Pasolini

The Criterion Collection

June 2023

PIER PAOLO PASOLINI

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The power of consumer goods has been engendered by the so-called liberal and progressive demands of freedom, and, by appropriating them, has emptied them of their meaning, and changed their nature.

PIER PAOLO PASOLINI

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Their discovery of the void brings with it new implications: not only that they must continue on in their actions and diligence, no longer considered as duties but as gratuitous, senseless routines, but also the exhilarating realization that all is nothing but a game.

PIER PAOLO PASOLINI

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Death does determine life.

PIER PAOLO PASOLINI

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When I make a film I'm always in reality among the trees, and among the people like yourselves. There's no symbolic or conventional filter between me and reality as there is in literature. The cinema is an explosion of my love for reality.

PIER PAOLO PASOLINI

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Nothing remains but to hope the end will come to extinguish the unrelenting pain of waiting for it.

PIER PAOLO PASOLINI

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We survive, in the confusion of a life reborn beyond reason.

PIER PAOLO PASOLINI

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The sexual freedom of today for most people is really only a convention, an obligation, a social duty, a social anxiety, a necessary feature of the consumer's way of life.

PIER PAOLO PASOLINI

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Truth lies not only in a dream, but in many dreams.

PIER PAOLO PASOLINI

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I think to scandalize is a right, to be scandalized is a pleasure, and those who refuse to be scandalized are moralists.

PIER PAOLO PASOLINI

From Roman Poems

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The fury of confession, at first,

then the fury of clarity:

It was from you, Death, that such hypocritical

obscure feeling was born! And now

let them accuse me of every passion,

let them bad-mouth me, let them say I’m deformed,

impure, obsessed, a dilettante, a perjurer.

You isolate me, you give me the certainty of life,

I’m on the stake. I play the card of fire

and I win this little, immense goodness of mine.

I can do it, for I have suffered you too much!

I return to you as an émigré returns

to his own country and rediscovers it:

I made a fortune (in the intellect)

and I’m happy, as I once was,

destitute of any norm,

a black rage of poetry in my breast.

A crazy old-age youth.

Once your joy was confused with terror,

it’s true, and now almost with other joy,

livid and arid, my passion deluded.

Now you really frighten me,

for you are truly close to me,

part of my angry state, of obscure hunger,

of the anxiety almost of a new being.

PIER PAOLO PASOLINI

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The sense comes back to me of life as it always was then, an affliction even blinder because wondrously filled with sweetness.

PIER PAOLO PASOLINI

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Behold those times re-created by the brutal power of sunlit images,the light of life’s tragedy. The walls of the trial, the field of the firing squad; and the distant ghost of Rome’s suburbs in a ring, gleaming white in naked light. Gunshots: our death, our survival.

PIER PAOLO PASOLINI

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Every day my anxiety is higher, every day the grief more mortal. Today more than yesterday terror exalts me.

PIER PAOLO PASOLINI

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The birds sang in the dust in an elaborate weave, ambiguous, deafening, prey to existence poor passions lost between the modest summits of groves of mulberry and elder; and I, like them, in secluded places reserved for the lost and pure, would wait for evening to fall, for the silent smells of fire and joyous misery to fill the air, for the Angelus bell to toll, veiled in the new peasant mystery fulfilled in the ancient mystery.

PIER PAOLO PASOLINI

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It’s not Love. But what fault is it of mine if my affections do not become Love? Very much my fault, I would say, when I can live from day to day on mad purity, blind pity ... Make a scandal of meekness. But the violence of the senses and intellect that has confounded me for years was the only way.

PIER PAOLO PASOLINI

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For to a boy it can seem that he shall never have what he alone has never had.

SALÒ, OR 120 DAYS OF SODOM

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Pier Paolo Pasolini
Italy, 1975

THE STREET KIDS
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Pier Paolo Pasolini

Translated by Ann Goldstein

PIER PAOLO PASOLINI
"Returning to the Village"
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I

What are you doing 
by the fire, girl, 
pale as a sapling 
fading in the dusk?
“I’m kindling old sticks. 
The smoke rises dark 
and tells me the world 
I live in is safe.”
But by the sweet-smelling fire 
I cannot breathe.
I wish I were the wind
dying down in the village.

II

My journey is over. 
Sweet smell of polenta, 
sad lowing of cattle. 
My journey is over.
“You’ve come here among us, 
but we only live,
live quiet and dead,
like water that trickles 
unseen between hedges.”

III

Midday chimes ring
festive in my village.
Yet what silence the bell casts over the fields!
You haven’t changed, bell;
in awe I return to your voice.
“Time does not move: 
behold the fathers’ smiles 
in the children’s eyes
like rain on the branches.”

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Borrowed from The Selected Poetry of Pier Paolo Pasolini (Univ of Chicago, 2014), Edited and Translated by Stephen Sartarelli