Pasolini, Pasolini!

Pasolini! Pasolini! is a monologue about loss. In a performance that interweaves memories, scandals and passages from legal records, Paolo Mazzarelli explores the sense of loss provoked by the passing of an intellectual, maverick and prophet.

In truth, the young Milanese actor Paolo Mazzarelli, winner of the 2001 Premio Speciale Scenario, does not set out to put Pasolini the man in the spotlight, nor his political and cultural legacy. Pasolini lived his life and left everything a man can possibly leave to ensure he is remembered. There is no trace here of Pasolini the writer, no mention of his works. What stands out instead is an unmistakable sense of loss, the loss of a man of great intellectual rigour and strength of character, the likes of whom Italy has not seen again. This was a man who, armed with his poetry, demonstrated a truly radical and independent mind and a loathing for convention; a man who, in his quest to challenge conventional ideas, was deliberately provocative and yet nevertheless made no attempt to hide his doubts, his internal conflicts or his intellectual revisions. Pasolini, Pasolini! is a description of loss and the void left by the absence of an interlocutor around whom disparate voices gather: “voices” from the trial records and documents of the 33 judicial proceedings Pasolini was subjected to during his lifetime; the voices of the lawyers, the politicians, critics and journalists who observed and commented upon the scandals and the morality of a life lived on the edge, the fragile indeterminacy of the words Mazzarelli found in Night Just Before the Forest, the pulsating drama by Bernard-Marie Koltès which here serves to illuminate in counter light the blunt, meticulously detailed, no holds barred accounts of the trials collected in the book entitled Pasolini: cronaca giudiziaria, persecuzione e morte / Pasolini: Law Reports, Persecution, Death edited by Laura Betti.