Talking to Pier Paolo Pasolini
Unearthing a conversation with the acclaimed director of “Salò” and “The Decameron”
In June 1967, I came to Rome with some twenty programs of New American Cinema, which were presented at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia. During my stay, Gideon Bachmann, an old friend of mine who was working with Pasolini, arranged a meeting between us at Pasolini’s apartment. Following are excerpts from our conversation that day.
— Jonas Mekas
Pier Paolo Pasolini: I think that the complete, total novelty of … let’s call it American experimental cinema, is the spirit of the New Left, which is a new political, social phenomenon. In terms of spirit, the New Left is an entirely new thing. I’m not even saying that your films necessarily belong to the New Left consciously and willingly, but that in the historical sense, they are a different expression of its spirit. Your new forms are new contents of opposition to American society.
Jonas Mekas: I always ask that our traveling programs be announced as political film programs, but often the organizers of local screenings fail to do this. In fact, this demand of mine is the one that usually arouses the most discussion.
Gideon Bachmann: Perhaps it would be practical, at this point, to clarify in which manner this anarchic cinema has a political function.
PPP: That seems very obvious to me. It’s the same as the reason why the director of the Pesaro Festival didn’t want to stress the political aspect of your films. He is, of course, a Socialist, and thus a traditional Marxist by formation and education — by morality. Thus, for him, Jonas, your films are not political because they come from the midst of the middle class, and therefore they do not reflect the Marxist experience. It’s difficult for him to accept that they are political, if they aren’t Marxist.
JM: I guess ours is a Marxism that has gone through Freud, Wilhelm Reich, the Beats, and LSD …
PPP: Sure, but besides that, American knowledge of Marxism is learned, not a lived experience. There has never been a revolution in America that could be called Marxist, and thus Americans have no direct experience of it. For Europeans, Marxism is a living experience. So I consider your fight a political fight outside of the Marxist fight, outside of the Marxist scheme. Therefore I love your new cinema, and do not love the Italian one. I do not like the new Italian cinema, because it is qualunquista. Much avant-garde Italian literature, by the way, is also qualunquista.
GB: That word, of course, cannot be translated. I’ll have to give an approximate explanation. The Fronte dell’Uomo Qualunque (The Common Man’s Front) was a political party in Italy shortly after World War II that pretended to be sort of everyman’s party, but in effect hid neo-Fascist tendencies. Today, qualunquista has become an adjective in the Italian political dictionary that could be vaguely identified with our use of reactionary, but it also signifies the refusal of social responsibility and has totalitarian leanings, a sort of Hell’s Angels attitude. It’s very hard to explain; anyway, it’s a dirty word in progressive circles. If you recall the list of accusations that Orson Welles, in Pasolini’s La Ricotta, throws at the idiot journalist who has come to ask him for an interview, it includes qualunquista —
PPP: — and razzista (racist).
JM: European political movements are always very conscious, based on the experiences you described, but in America we have very little political experience. Artistic movements — and even political ones like strikes and student movements — did not start as conscious political movements, but as personal reactions, and only later gained a larger political leaning and consciousness. Now they are approaching, sort of, Marxist thinking, in a sense, but they started as personal reactions first, as a not wanting to stand the situation as it was. We say, “We don’t know what’s ahead of us, but we don’t want to be where we are.” That may be the major difference between American and European younger generations, with the latter always wanting to have, at the beginning, a political purpose and an aim before they act. The question that always meets us in Europe is: “What is your aim?” We say, “Our aim is to get out from where we are.” That’s why they often call us anarchists.
PPP: In Europe, too, however, there are similar experiences. The Bohème poets of the nineteenth century, for example, and the, let’s call them Rimbaudians, they’ve lived this experience.
JM: And the Dutch provos now … We know that in America today there are seven million cameras in people’s homes, seven million 8mm and 16mm cameras. We will take cinema away from the industry and give it to the people in their homes. That is the whole meaning of what’s called Underground Cinema. By taking cinema away from the industry and by exaggerating, by saying that EVERYONE can make films, we are freeing those seven million cameras. Any child who grows up in a home and sees that camera — he could already dosomething else with it other than take tourist movies. He could do something with it. I think that eventually these seven million cameras can become a political force in this way: all aspects of reality will be covered. Eventually the camera will go into the prisons, into the banks, into the army, and help us to see where we are, so that we can go out of here and go somewhere else. We want to give these seven million cameras a voice.
PPP: I’ve got my doubts … how many typewriters are there in America? I don’t mean to ridicule your hope, on the contrary. But I’m trying to find out why you find the cinema a better road to liberation than literature?
JM: Because with a typewriter you write your own fantasies, you reflect your own distortions, your own dreams. Good; you write poetry. But the camera shows reality, bits of reality, faces and situations. Because this is not Hollywood or Cinecittà filmmaking, which are staged. But these seven million cameras will be used to film reality “as it is.” Nothing can be hidden behind a face that you actually see.
PPP: I can see exactly where your problem lies.
Up to this point, the American revolt has been a stupendous thing, the thing I admire most in the world today. But in essence it has always remained basically irrational, having always found its motive inside of America itself, in the authentic part of America, which is democracy; that is the truest example of pure democracy.
At this point, of course, what is necessary is guidance, but this guidance can only be an ideology. America isn’t awaiting guidance, it’s awaiting an ideology.
If an ideology can be born, you will have a civil war. And if you have a civil war, the world will be safe, for maybe 300 years. If all this can crystallize somehow — because that’s how man is made — into an ideology, it will give people the force to make a civil war. It may be true that an ideology isn’t the only thing that can unite people and facilitate their liberty; there is also religion. Maybe what you are creating in the USA is a mystical religious movement? Maybe even such a movement can bring about a civil war.
JM: Those civil wars are the bloodiest …
PPP: In any case, it is eminently clear that if this civil war doesn’t happen, America will assume the heredity of Germany, becoming the country of Nazism carried to its extreme.
GB: Is there anything positive about the Italian situation that would interest the USA?
PPP: No. I am saying it to you in a very simple manner: no. I have just returned from Morocco, where I shot my latest film, and upon returning I was tempted to drop everything, drop the films, drop my previous life, and return to live in Morocco. And not because I love Morocco, but because my arrival in Italy was so terrible, so shocking, it was unbearable. There is no sign of hope, no light, nothing. It was like arriving in a madhouse of real mad people; that is, calm madmen. I have passed ten days of terror; it was as if I couldn’t live in Italy any more. For those ten days I considered leaving Italy. And the worst thing is that the Italians don’t notice anything. And after what you tell me about New York, maybe I’ll give up everything and go live in a desert in Morocco, where the problems are simple, known, pre-industrial: laziness, underdevelopment, retardation, poverty — things we have learned to cope with.
Read the full exchange, along with Jonas Mekas’s review of Pasolini’s Selected Poetry, on BOMB.
