When Pasolini Came to New York

In 1967, Pier Paolo Pasolini came to New York to promote The Gospel According to St. Matthew and Hawks and Sparrows. Not that he didn’t travel a lot (Africa, India, The Middle East, Yemen, Iran), but the New York trip was special because New York in the 1960s was undergoing significant political upheaval. And Pasolini, ... When Pasolini Came to New York

In 1967, Pier Paolo Pasolini came to New York to promote The Gospel According to St. Matthew and Hawks and Sparrows. Not that he didn’t travel a lot (Africa, India, The Middle East, Yemen, Iran), but the New York trip was special because New York in the 1960s was undergoing significant political upheaval. And Pasolini, well, was always undergoing a poetic upheaval.

An account of Pasolini’s trip was recorded in Agnès Varda’s interview recently hyped by Criterion Channel, “Pier Paolo Pasolini – Agnès Varda – New York – 1967.” Filmed with 16mm camera in hand, Varda filmed on 42nd street, as Pasolini meanders around, jacket slung over his shoulder, amidst typical passersby, lights, faces and chaos of multicultural New York, to the beat of The Doors.

Now, a new book published by Inga (1740 W. 18th Street, Chicago, IL) features an “in-depth interview … conducted in New York in 1969,” Pasolini’s subsequent visit to New York, with Guiseppe Cardillo, longtime director of Instituto Italiano di Cultura of New York.

The opening pages are as follows:

“Pasolini had a persuasive, musical voice: it seemed to caress his words so as to gracefully proffer them to his interlocutors, with all the freshness of dew (rosada’ will itself be the dazzling keyword that summons him irresistibly into poetry in the Friulan language); almost like a perfume or a Proustian taste in which you rediscover the most vital and real part of yourself. Anyone who, like me, had the opportunity to hear Pasolini read his own poetry, will know what I mean.

“In this calm, self-effacing phonic expressiveness, in this vocal hugeness, Pasolini was nonetheless able to express profound concepts and sentiments, intense as well as sharp, and mercilessly logical, which caught his interlocutor off guard, and which could carry the weight of unavoidable stones. His reasoning, fertile and dry at the same time, was charged, in his speaking, with an inexorable progressive dialectical force, which I have encountered only in Enrico Berlinguer; obviously, one shouldn’t force the comparison: I’m alluding merely to the pure force of suggestion that these two reasoning voices knew how to provoke in those who listen(ed) to them.

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Pier Paolo Pasolini, best known as a filmmaker and writer, also engaged in painting, though intermittently. His views on painting, collected in Heretical Aesthetics: Pasolini on Painting, reflect his complex relationship with the art world. While Pasolini admired classical painters like Caravaggio, whose work he described as an exploration of realism and truth, he was deeply critical of modern artists such as Picasso and Warhol.

Pasolini was introduced to Caravaggio’s work by art historian Roberto Longhi, whom he studied under in Bologna. Pasolini wrote about Caravaggio’s unique use of light, remarking that the artist’s figures appeared as if “suspended, as if by an excess of truth,” referring to the almost hyper-real quality of Caravaggio’s realism.

Pasolini never warmed to abstract painting, critiquing works like those of Giorgio Morandi, although he admired Morandi’s focus on realism. He also expressed political discontent with abstract art, which aligned with the Italian Communist Party’s general disapproval.

As for Warhol, Pasolini viewed him as emblematic of American consumerism and sameness. He observed that Warhol’s repetitive depictions in his silkscreens erased individual identities, reducing figures to mere symbols of a homogenized culture, which he found troubling in a world increasingly dominated by mass media and commercialism.