Pier Paolo Pasolini

A collection of essays discussing the famed Italian film director, writer, and intellectual.

More than thirty years after the tragic death of Pier Paolo Pasolini, this volume is intended to acknowledge the significance of his living memory. His artistic and cultural production continues to be a fundamental reference point in any discourse on the state of the arts, and on contemporary political events, in Italy and abroad.

This collection of essays intends to continue the recognition of Pasolini’s teachings and of his role as engaged intellectual, not only as acute observer of the society in which he lived, but also as semiologist, writer, and filmmaker, always heretical in all his endeavors.

Many directors, reporters, and contemporary writers see in the “inconvenient intellectual” personified by Pasolini in his writings, in his films, and in his interviews, an emblematic figure with whom to institute and maintain a constant dialog, both because of the controversial topics he addressed, which are still relevant today, and because of the ways in which he confronted the power structures. His analytical ability made it impossible for him to believe in the myth of progress; instead, he embraced an ideal that pushed him always to struggle on the firing line of controversy.