Pier Paolo Pasolini remains one of the most influential and complex figures in 20th-century cultural and political thought. As a poet, journalist, filmmaker, and intellectual, his work traversed multiple artistic disciplines, from literature to cinema and visual aesthetics. While much scholarship has focused on his films and political engagement, less attention has been given to his role in fashion, costume design, and art direction in his films. Pasolini’s approach to aesthetics was deeply intertwined with his ideological convictions, as he used clothing and visual design as tools to articulate his critique of bourgeois society, consumerism, and neocolonialism. This article explores Pasolini’s literary output—particularly his articles and poetry—and its relationship to his cinematic vision. Additionally, it examines his engagement with fashion and art direction, emphasizing how these elements contributed to the unique visual and ideological fabric of his films. By drawing connections between his poetic sensibilities and his attention to material culture, this study highlights Pasolini’s holistic artistic vision, in which text, image, and design function as interwoven modes of critique and expression.
Pier Paolo Pasolini’s artistic career defies singular categorization. While widely recognized as a filmmaker, his foundation was in poetry and journalism, both of which informed his cinematic language. Pasolini’s poetry, often concerned with themes of loss, class struggle, and cultural transformation, deeply influenced his approach to storytelling in film. At the same time, his engagement with journalism—particularly his critiques of capitalism, fascism, and mass media—shaped the ideological framework of his work.
Beyond literature and film, Pasolini had a distinct aesthetic sensibility that extended to fashion, costume design, and art direction. In his films, clothing was never incidental; it served as a marker of class, history, and ideological struggle. His art direction blended historical accuracy with stylization, creating visual compositions that reinforced his critiques of modernity, capitalism, and the destruction of tradition.
His poetry and journalism, with a focus on how these informed his cinematic themes.
Also, his approach to fashion and costume design, particularly in films such as The Gospel According to Matthew (1964) and The Decameron (1971). Pasolini role as an art director, exploring how his visual compositions reflected his ideological concerns.
By examining these interconnected aspects of Pasolini’s work, this study seeks to provide a comprehensive understanding of his artistic philosophy and its radical critique of contemporary society.
Pasolini’s literary career began with poetry, which remained central to his artistic identity throughout his life. His first major collection, Poesie a Casarsa (1942), written in Friulian dialect, reflected his deep attachment to regional culture and the rural proletariat. This early work already contained themes that would later permeate his films: nostalgia for a disappearing world, a critique of modernity, and a fascination with subaltern identities.
As his political consciousness developed, Pasolini’s poetry became more explicitly engaged with Marxism and the struggles of the working class. Collections such as Le ceneri di Gramsci (1957) grappled with the contradictions of postwar Italy, reflecting on the failure of the Italian Communist Party (PCI) to connect with subaltern communities. His poetry often employed a dialectical method, contrasting past and present, tradition and modernity, revolutionary potential and ideological betrayal.
Pasolini’s poetic vision was not separate from his cinematic one. His films, like his poems, were structured around juxtapositions: sacred and profane, beauty and violence, myth and history. The lyrical nature of his cinematic language—seen in the stark landscapes of The Gospel According to Matthew or the dreamlike sequences of Medea (1969)—can be traced back to his poetic sensibilities.
Pasolini was highly attentive to fashion and costume design in his films, using clothing as a key tool for social and historical commentary. Unlike traditional filmmakers who treated costume as secondary to narrative, Pasolini viewed clothing as an ideological signifier, reflecting class distinctions, cultural erasures, and power dynamics.
In The Gospel According to Matthew, for example, he opted for a neorealist approach, using non-professional actors and historically accurate, rough-textured garments that evoked early Christian iconography. By contrast, The Decameron (1971) and The Canterbury Tales (1972) featured extravagant, painterly costumes inspired by Renaissance and medieval art, reinforcing their connection to European artistic traditions.
In Salò, clothing plays a more sinister role, reflecting the aestheticization of power and cruelty. The ruling elite’s formal, bourgeois attire contrasts starkly with the naked vulnerability of their victims, highlighting the relationship between social hierarchy and bodily control.
Pasolini himself was deeply conscious of his own fashion choices. His signature look—composed of simple but elegant jackets, turtlenecks, and sunglasses—reflected his intellectual yet anti-bourgeois stance. Unlike many leftist intellectuals of his time, he did not reject style but instead used it as a form of self-expression. His fashion choices conveyed an understated elegance that resisted consumerist spectacle while embracing a cultivated aesthetic sensibility.
His engagement with fashion extended beyond personal style; he collaborated with designers such as Piero Tosi, who created costumes for The Gospel According to Matthew and Medea. These collaborations were essential in shaping the visual identity of his films, demonstrating Pasolini’s commitment to every aspect of cinematic creation.
Pasolini’s approach to art direction was inseparable from his broader political and aesthetic vision. He often sought inspiration from classical paintings, particularly those of the Renaissance and early Christian art. Films such as The Gospel According to Matthew and Medea contain compositions reminiscent of Giotto and Piero della Francesca, emphasizing symmetry, starkness, and a sense of timelessness.
At the same time, his art direction rejected the artificiality of commercial cinema. He preferred real locations over constructed sets, integrating landscapes into his visual storytelling. The ruins of ancient civilizations in Oedipus Rex (1967) and the barren, sun-drenched landscapes of The Gospel According to Matthew contribute to a sense of historical continuity and loss.
Pasolini’s use of space was deeply political. In Salò, the cold, fascist villa functions as an architectural metaphor for totalitarian power. In contrast, his earlier films embrace open landscapes and rural settings, symbolizing lost forms of communal life. His meticulous attention to material culture—fabrics, furniture, colors—reinforced his critique of modern alienation.
Pasolini’s work cannot be understood in isolation; his poetry, journalism, fashion choices, and art direction all form part of a unified artistic and ideological project. His engagement with fashion and material culture was never superficial but deeply political, reflecting his critique of capitalism, consumerism, and historical amnesia. By analyzing these elements together, we gain a fuller understanding of Pasolini’s radical vision—one that remains profoundly relevant in today’s cultural and political landscape.
This article also explores the intersection of dialectical Marxism and consumerism through the lens of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s critiques of late capitalism, cultural hegemony, and societal transformation. He engaged deeply with Marxist thought but diverged from traditional historical materialism by emphasizing the cultural and anthropological consequences of consumerist expansion. His critique extended beyond economic exploitation to the erosion of historical and local identities, focusing on how consumerism functioned as a totalizing ideological force. This article examines Pasolini’s engagement with dialectical Marxism, his critique of postwar Italy’s transition from a proletarian to a petit-bourgeois society, and the role of mass media in enforcing a new form of social conformity. By situating Pasolini within the broader discourse of Marxist and post-Marxist theory, this study highlights the originality of his contribution to contemporary critiques of neoliberal capitalism.
Pier Paolo Pasolini was a multifaceted intellectual whose work traversed literature, cinema, and political theory. Deeply influenced by Marxism, he engaged critically with historical materialism while simultaneously rejecting dogmatic interpretations of class struggle. His concerns extended beyond economic analysis to include culture, language, and the transformation of human subjectivity under capitalism. Pasolini’s critique of consumerism was rooted in a dialectical understanding of history, wherein he saw postwar Italy’s shift toward a consumer society not as progress but as a profound rupture with its past.
Pasolini’s work demonstrates a unique synthesis of Marxist dialectics and a pessimistic view of modernization. He viewed consumer capitalism as more insidious than traditional class oppression because it restructured social relations, annihilated local cultures, and created a homogenized, depoliticized mass. Unlike orthodox Marxist views that saw capitalism’s contradictions as leading to its downfall, Pasolini feared that consumerism had created an ideological apparatus so powerful that it precluded resistance. This article explores his theoretical engagements with dialectical Marxism, his critique of consumerism, and how his work remains relevant in contemporary discussions of neoliberalism and cultural hegemony.
Dialectical Marxism, rooted in the works of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, understands history as a dynamic process shaped by contradictions between opposing forces. The materialist conception of history posits that economic structures determine social relations, and that class struggle is the engine of historical change. Traditional Marxist dialectics anticipates capitalism’s self-destruction due to its internal contradictions, leading to proletarian revolution and the emergence of socialism.
Pasolini was influenced by Marxist dialectics but challenged some of its fundamental assumptions. He recognized that postwar capitalism had developed mechanisms to neutralize class struggle—not through direct repression but through cultural and ideological assimilation. While classical Marxism emphasized the role of industrial capitalism in shaping class consciousness, Pasolini saw consumer capitalism as producing a new kind of subjectivity that was depoliticized and conformist.
Pasolini was critical of what he perceived as the rigidity of orthodox Marxist interpretations. In his view, traditional Marxism failed to account for the cultural transformations brought about by consumerism. The Italian Communist Party (PCI), with which Pasolini had a complex relationship, remained focused on economic conditions and class relations, often neglecting the role of ideology and culture in shaping political consciousness.
Pasolini argued that consumerism did not merely exploit workers; it changed them. Unlike classical bourgeois capitalism, which at least allowed for the persistence of proletarian and peasant cultures, consumer capitalism destroyed them by imposing new desires, new languages, and new forms of socialization. This, he believed, led to the death of authentic cultural identities and the rise of a homogenized, bourgeoisified populace.
For Pasolini, consumerism was not simply an economic phenomenon; it was an ideological system more oppressive than fascism. In his view, fascism attempted to impose control through violence and coercion, but consumer capitalism achieved deeper domination by reshaping people’s desires and consciousness.
Pasolini referred to this process as a “new totalitarianism,” wherein individuals believed they were free, yet their thoughts, behaviors, and identities were dictated by capitalist ideology. Through advertising, television, and mass culture, consumer society eliminated class antagonisms not by resolving them but by making them invisible. It dissolved the historical proletariat, turning it into a classless mass of consumers.
Pasolini’s nostalgia for peasant and proletarian cultures was not reactionary but dialectical. He saw these cultures as sites of resistance to capitalist homogenization. In his view, pre-industrial Italy, though poor, contained rich cultural traditions that fostered community, oral history, and solidarity. The expansion of consumerism after World War II eroded these cultures, replacing them with a standardized, market-driven ethos.
Pasolini lamented the disappearance of dialects, regional customs, and historical identities. He saw the rise of consumerism as an erasure of difference, wherein television and advertising replaced authentic cultural expression with superficial, commodified identities. This, he argued, was a form of cultural genocide—less visible than colonial conquest but equally destructive.
One of Pasolini’s most controversial arguments was that consumer capitalism had turned the working class into a petit-bourgeois mass. Unlike classical Marxists, who saw the proletariat as a revolutionary subject, Pasolini argued that postwar prosperity had integrated workers into the consumer system, making them complicit in their own subjugation.
This thesis was especially radical in the context of 1960s and 1970s Italy, where Marxist intellectuals still largely viewed the working class as an agent of historical change. Pasolini, however, believed that the real revolutionary potential no longer lay with the industrial proletariat but with marginalized groups—immigrants, the urban poor, and subaltern communities who had not yet been absorbed into consumerism’s ideological machinery.
Pasolini saw television as the primary instrument of consumerist hegemony. He argued that mass media did not merely inform but actively shaped consciousness, enforcing conformity and eliminating alternative worldviews. Television, in his view, did not serve as a neutral medium but as a vehicle for ideological indoctrination.
Unlike Antonio Gramsci, who viewed cultural hegemony as operating through civil society, Pasolini saw mass media as a more aggressive, invasive force. He argued that television was the Church of the modern world, spreading a secular but equally dogmatic religion of consumption.
Pasolini was deeply concerned with how mass media transformed language. He lamented the disappearance of regional dialects and the rise of a homogenized, commercialized Italian. This linguistic flattening, he argued, was symbolic of a broader cultural flattening—an elimination of diversity in favor of a single, consumerist reality.
Pasolini’s critique of consumerism remains strikingly relevant in the age of globalized neoliberal capitalism. His concerns about cultural homogenization, ideological control through mass media, and the transformation of class relations anticipate many contemporary debates on digital capitalism, surveillance culture, and algorithmic governance.
His work challenges both traditional Marxist assumptions about class struggle and liberal narratives of progress. By framing consumerism as a totalitarian system rather than a mere economic stage, Pasolini forces us to reconsider the depth of capitalism’s ideological power. In a world increasingly shaped by digital media, corporate hegemony, and globalized consumer culture, Pasolini’s insights offer a powerful lens through which to analyze the enduring contradictions of late capitalism.
This article, though a broad introduction, invites further exploration into Pasolini’s complex relationship with Marxism, his cinematic critiques, and his theoretical contributions to anti-capitalist thought. His work remains a crucial resource for those seeking to understand not just economic exploitation but the deeper cultural transformations wrought by consumer capitalism.
Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975) remains one of the most controversial and deeply analyzed films in cinema history. Through its graphic portrayal of violence, sexual degradation, and absolute power, the film has been interpreted in various ways, from an allegory of political oppression to a critique of consumer society. This article presents a Marxist reading of Salò, arguing that Pasolini uses the framework of the Marquis de Sade’s The 120 Days of Sodom to expose the mechanisms of class domination, the totalitarian logic of capitalism, and the cultural annihilation brought about by consumerist ideology. The film does not merely depict fascism as a historical phenomenon but as a system that persists in new forms under late capitalism. Through a critical examination of its themes, aesthetics, and philosophical underpinnings, this article situates Salò within Marxist debates on power, ideology, and the commodification of human life.
Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom was released posthumously in 1975, shortly after his brutal murder. The film, inspired by the writings of the Marquis de Sade and set in the fascist Italian Social Republic (1943–1945), depicts a group of powerful men who kidnap and subject young victims to extreme forms of sexual and psychological torture. While its explicit violence has led many to categorize it as an exercise in nihilism, this article argues that Salò is a profoundly political and Marxist film that critiques not only fascism but also the evolution of capitalist oppression into new, subtler forms.
Pasolini saw Salò as his final warning against the cultural and ideological transformations taking place in Italy and beyond. He believed that consumerism had supplanted traditional forms of class struggle by integrating the working class into a system of passive submission. This, for Pasolini, was a more insidious form of oppression than fascist violence, as it destroyed resistance at the level of desire and identity itself. By using Sadean horror as a metaphor for capitalist power, Salò presents a terrifying vision of a world where people are reduced to objects, bodies are commodified, and pleasure becomes indistinguishable from domination.
This article critically engages with Salò from a Marxist perspective, exploring its thematic structure, its relationship to fascism and capitalism, and its implications for contemporary debates on ideology, power, and consumer society.
Pasolini was deeply influenced by Marxist theory, though he distanced himself from orthodox economic determinism. He saw consumerism as a new form of totalitarianism—one that did not rely on state violence but instead operated through ideological domination and the reshaping of human subjectivity. While classical Marxism focused on economic exploitation and class struggle, Pasolini argued that capitalism had evolved into a system that controlled not just labor but also desire, culture, and language.
In his essays and interviews, Pasolini repeatedly claimed that postwar capitalism was more effective at suppressing dissent than historical fascism. Fascism, he argued, failed because it relied on external coercion, whereas consumer capitalism worked by internalizing control within individuals themselves. The proletariat was no longer a revolutionary class but had been absorbed into the mechanisms of consumption, rendered docile by mass media and commodified desires.
Salò functions as an allegory for this shift. While its setting is fascist Italy, its real target is the modern world of neoliberal consumerism, in which bodies and identities are transformed into commodities. The film suggests that the logic of fascism did not die with Mussolini but persists in new forms—through the media, advertising, and the depoliticization of everyday life.
The film’s four central figures—the Duke, the Bishop, the Magistrate, and the President—represent the ruling bourgeois elite. These figures do not act as mere individuals but as archetypes of class power, controlling not only economic structures but also the fundamental aspects of human life. Their absolute control over their victims mirrors the capitalist ruling class’s ability to shape and dictate the conditions of existence for the working masses.
Pasolini’s decision to set Salò in the final days of fascism suggests that this period serves as a metaphor for late-stage capitalism. The bourgeois class, in both fascist and capitalist societies, operates on the principle of absolute dominion, reducing human beings to objects for consumption and pleasure. The victims, stripped of agency and individuality, become representative of the proletariat—exploited, dehumanized, and ultimately disposable.
The acts of sexual violence in Salò are not merely depictions of cruelty; they function as a critique of capitalism’s commodification of the human body. Pasolini portrays a world in which people are reduced to mere flesh, existing only to satisfy the sadistic pleasures of the ruling class. This mirrors how capitalism treats laborers—as objects whose only value lies in their ability to produce and serve the interests of the bourgeoisie.
In Marxist terms, the victims in Salò undergo a process of “reification” (as described by Georg Lukács), where human beings are transformed into things. This process is central to capitalism, where workers are alienated from their labor, their bodies, and ultimately their own desires. The film’s explicit portrayal of dehumanization serves as a hyperbolic representation of the alienation inherent in capitalist societies.
Pasolini’s use of the Marquis de Sade’s The 120 Days of Sodom is crucial to understanding Salò’s Marxist critique. Sade’s philosophy, which embraces absolute freedom in the pursuit of pleasure, serves as an extreme articulation of capitalist individualism. In the film, the ruling class enacts a brutal version of free-market logic, where desires are unrestrained and human beings are reduced to mere commodities.
By merging Sadean libertinism with fascist power structures, Pasolini exposes the perverse underpinnings of consumer society. The victims in Salò are not only subjected to physical abuse but also to ideological conditioning, where their suffering is normalized as part of the ruling class’s pleasure economy. This reflects how capitalism manipulates desire, turning even suffering into a spectacle for consumption.
One of the most striking aspects of Salò is the role of the “Madames,” the older women who narrate tales of perversion that inspire the rulers’ actions. These figures symbolize the ideological apparatus of the state, akin to the media and cultural institutions that shape ideology under capitalism.
The Madames’ function is to normalize and aestheticize horror, much like capitalist culture industries do. Their stories transform suffering into entertainment, mirroring how contemporary mass media depoliticizes violence and oppression, rendering them as consumable images. This reflects Pasolini’s broader critique of how ideology functions not through direct coercion but through cultural production and aestheticization.
Unlike many political films, Salò offers no possibility of redemption or revolution. The victims do not rebel, and the cycle of violence continues unchallenged. This absence of resistance reflects Pasolini’s pessimism about modern capitalism. Unlike traditional Marxist narratives that anticipate a revolutionary overturning of the system, Salò suggests that consumer capitalism has so deeply infiltrated human consciousness that even the potential for revolt has been extinguished.
The final scene, in which the perpetrators casually dance while atrocities unfold, underscores this point. It suggests that, under consumer capitalism, even the most extreme forms of domination become banal, normalized, and ultimately unnoticed.
Nearly fifty years after its release, Salò remains a vital critique of power, ideology, and consumer society. Pasolini’s vision was not just about historical fascism but about the ongoing transformation of capitalist domination. His film suggests that the logic of fascism persists in the commodification of human life, the erosion of resistance, and the integration of violence into everyday spectacle.
By forcing viewers to confront the extremities of capitalist dehumanization, Salò challenges us to recognize the hidden structures of oppression in our own societies. Its Marxist critique remains more relevant than ever in an era of neoliberal hegemony, mass surveillance, and the continued commodification of desire.