Generally, cinematic controversies seem less relevant as the years go by. It's kind of quaint these days to learn that Psycho was almost as notable for showing a bathroom onscreen as it was for its shower murder scene. But for the Italian filmmaker, poet, and novelist Pier Paolo Pasolini, currently the subject of a major citywide tribute in New York, the rule does not apply. His work today seems even more transgressive than it did during his heyday.
Pasolini was a gay Marxist, but those descriptors don't quite do justice to the controversial nature of his beliefs, his lifestyle, or his films. Politically, he was far removed from the orthodoxy of Italy's powerful Communist party. Sexually, he had a thing for teenage street hustlers, and the rough nature of
his tastes often caused him some degree of isolation even in the Italian intellectual community, where homosexuality itself wasn't so uncommon. (He would eventually meet his brutal death, under mysterious circumstances, at the hands of one of these hustlers, in 1975.)
Yet the key theme in Pasolini's films wasn't Marx or homosexuality, but God. Although the director was an atheist, he lived under the influence of Catholic morality and iconography. His most important and popular film was 1964's
The Gospel According to Matthew, one of the most devout cinematic depictions of Christ ever, and still featured prominently on the Vatican's list of the best religious films of all time. To an outside observer,
The Gospel may seem like an intriguing aberration in Pasolini's greater body of work; many of his other films were regularly condemned and banned by Church organizations. But its depiction of a Christ who came from the lower classes, and the film's gritty, almost verite style interspersed with glimpses of visual poetry that recalled early Renaissance painting is pure Pasolini.
The Gospel served as a rebuke to the prettified, movie-star Christs of Hollywood spectaculars; the film is a direct influence on both Martin Scorsese's
The Last Temptation of Christ 
and on Mel Gibson's
The Passion of the Christ. Obviously, there is no sex in Pasolini's film, but the alternately earthy and otherworldly appeal of his Christ figure finds an alarming correlative in his later, more controversial
Teorema (1968). In that film, Terrence Stamp plays a mysterious, silent stranger who infiltrates a smug bourgeois family, has sex with its members (both male and female), and tears it apart. In a sense,
Teorema, which Pasolini himself called "a straightforward apologia concerning the descent of God and his relationship to man," plays almost like a modernist sequel to
The Gospel. This time, Pasolini's Christ is resurrected into the world of late '60s European ennui. Although he wasn't particularly sympathetic to the free-love espousing student radicals of his day (he famously sided with the working-class policemen who brutalized them), Pasolini clearly saw sex as one of the few aspects of human interaction with any real revolutionary power.
Sex is again the key in the "Trilogy of Life," the three adaptations Pasolini made in the early '70s:
The Decameron,
The Canterbury Tales, and
The Arabian Nights. Removed from the confrontational politics of
Teorema and its companion piece
Pigsty (1969), these films, liberally adapted from their canonical texts, depicted a romantically charged Medieval world steeped in sex, where naked youths could thumb their noses at power. In Pasolini's hands, this pre-industrial world was one where, contrary to common notions about the Middle Ages, pious religious authorities were often seen as objects of ridicule:
The Canterbury Tales, for example, ends with a vision of Hell in which Satan graphically shits out streams of screaming friars. Imagine someone trying to get away with that today.
But nothing in Pasolini's previous films could have prepared audiences for his final work, the unwatchably brutal
Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975), released just after his death.
Based in part on the Marquis de Sade's controversial work, it's nominally set during the final days of Mussolini's short-lived attempt to establish a Fascist republic in the North of Italy. Pasolini's version gives us four cipher-like authority figures — a Bishop, a Magistrate, a Duke and a President — who round up nine boys and nine girls and enact horrible acts of torture, deviancy and murder upon them. Although there is a bishop among the film's chief villains, God is totally absent from the proceedings. Also absent is the sex that seemed so liberating and impulsive in The Trilogy of Life, as well as the sex that seemed like such a revolutionary force in
Teorema. They are replaced by degradation. Gone too are the earthiness and the lived-in textures of Pasolini's other films: the spaces in
Salo are cold, symmetrical, devoid of any escape or life. Sex is no longer a challenge to the church, but just another method by which the church (and other symbols of authority) controls and commodifies and destroys human beings.
Salo is the one Pasolini film that feels almost nothing like a Pasolini film — but that seems to be the point.
The radical intertwining of sex and religion throughout a director's body of work is practically unthinkable today. Most filmmakers are lucky if they can tackle such a subject just once. What is perhaps most remarkable about these films is that while Pasolini certainly grew and changed as an artist, his voice and sensibility remained unmistakably consistent: the director who made one of the Vatican's favorite movies was the same one whose final film is still banned in numerous countries. More significantly, the journey between these works — from an admiring vision of Jesus as a dust-covered revolutionary, to
Salo's final
cri de coeur at the systematic destruction of individuality and freedom — corresponds to the modern world's own tale of radical disillusionment. As a result, Pasolini's transgressions seem even more revolutionary today, and his films more indispensable than ever.
©2007 Bilge Ebiri & hooksexup.com