Pier Paolo Pasolini Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922-1975) was a cutting edge Italian gay communist film-maker of the sixties and seventies until his murder. Now, thirty years later, his 'cold case' may be reopened. Pasolini was born in Friulia, and wrote in that dialect. He served in the Italian resistance in the closing years of the Second World War, and briefly joined the PCI (Italian Communist Party) in the mid-forties, until he was expelled due to the open avowal of his gay sexual orientation in 1947. He seems to have always been out, and never lost his marxist faith, although he also seems to have been a conservative romanticist at the same time, cherishing Italian and mediaevil European touchpieces. Oddly enough, he even reached an entente cordiale with the Catholic Church, which even went so far as to venerate his early, black and white Gospel According to Saint Matthew (1955). At the same time as he was winning ecclesiastical praise, he wrote Ragazzi di Vita (1954), which dealt with the life of teenage gay Italian male prostitutes or rent boys, and which was threatened with prohibition on obscenity grounds. He wasn't as frontline about his sexual orientation in his filmed work during the sixties and seventies, although it was foregrounded and backgrounded in Theorem (1968), which explored concurrent Italian gay Freudo-Marxist criticisms of the family-centred oedipus complex as central to repression of desire. In that work, a mysterious stranger infiltrates a middle-class Italian family and undoes that repression, destroying the family in the process. He was also an experimenter, and dealt with alternative ways of representing human beings onscreen from the perspectives of past portraiture and landscape painting, and Islamic miniatures, in the Decameron (1970) and Arabian Nights (1974). Memorably, in his Canterbury Tales, he showed the effects that class had on the lives of gay men in the Middle Ages, when two 'sodomites' of different class backgrounds were caught. The nobleman went free into anonymity, while the urban artisan was burnt at the stake. His final work, Salo: Or 120 Days of Sodom (1975), proved to be his most controversial. He decided to update the infamous original text of the Marquis de Sade, which dealt with several eighteenth century libertines and their abuse of hapless male and female teenagers in a chateau. Pasolini retained the framework of de Sade's story, but updated the setting to Salo, an Italian community that was the site of a particularly brutal atrocity while Italy was under Nazi occupation. This raised some disturbing questions about the depiction of fascism on film, which was not as distanced by history as one might have thought. In the seventies, Italy was wracked by Maoist marxist and neofascist terrorism, and Pasolini was believed to have received death threats due to the depiction of sexuality, degradation and violence within the film. Salo has aroused fierce controversy elsewhere in the Western world. Its anti-censorship defenders argue that Salo is a valid depiction of actually existing fascism and lays bare the psychological and social structures that led to degradation, brutalisation and eventual massacre of the inmates of concentration camps during that period. Given Serbian atrocities during the Bosnian and Kosovar Wars of the nineties, that masterpiece is still sadly relevant to contemporary debates about the meaning of actually existing fascism. It is brutal and explicit because it has to be. Pino Pelosi, a Roman rent boy, was charged with Pasolini's murder and served a nine year prison sentence. However, Pasolini's friends and political allies have questioned the involvement of the Italian civil service, and incoherence of the documents related to the investigation of his murder, while Pelosi has argued that three to five other assailants actually murdered the controversial director during a recent current affairs programme on Italy's TV Rai Tre. Another collaborator, Sergio Citti, has argued that five other men were involved in Pasolini's murder. Thirty Italian federal MPs have petitioned President Silvio Berlusconi, asking him to reopen this 'cold case.' So the question arises, who killed Pier Paolo Pasolini? Was it Pelosi, or was it assailants as yet unknown? Bibliography: Naomi Greene: Pier Paolo Pasolini: Cinema as Heresy: Princeton: Princeton University Press: 1990. Sam Rohdie: The Passion of Pier Paolo Pasolini: Bloomington: Indiana University Press/London: British Film Institute: 1995. Barth David Schwartz: Pasolini Requiem: New York: Pantheon: 1992. Enzo Siciliano: Pasolini: A Bibliography: London: Bloomsbury: 1987. Craig Young - 17th May 2005