screams, fireworks and tribal music, in front of everyone.
The music of the Congolese mass brings back the globe and with it the voice of Pasolini who finishes reading his script, expressing his desire to start filming soon, before saying goodbye to his friends. After another foray into the central station area, when he sees several young men, he ends up inviting one of them and takes him to dinner at another restaurant. They leave the place and the sound of The corner of the Vomero laundry room follows the car trip to Ostia beach, where Pasolini will be attacked by two men who insult him for his sexual orientation and beat him up. The boy, in the end, also participates in the beating and ends up running over the victim's inert body with his car.
Pasolini's tragic fate is associated with the death and resurrection of Epifanio, as the viewer is once again faced with the final part of Porno-Teo-Kolossal, practically the same read for Ninetto in the restaurant. And the film continues to show the discovery of the body in the sand, again the three shots of EUR, Laura who goes to give the news to Susanna, and ends focusing on the work table and the open agenda for the days of November 6-7, with the commitments made.
Between successes and dubious solutions, Abel Ferrara may have made not “a film about Pasolini, but a film for Pasolini”, as Vasco Câmara ventures, to demonstrate his admiration. The choice of Willem Dafoe as the protagonist was a good one, as he managed to look physically similar to his real character. The actor, however, is American and this leads to some mistakes, in addition to the alternation, not only on his part, between English and Italian, which causes strangeness and some moments of unwanted hilarity.
The musical repertoire is quite adequate, except perhaps for the inclusion of two North American songs, which belong more to the universe of Abel Ferrara than to that of Pasolini: I'll take you there e Polk salad Annie. As for the other songs, the same ones are present Passion according to Saint Matthew, which served as leitmotiv to the protagonist's wanderings in Beggar (Maladjustment Social, 1961); the same The corner of the Vomero laundry room used in some sections of The Decameron (decameron, 1971); Luba Mass, whose “Glory” was heard in The Gospel according to Matthew (The Gospel According to Matthew, 1964) and which, together with the Croatian folk song How are you at home? come to remember the ethnic music that the filmmaker was interested in, including in the soundtrack of his films; in addition to the aria “Una voce poco fa”, by The Barber of Seville, by Gioacchino Rossini, in the voice of Maria Callas, who embodied Pasolin's Medea.
It is not only through music that Abel Ferrara tries to recover the universe of his subject, but also through some friends and actors. From his circle of friends, besides Moravia, Penna and Sciascia, the writer and painter Carlo Levi, author of the poster for Beggar. Among the interpreters, Adriana Asti, already present in Beggar, when she gave life to Amore, now in the role of Susanna Pasolini, and Ninetto Davoli, who, since The Gospel according to Matthew, participated in several Pasolini productions, in charge of replacing Eduardo De Filippo as Epifanio and being replaced by Riccardo Scamarcio in the role of Nunzio.
If Scamarcio does not have the spontaneity and mischievous malice that characterized Ninetto in Uccellacci e uccellini (hawks and birds, 1966), of which Porno-Teo-Kolossal is a kind of resumption, Davoli does not have the interpretative gifts nor the artistic verve of the famous Neapolitan actor and playwright. To cite Eduardo, Ninetto and Scamarcio means to dwell on one of the most daring points of Pasolini: the sequences in which Ferrara tried to “replace” the Italian filmmaker in directing a film that he was unable to complete.
The first news about Porno-Teo-Kolossal date back to 1966 and Pasolini begins to refer to a film about the Three Wise Men in the prologue of “Che cosa sono le nuvole?” (“What are the clouds?”), the third episode of the film Italian capriccio (caprice à italian, 1967), focusing on the posters of the four parts that should have made up the project Che cos'è il cinema?. Pasolini resumed the project in 1973, having prepared a 75-page script entitled The cinema, which concluded in 1975, when he wrote a letter to Eduardo De Filippo, sending him a draft of the script and hoping that the actor would not only accept to play Epifanio but also help him improvise the dialogues.
Resuming the fabulous, apologetic and picaresque tone of Uccellacci e uccellini and adding a great deal of eroticism, Pasolini once again puts on stage two wanderers who, this time, follow a Guiding Star, a metaphor for ideology, on a long journey through three emblematic Western cities – Sodom, Gomorrah and Numantia – and an Eastern city, Ur, where “the Messiah was born, but long ago he died and was forgotten”, a discovery that corresponds to the end of any and all utopias. The journey begins in a mythical Naples, with the air of a nativity scene, where Epiphanio learns of the birth of the Messiah in the market.
Following the comet, he sets off, accompanied by his servant Nunzio, towards the North to reach Sodom, which is nothing more than the Rome of the 1950s (still paleoindustrial), where men frequent men and women circulate with women; Gomorrah, which corresponds to Milan of the 1960s-1970s (therefore neocapitalist), and whose inhabitants “do not tolerate any diversity, any minority, any exception”, and Numantia, or Paris, a socialist city besieged by a fascist army, which, in some way, refers to the 1940s (technocratic society).
No Porno-Teo-Kolossal In Abel Ferrara's book, of the three European cities, only one appears, Rome, although it is not named, not even as Sodom. This causes confusion in a viewer who knows a little about the Italian capital, since, after leaving a place where everything reminds one of the eternal city and not Naples, where people speak in Roman dialect and not in Neapolitan, Epifanio and Nunzio arrive in a city from which the first thing that can be seen is the Pyramid of Cestius, near the Roma Ostiense train station, where they disembarked.
In addition to this strangeness, the exchange of one location for another is problematic, as it betrays Pasolini's intentions. From the beginning of the 1970s, the filmmaker, who had been disillusioned with the adopted city that had dazzled him when he first arrived, became enchanted with Naples, where he shot part of Il Decameron. In it he once again sought a “spontaneity” of living that did not necessarily correspond to reality.
Another problematic point of the Porno-Teo-Kolossal Ferrari's is the representation of the Fertilization Festival, which the American filmmaker transforms into a great orgy, while in Pasolini's argument, intercourse is organized, as in a brothel for military personnel: each couple enters a cubicle, does not copulate in front of the others, although they hear the shouts of encouragement from their companions. It is programmatic sex, with a specific objective, not pleasurable, since pleasure between a man and a woman is prohibited and is severely punished, which refers to how sex was approached in Salò: an act performed on reified bodies.
This bacchanal, the excerpts from the last film, the first sequence taken from Petroleum, the lewd tone with which Laura Betti speaks of the film shot in Croatia, the reiteration of the night raids, the unequivocal version of Pasolini's murder for his homosexuality[4] If, on the one hand, they refer to one of the central aspects of the work of the Bolognese author – the clamor for scandal –, on the other, they blur the less “profane” and more intellectual side of his tireless work, although the film does not shy away from focusing on them. The result was a “fan film” (in Câmara’s definition), aimed at other fans, because it is full of clues that can only be fully deciphered by those who know the life and work of the biographee, in their multiple aspects; a “fan film” that could not avoid the hagiography in relation to the figure of Pasolini, quite common after his death, a work despite everything without “scandal”, in the sense that everything is already known, predictable, a work without controversy or contradictions, an achievement that, in this sense, ended up being hardly Pasolini-like.
*Mariarosaria Fabris is a retired professor at the Department of Modern Letters at FFLCH-USP. Author, among other texts, of “A descampado bathed in moonlight: notes and fragments”, which is part of the volume An intellectual in the emergency: Pasolini read in Brazil (Unesp/Unicamp).
Revised version of “Pasolini, a Pasolini”, published in MIGLIORIN, Cezar et al. (org.). Annals of full texts of the XXI Socine Meeting.
References
BACHMANN, Gideon.; GALLO, Donata. “[Intervista rilasciata a Gideon Bachmann e Donata Gallo]”. In: PASOLINI, Pier Paolo Profile cinema, Milan: Mondadori, 2001.
CÂMARA, Vasco. “Dafoe’s head, Depardieu’s body”; “Abel Ferrara’s Pasolini has no scandal”. Epsilon, Lisbon, Dec. 2014.
COLOMBO, Furio. “'Oggi sono in molti a credere che c'è bisogno di uccidere'”. Stamp Sera, Turin, 3 Nov. 1975.
COLOMBO, Furio. “Pasolini: 'Siamo tutti in pericolo'”. All books, Turin, year 1, n. 2, 8 Nov. 1975.
FABRIS, Mariarosaria. “A moonlit open space: notes and fragments”. In: AMOROSO, Maria Betânia; ALVES, Cláudia Tavares (org.). An intellectual in urgency: Pasolini read in Brazil. Campinas-São Paulo: UNICAMP Publishing House-UNESP Publishing House, 2022.
MOURINHA, Jorge. “An actor in search of the human factor: Willem Dafoe”. Epsilon”, Lisbon, Dec. 2014.
PASOLINI, Pier Paolo. “Porno-Teo-Kolossal”. In: ________. Profile cinema , cit.
PASOLINI, Pier Paolo. “Appunto 55 – Il platen della Casilina”; “[Lettera ad Alberto Moravia]”. In: ________. Petroleum. Turin: Einaudi, 1992.
SICILIANO, Enzo. Pasolini's Life. Milan: Rizzoli, 1978.
Notes
[1] There is a translation into Portuguese of these works by Pasolini: Oil (Barcelona: Planeta DeAgostini, 2002), which is part of the collection “Foreign writers of today”; Porno-Teo-Kolossal (São Paulo: Sobinfluência, 2024), with a foreword by the translator himself, Andityas Matos.
[2] By reducing “Appunto 55” to a mere reiteration of the provision of sexual services by the young men, Ferrara deprives them of their own identity, which is present in the novel (name, peculiar physical and behavioral traits, way of dressing, a profession, a history). Furthermore, by refusing to describe even one embrace, he erases the social inversion intended by Pasolini by placing the sodomized bourgeois in an inferior position to the lumpenproletarians to whom he submits himself. Not to mention the sacred aura with which the author invests the sexual relationship, by making the young men’s bodies, or rather their members, the receptacle of mystery. See text written by me.
[3] Although Pasolini began to distance himself from the Italian capital in the early 1960s, when the city underwent urban and social transformations, the statement that Rome was finished was probably inspired by his interview with Gideon Bachmann and Donata Gallo (which appears in the film's credits), when he declared that “power has destroyed Rome, the Romans no longer exist, a young Roman is the corpse of himself, who still lives biologically and is in a state of weightlessness between the old values of his Roman popular culture and the new petty-bourgeois values that have been imposed on him”.
[4] There is still no definitive version of Pasolini's death. According to Philippe Sollers, no matter what motivated his murder – fear that he would expose compromising facts or homophobia – it was always a political crime. See text written by me.
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