One should at least watch The Tales of Canterbury, The Flower of a Thousand and One Nights, Salò (few years ago I watched it mainly for fun) and do research about the director himself before interpreting this film- it is so complex and self-contradictory. I will go with others’ questions that made me think, and try add some thoughts.
- how might we compare and contrast this film with neorealist techniques?
- why did Pasolini renounce his Trilogy of Life, stating it as his least favorite set of works?
- what is one possible interpretation of the last line: "Why create a piece of art when dreaming about it is so much nicer?"
A: Pasolini prefers working with real people rather than professional actors. He said, "In general, I choose actors because of what they are as human beings, not because of what they can do. Terence Stamp (-plays God in Teorema) was offended by this because I never asked him to demonstrate his acting ability. It was like stealing from him, using his reality. I had a similar experience with Anna Magnani on ‘Mama Roma.’ She also felt I was stealing from her." He chose his mother to play Mary in The Gospel According to Saint Matthew because “when she saw Christ go on the cross, she felt the same pain that she felt when my brother, a partisan, was killed during the war.” (http://www.moviecrazed.com/outpast/pasolini.html) In this case, how neorealist filmmakers choose actors (De Sica chose Maggiorani because of his hands) seems to share some similarities with part of Pasilini’s standards for casting.
However, the reason why they did so is different. Pasolini used to state that, while neorealist films were characterized by “credulousness, naturalism, human warmth and irony”, he was trying to “capture the ‘sacrality’ of reality itself.” (Lawton, when did you say this?) In other word, though both trying to capture reality on film, neorealist films portray the world as anti-anagogical, while Pasolini endowed the reality itself with mysterious, sacred qualities. He is, like the above article (that link) titled- The Atheist Who Was Obsessed With God. He is fascinating.
In this film however, Pasolini definitely made fun of ‘religion’ and religious people- poor bishop’s dead body, sex-starved nuns in the convent, dead lying Saint (reminds me Kurosawa’s Roshomon), imaginative priest with his tail for the mare... But in the episode of painting a fresco in Santa Chiara church with internal tale of the brothers debating whether having sex should be punished after death, the painter (Pasolini) wakes up! And with a slow pan on that fresco (something to do with Divina Commedia?), we see Virgin Mary’s mythical image, then other parts of the fresco under Mary- people fighting, servant carries a house on his shoulder, etc..
In my perspective, the reason why Pasolini seems paradoxical and rejecting religion is precisely because he sees through the ‘religion’. He noticed how the naive sub-proletariat are manipulated by the Italian politicalized churches, and began to gradually lose hope for the youths, even denied his previous beliefs: “...if now they are human garbage it means that potentially they were such also then; they were, therefore, imbeciles compelled to be adorable, squalid criminals compelled to be likeable rascals, vile good-for-nothings compelled to be saintly innocents, etc. The collapse of the present implies the collapse of the past. Life is a pile of insignificant and ironic ruins.” (Repudiation of the Trilogy of Life).
Although when asked about his “trilogy of life” films, Pasoloni stated that “I find it the most beautiful idea I have ever had, this wish to tell, to recount for the sheer joy of telling and recounting, for the creation of narrative myths, away from ideology, precisely because I have understood that to make an ideological film is finally easier than making a film outwardly lacking ideology” (Bachmann, Gideon, “Pasolini Today: The Interview,” Take One 4 (1973), 18-21), I think part of the reason why he tended to put more interests on “the experience of entering into the most mysterious working of artistic creation...into the ontology of narration, in the making of cinema-cinema” was also the fact that he was angry and confused by his crumbling allegory of love. His ideology was conflicting, so he subconsciously joked about violence and sex without giving logical cause-effect interpretations, thereby presented an orgiastic world that is on the verge of collapse (it reached the disintegration in Salò); maybe he himself was too naive than the religion and sub-proletariat he used to pursuit.
More about Pasolini’s beliefs:
There are times when Pasolini sounds remarkably religious for a self-acknowledged atheist. "I suffer from the nostalgia of a peasant-type religion and that is why I am on the side of the servant," he said, "But I do not believe in a metaphysical god. I am religious because I have a natural identification between reality and God. Reality is divine. That is why my films are never naturalistic. The motivation that unites all of my films is to give back to reality its original sacred significance." (above source)
"When I say God," Pasolini added, "I do not mean a Catholic God. He could belong to any religion, a peasant religion. All religions are really peasant religions. That is why religion is in crisis today. We are passing from a peasant world to an industrial world. But a world does not die, so the peasant civilization lives within us, buried within us." (above source)
“Peasant religion” is a pejorative term for “folk religion” in its second meaning below. According to the Oxford Dictionary of World Religions (1997), folk society is small, isolated, nonliterate and homogeneous, with a strong sense of group solidarity... Behaviour is traditional, spontaneous, uncritical and personal... In a wider sense, folk religion expresses the deep religiosity which exists naturally in most people, and is therefore closely allied to implicit religion.
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