Pier Paolo Pasolini stands as a uniquely visionary figure in cinema \u2013 a poet, painter, and polemicist who made films with the soul of an artist and the eye of an anthropologist. From his earliest forays into Italian neorealism to his later excursions into myth and allegory, Pasolini crafted a visual language at once earthy and transcendent. In his films, rags can assume the dignity of sacral vestments, and slum alleys can glow with a ritualistic aura. If Pasolini often seemed to profane everything, it was only because he \u201cwanted everything to be sacred,\u201d as one critic observed . His cinema is a continual collision of the sacred and the profane \u2013 a \u201ccinema of poetry\u201d where humble details of costume, setting, and cinematography are charged with symbolic and even spiritual power. Pasolini\u2019s background in literature and visual art profoundly informed this approach. \u201cMy cinematic taste does not have its origins in cinema but in the figurative,\u201d Pasolini admitted, noting that the visions he carried in his head were the frescoes of Masaccio and Giotto . Indeed, collaborators recall that on set \u201che never spoke of cinema, only of drawings and paintings, altarpieces\u201d . Such painterly sensibility suffuses his films: he framed destitute youths like Renaissance saints, staged biblical tales with documentary grit, and dressed actors in fabrics heavy with history. Across Pasolini\u2019s body of work \u2013 from the gritty early realist dramas through the mythic adaptations, the political parables, and finally the controversial last films \u2013 one finds a consistent visual grammar where dress, fabric, space, light, and texture carry sacred, symbolic, and political resonance. In what follows, we journey through Pasolini\u2019s entire cinematic opus, immersively examining how his aesthetic of poverty and ritual, his sense of the sacred and the sensual, are encoded in the very costumes, sets, and images he created. This is a story of how a Marxist, Catholic, and perpetually dissident artist reinvented film as a kind of sacred theater \u2013 one in which the lowliest garment or roughest wall can reveal transcendent truth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Pasolini\u2019s debut film Accattone (1961) announced this vision with raw force. Filmed on the impoverished outskirts of Rome, Accattone follows a young pimp, Vittorio \u201cAccattone\u201d Cataldi, scraping by in the slums. At first glance the film adopts the unvarnished look of Italian neorealism \u2013 nonprofessional actors, real locations, colloquial dialect \u2013 yet Pasolini transforms this \u201chardscrabble neorealist milieu\u201d into something almost liturgical . The stark black-and-white cinematography (by Tonino Delli Colli) gives the Roman borgate an eternal, gravestone beauty, with faces and gestures staged in a monumental, Renaissance-like composition. Bernardo Bertolucci, who assisted Pasolini, recalled watching Accattone being made \u201clike witnessing the invention of a new language,\u201d noting that Pasolini spoke in references to art: \u201cdrawings and paintings, altarpieces\u201d rather than standard film jargon . In one emblematic sequence, Accattone sits at an outdoor table, idle and hungry, yet behind him the sun blazes in halo, and Bach\u2019s St. Matthew Passion soars on the soundtrack. Pasolini\u2019s use of Catholic iconography and liturgical music to underscore the travails of a petty thief shocked some as blasphemous, but it was utterly deliberate . He once overlaid a brawl between pimps with a Bach chorale \u2013 an audacious juxtaposition of street violence and sacred song. By such means, Pasolini offers \u201ca vision of underclass struggle as a kind of modern sainthood,\u201d elevating the figure of the pimp to a quasi-Christlike status . Indeed, in Accattone\u2019s final scene, the starving protagonist, having briefly attempted honest work, lies dying and murmurs, \u201cAh, mo\u2019 sto bene\u201d (\u201cNow I\u2019m fine\u201d), as if achieving a martyr\u2019s peace. The camera lifts upward as if bearing his soul. This finale, critics note, explicitly echoes Renaissance piet\u00e0 imagery \u2013 a Depositio of the urban poor. Pasolini\u2019s style here has been termed \u201ccreatural realism,\u201d imbuing a wretched life with a sacred aura: Ettore, the doomed son in Pasolini\u2019s next film, Mamma Roma, is similarly filmed in death as a Christ figure, his body arranged in clear reminiscence of Mantegna\u2019s Dead Christ . Such references were not accidental. Pasolini, a student of art history, wove fine-art influences into the very blocking of his scenes. In Accattone, the tableau of ragged friends carrying Vittorio\u2019s body suggests a deposition from the cross, while in Mamma Roma (1962) the young Ettore\u2019s foreshortened corpse explicitly imitates Mantegna\u2019s famous Cristo morto . These visual quotations are not mere homage but part of Pasolini\u2019s belief that the sacred resides in the flesh of common people. As one scholar observes, Pasolini \u201cmixed artistic references from our cultural heritage to associate the figure of Christ with the subproletarians of his films,\u201d forging a new discourse on sacredness and class . The seam between art and life, the Renaissance painting and the Roman slum, is where Pasolini\u2019s cinema finds its poetry.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Crucial to this effect is Pasolini\u2019s attention to clothing and physical detail \u2013 what his curator friend Olivier Saillard calls the \u201cself-contained social portrait\u201d of clothes . In Accattone and Mamma Roma, the costumes were not designed for glamour or period accuracy; they were scavenged from Roman flea markets and thrift stalls . Pasolini insisted on using real, worn garments that \u201clooked neglected or worn out,\u201d because in the slums a frayed collar or patched trouser leg speaks volumes about a person\u2019s status and aspirations . \u201cClothes are like a social portrait,\u201d Saillard notes of Pasolini\u2019s approach; he was far more interested in a costume\u2019s social meaning than in fashion or polish . In these early films, a threadbare coat or cheap dress signifies the dignity and despair of the wearer. Anna Magnani\u2019s character in Mamma Roma tries to don slightly finer outfits (a white blouse, a stylish skirt) as she attempts to enter respectable society, yet the patina of the street never leaves her. Her son Ettore struts in a second-hand blazer two sizes too large \u2013 a poignant symbol of adolescent yearning for respectability. Pasolini often personally guided such choices. Danilo Donati, the great Italian costume designer who became Pasolini\u2019s close collaborator, recalled that on Mamma Roma (their first project together) his task was simply to find authentic \u201ccivilian clothes\u201d for the characters . Pasolini would sketch out a character\u2019s background and then say, trova qualcosa \u2013 find something. Donati would trawl Rome\u2019s mercados and come back with armfuls of garments smelling of age and poverty. It was a process Pasolini relished, as he felt selecting real used clothes helped him \u201caccess his thoughts\u201d about the character\u2019s inner life . The result on screen is that Roma\u2019s inhabitants truly wear their world on their backs: every tear, stain, and repair in the fabric tells a story. In Accattone, Franco Citti (the non-actor playing Vittorio) shuffles through the dirt streets in scuffed shoes without laces, pants held up by string \u2013 the costume is the character. Pasolini \u201cfetishized the image of the underclass,\u201d Saillard remarks, both out of genuine love for the ragazzi di vita (street boys) and as a way to indict the bourgeoisie by contrast . Where the poor wear honest rags, the bourgeois wear pretentious masks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Despite (or because of) its reverent view of the profane, Pasolini\u2019s early work provoked controversy. Nowhere was this more evident than in La ricotta (1963), a short film he made as part of the anthology RoGoPaG. La ricotta is a pungent satire in which a starving extra (nicknamed Stracci, \u201cRags\u201d) is cast as the Good Thief in a director\u2019s grandiose film about Christ. Dressed in ragged biblical costume, Stracci sneaks off between takes to ravenously eat baskets of ricotta cheese \u2013 only to die of indigestion, literally a martyr to hunger. Pasolini intercuts this farce with stunning tableaux vivants of the Crucifixion, staged in lurid color as recreations of Pontormo\u2019s and Rosso Fiorentino\u2019s Mannerist paintings . The effect is jarring and brilliant: clowns and callous filmmakers bustle in black-and-white, while the sacred scenes they\u2019re shooting burst into saturated color, like Renaissance frescoes come alive. Pasolini juxtaposes the sacred image and the profane reality to scathing effect \u2013 at one point, the actor playing Christ, still nailed on the cross prop, breaks character to chortle with his fellow \u201cangels\u201d over some on-set joke. This cheeky collapse of sacred iconography into mundane absurdity landed Pasolini in serious trouble. La ricotta was condemned by Italian censors, and Pasolini was even prosecuted for \u201cinsulting the religion of the state\u201d . In court, a judge pored over the scene where the crucified Christ drops character and laughs, debating whether it constituted blasphemy. Pasolini defended himself by pointing out that it was not Christ laughing, but an actor \u2013 highlighting the hypocrisy of a society that venerates religious art while ignoring the living poor (embodied by Stracci, who dies unnoticed on set). The scandal of La ricotta only affirmed Pasolini\u2019s conviction that true sacredness lies with the humiliated and insulted, not with pompous representations. As one commentator put it, \u201cIf Pasolini profaned everything, it was because he wanted everything to be sacred\u201d \u2013 he wished to free holiness from sanctimony and find it among the lowest. La ricotta\u2019s conflation of holy imagery with bodily hunger exemplifies this mission. It also shows Pasolini\u2019s instinct for \u201cshocking juxtapositions of idea and imagery\u201d, using carnivalesque humor to expose society\u2019s spiritual emptiness .<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Having tested the limits of blending sanctity and satire, Pasolini boldly moved on to a project of genuine devotional intensity: Il Vangelo secondo Matteo (The Gospel According to St. Matthew, 1964). This film, a straightforward retelling of the life of Christ, might seem an unlikely undertaking for a Marxist rebel, yet Pasolini saw in the figure of Jesus the ultimate subversive and sacred icon. The resulting film is frequently hailed as one of the most authentic and powerful biblical films ever made \u2013 precisely because Pasolini eschewed Hollywood spectacle for ascetic realism and tactile detail. He was determined to shoot the Gospel as if it were happening in the present. During pre-production, Pasolini actually traveled to Palestine to scout locations, but what he found disappointed him: the Holy Land of the 1960s was too developed, too \u201crealistic\u201d in a modern sense, to serve his vision of timeless antiquity . Instead, he turned to the impoverished landscapes of southern Italy. The ancient rock-hewn town of Matera, with its cave dwellings (sassi), became his Judea \u2013 a place that looked biblical precisely because it was still mired in poverty and pre-industrial life. In Matera\u2019s sun-bleached cliffs and primitive dwellings, Pasolini found the \u201carchaic\u201d quality he sought, a living remnant of an eternal peasant world. \u201cAuthenticity\u201d for Pasolini did not mean scholarly reconstruction of 1st-century Judea, but capturing the spirit of a world untouched by modern alienation. As Dante Ferretti (who worked as an assistant art director on Gospel) recalled, Pasolini \u201copted for Matera\u201d after rejecting Palestine, and immediately set about adapting its medieval streets \u2013 clearing TV antennas, concealing any sign of the 20th century . Many of the costumes for Gospel were simple tunics made of coarse wool or rough fabric, produced not in fancy studios but by local artisans. The resulting wardrobe has a weathered simplicity that perfectly suits Pasolini\u2019s Christ and apostles \u2013 it feels as though \u201cthe character spent his life in that costume,\u201d lending the film an almost documentary credibility . One observer noted that the clothing in Gospel looks \u201cmore painting than fashion\u201d , with muted earth-tone robes and veils that could have stepped out of a Giotto fresco. This was intentional. According to Donati (costume designer for Gospel), Pasolini insisted on particular tones and textures for each film \u2013 here a palette of unbleached wool and boiled wool dominated, to evoke a coarse, humble feel . The fabric itself carries meaning: heavy wool suggests warmth and hardship, its lack of color an austerity befitting biblical poverty. These garments were often distressed and dirtied to avoid any hint of theatrical \u201ccostumeyness.\u201d Indeed, they were sometimes crudely constructed \u2013 \u201cheld together with staples,\u201d as Saillard notes of Pasolini\u2019s biblical costumes, \u201ccertainly not haute couture\u2026 made to stay together but not to last forever\u201d . Such impermanence was by design: Pasolini was not making a museum piece but a \u201cliving\u201d Gospel, immediate and raw.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The cinematography of The Gospel According to St. Matthew, in luminous black-and-white, further melds the sacred and the real. Delli Colli, returning as Pasolini\u2019s director of photography, shot much of the film with handheld cameras and long telephoto lenses, lending a feeling of newsreel immediacy to the events. At times one might be watching an old documentary of contadini in Southern Italy, until the faces \u2013 often non-actors with craggy, beatific features \u2013 strike poses of overtly classical beauty. Pasolini cast his own mother, Susanna, as the older Virgin Mary, bringing an intimate religious reverence to key moments (her Piet\u00e0 cradling the dead Christ is heartbreakingly sincere). The young Spanish student Enrique Irazoqui, cast as Jesus for his fierce, idealistic visage, performs Christ\u2019s words with the grave urgency of a revolutionary. Pasolini accentuates this with a judicious, eclectic use of music: alongside Bach and Mozart, he deploys the African Missa Luba and folk spirituals, bridging epochs and cultures in sonic communion. The sacred is thus heard in many tongues even as it is seen in peasant guise. The overall effect is deeply moving \u2013 so much so that even the Catholic Church, initially wary of Pasolini, embraced the film (it won approval at the Vatican and a prize at a Catholic film festival). Pasolini, the avowed non-believer, had created a religious film of startling purity by stripping away pious artifice. In doing so he proved his thesis: that the holy can be made flesh again through raw realism. As one costume curator marveled, in Gospel \u201cit really looks like the character spent his life in that costume,\u201d the dirt and wear conveying a truth no polished Hollywood robe could . For Pasolini, such imperfection gave a sense of truth \u2013 a guiding principle he carried forward. \u201cThere always had to be something that was imperfect,\u201d Ferretti recalls of Pasolini\u2019s sets; a perfectly scrubbed or manicured environment would not work for him, \u201cbecause imperfection gave him a sense of truth\u201d . In Gospel\u2019s rough textures, uneven faces, and awkward silences, Pasolini found an authentic sacredness that paradoxically validated his faith in cinema as the language of reality.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
By the mid-1960s, Pasolini had thus reinvented both the contemporary social film and the religious epic in his own idiosyncratic style. But he was not done experimenting. His next moves were boldly allegorical and satirical, bringing his visual sensibilities to bear on modern politics and mythology. Comedy and Brechtian fable enter Pasolini\u2019s palette with Uccellacci e uccellini (The Hawks and the Sparrows, 1966). In this whimsical parable, the beloved Neapolitan comic Tot\u00f2 and Pasolini\u2019s young discovery Ninetto Davoli wander a fanciful road as a father-son pair, encountering a talking crow who spouts Marxist theory. Pasolini shot this film in black-and-white, often in wide, near-surreal landscapes outside Rome. Costuming plays a tongue-in-cheek role: at one point Tot\u00f2 and Ninetto appear in Franciscan friar robes, acting out a didactic fable of St. Francis preaching to literal hawks and sparrows. The burlap-like habits and sandals they wear intentionally evoke Giotto\u2019s frescoes of Franciscans. But soon enough the duo are back in contemporary dress, hounded by the loquacious crow. Hawks and Sparrows uses its costumes and settings as fluid signifiers, toggling between a medieval morality play and a Chaplin-like road comedy. The \u201csacred\u201d world of the saint (in coarse monk\u2019s habit) collides with the \u201cprofane\u201d reality of 1960s Italy (Tot\u00f2 in his threadbare suit and little fedora), all within the film\u2019s freewheeling structure. Visually, Pasolini keeps the tone light yet pointed: the crow (a puppet in some shots) lectures against a backdrop of desolate modern suburbs \u2013 a black figure of wisdom amid a concrete wasteland. The implication is clear that the spiritual teachings of the past (symbolized by the friars\u2019 simple garb and humility) have lost currency in the present, yet something new and radical (the crow\u2019s Marxist gospel) remains an outsider\u2019s voice. Though a minor work, Hawks and Sparrows encapsulates Pasolini\u2019s penchant for mixing registers: costume here is used both for laughs and for philosophical provocation. Tot\u00f2\u2019s expressive face \u2013 as much an Italian cultural icon as any saint\u2019s visage \u2013 becomes another of Pasolini\u2019s living paintings, etched with both buffoonery and sorrow. The film\u2019s final image, of the two vagabonds literally devouring the talking crow (a darkly comic twist), suggests that lofty ideals are ultimately swallowed by base hunger \u2013 a return to La ricotta\u2019s theme in farcical form. Through this strangely poetic farce, Pasolini further honed his visual storytelling: we read meaning in the contrast between a worn 1960s overcoat and a sackcloth friar\u2019s habit, between the stark postwar Italian landscape and the fanciful medieval tableaux vivants inserted into it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Pasolini\u2019s visual imagination truly flowered in the late 1960s with a pair of films that delve into myth and antiquity: Edipo Re (Oedipus Rex, 1967) and Medea (1969). In these works, Pasolini applied all he had learned about costume, set design, and cinematic texture to re-create ancient worlds\u2014not as glossy historical reconstructions, but as intense, dreamlike realms filtered through memory, archeology and his own poetic vision. Oedipus Rex was especially personal: Pasolini transposed Sophocles\u2019 tragedy to a tribal, pre-classical setting that also serves as an autobiographical allegory of his own life. The film famously begins in 1920s Italy with a prologue suggesting the birth of Oedipus (a baby in a small town, clearly standing in for Pasolini himself), then jumps back in time to an oneiric \u201carchaic\u201d age for the bulk of the myth, before concluding in modern Bologna. To visualize Oedipus\u2019s ancient world, Pasolini rejected any specific historical period. Instead, he told Donati he wanted an \u201cindistinct barbaric\u201d feel, a primordial milieu that is everywhere and nowhere . Donati responded with a tour-de-force of imaginative costuming: he concocted a rich m\u00e9lange of styles drawn from Persian, Egyptian, Greek, African and even pre-Columbian influences . Pasolini\u2019s method, as described by scholar Roberto Chiesi, was one of contaminazione \u2013 a deliberate contamination or fusion of disparate ancient motifs so that \u201cthey would lose their original identity in a new form\u201d while still evoking the memory of ancient cultures . Thus, in Oedipus Rex, one sees costuming that might place the story in a never-never-land of early civilization: leather headdresses with horn-like crests, robes embroidered with abstract symbols, faces painted in earth tones. For Oedipus\u2019s Corinthian adoptive parents (played by Alida Valli and Luciano Bartoli), Donati designed splendid, vaguely Assyro-Babylonian garments \u2013 Valli wears a towering conical hat and heavy striped cloak, as if a priestess-queen from a forgotten tribe. Young Oedipus (Franco Citti) himself is mostly clad in simple black cloth, almost like a witch-doctor\u2019s apprentice, setting him apart chromatically (indeed Saillard notes \u201cOedipus is always in black, Jocasta always in white\u201d symbolically ). Later, when Oedipus becomes king of Thebes, he dons a striking outfit: a black tunic and leggings, with geometric patterns and thick cords, somewhere between Berber nomad and samurai armor. Each element of costume hints at stories untold \u2013 fragments of global antiquity recombined.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The production design and locations reinforce this effect. Pasolini shot Oedipus Rex largely in the deserts and ancient sites of Morocco, which provided an austere, sun-baked backdrop of sand, mud-brick walls, and sky. The filmmaker and his team (including Ferretti as assistant set designer) were captivated by the landscape around Ouarzazate \u2013 \u201chuge spaces\u201d with desert oueds and kasbah ruins that looked to Pasolini \u201clike a village from a Western,\u201d Ferretti recalls . In these wide emptinesses, figures in Donati\u2019s fantastical costumes appear as if enacting a ritual outside of time. One scene shows a row of masked, costumed priests playing flutes and drums in a ritual for the oracle at Delphi: their masks have elongated snouts and their costumes are patchworks of fur and woven straw, resembling African tribal attire. Meanwhile, the soundtrack plays an incongruous strain of Japanese gagaku court music , further estranging us from any familiar reference point. As Saillard notes, Pasolini\u2019s approach to myth \u201cnever clarified geographic or folkloric origins\u201d \u2013 Oedipus Rex draws from Incas for costume, uses Japanese music, and was filmed not in Greece but in North Africa . The goal was not authenticity but universality: by avoiding a concrete historical setting, Pasolini could treat the myth of Oedipus as a floating archetype, a story happening in the eternal present. He explicitly did not want to create the kind of lush historical \u201cfresco\u201d that, say, a Hollywood epic or a Visconti film might attempt . As Saillard puts it, Pasolini\u2019s period films \u201caren\u2019t reconstituted frescoes\u201d at all \u2013 they are more like primal dreams given form. And in dreams, objects and costumes have immense symbolic charge. The Golden Brooch that Oedipus plucks to blind himself, for instance, is oversized and primitive in design \u2013 more an abstract totem than a realistic pin from a Greek robe. When he plunges it into his eyes, smearing blood on his cheeks, the gesture has a raw ritualistic quality, intensified by the costume framing it. Jocasta (Silvana Mangano) throughout the film wears flowing white gowns and a series of ornate wigs\/headpieces \u2013 in one scene her tall cone of hair is ringed by a circular fringe, making her look like an icon from some Middle Eastern relief. Her whiteness and regality set her apart, and indeed as the truth comes out, Jocasta\u2019s final act (suicide by hanging) has her draped in white against the brown mud walls \u2013 a pale ghost of a queen, vanishing from the contaminated world she helped create. Pasolini\u2019s color choices here were deliberate: \u201cnuances of salmon apart from Oedipus in black and Jocasta in white,\u201d Saillard notes, giving the film a rough color symbolism of innocence and corruption . The colors are untamed \u2013 ochres, deep reds, sooty blacks \u2013 befitting the emotional cruelty at the story\u2019s core . To Pasolini, Oedipus Rex was partly about the violence of myth and of family; the costumes themselves were made in a \u201ccrude and cruel\u201d way, according to Donati\u2019s practice . Donati would rip and hand-dye fabrics, knit coarse materials by hand without proper tools, \u201cvery wild\u201d in his methods . The resulting attire looks nearly primitive \u2013 seams visible, edges frayed. This roughness, far from being a flaw, was the very texture Pasolini sought: imperfection as truth once again. In Oedipus, the clothes and sets do not transport us to a specific era, but rather envelop us in a fable-like abstraction. As viewers, we accept the \u201conce upon a time\u201d reality of it, a present-tense myth unfolding in a stark, unfamiliar world that nonetheless feels deeply human.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
If Oedipus Rex reaches deep into an imaginary antiquity, Medea (1969) goes even further, venturing into the mystical mindset of a pre-Christian, pre-rational society \u2013 and colliding it with the classical \u201cmodern\u201d world of ancient Greece. Starring the legendary opera diva Maria Callas in the title role, Medea is less a straightforward Euripidean tragedy than a Freudian-Marxist-anthropological fever dream, as one critic put it . Visually, it is one of Pasolini\u2019s most astonishing films. Shot on location in places as varied as the painted deserts of Cappadocia (Turkey), the Roman ruins of Aleppo (Syria, in safer times), and the medieval Campo in Pisa, Medea offers a tapestry of ancient environments. Pasolini attempts \u201can imaginative recreation of the premodern world from which the mythical sorceress Medea emerged,\u201d giving meticulous, \u201cnearly anthropological\u201d attention to the practical details of its rituals . The film\u2019s first half immerses us in Medea\u2019s barbarian homeland of Colchis \u2013 portrayed as a sun-baked tribal society steeped in magic and blood. The opening sequence is emblematic: under a blazing sun, a group of Colchian priests conduct a human sacrifice to ensure the fertility of the land. The victim, a young man adorned with wreaths and body paint, is ritually slain, dismembered, and scattered over the fields while the populace chants and dances. Pasolini films this with unflinching ethnographic detachment, dwelling on the visceral details (blood splashed on crops, the ecstasy on the participants\u2019 faces) . The costumes and body decorations here are extraordinary \u2013 likely inspired by accounts of ancient sacrificial rites and tribal ceremonies. The priests in Colchis wear tall, conical hats and cloaks patterned with bold, primal designs; some have their faces half-painted in clay. The Golden Fleece itself, hanging in the temple, is not a lustrous fairy-tale object but a mangy ram\u2019s hide, daubed in gold pigment \u2013 a totem of earthy power. Medea (Callas), as high priestess, appears in one early scene in full sacrificial regalia: a heavy dark robe, massive necklaces of what look like animal teeth or carved bone, and a towering headpiece of braided hair and fabric that extends her silhouette to double height. Her eyes are ringed with kohl, her face an impassive mask. In this getup, Callas truly looks like an ancient \u201cbarbarian sorceress\u201d \u2013 one critic noted her \u201cextraordinary mask of a face bespeaking extremes of emotion,\u201d even as she remains silent . Throughout Medea, Pasolini and Donati clothe her to embody the collision of worlds that the story is about. When Medea arrives in Jason\u2019s Greek world (Corinth), she initially wears a bright, elaborate oriental dress \u2013 rich turquoise and gold fabrics, with jeweled embroidery and a high collar \u2013 making her an exotic alien in the relatively plain Greek milieu. But as Jason betrays her and she prepares her revenge, Medea sheds her foreign finery and dons a simple, dark gown. In the film\u2019s climax, as she murders her children and sets her palace aflame, Callas\u2019s Medea wears a severe, unadorned black dress, her hair loose \u2013 looking more like a Gothic witch or a modern widow than a princess. The stripping down of her costume reflects Medea\u2019s reversion to elemental forces: having renounced the \u201ccivilized\u201d Greek life, she invokes her primal gods (sun, earth, etc.) one last time to exact vengeance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Pasolini\u2019s production design in Medea \u2013 his first collaboration with Dante Ferretti as full production designer \u2013 is equally deliberate in contrasting the raw and the refined. Colchis is depicted using real historical sites that carry an aura of antiquity untempered by Hellenic order. The team filmed in Cappadocian villages carved from rock and in the ruins of a Hittite temple; Ferretti recalls how captivated Pasolini was by the \u201csand cave dwellings, the landscape and the almost hieroglyphic drawings\u201d on the ancient walls . These settings, combined with Donati\u2019s wild costumes, create a vivid sense of a cosmology utterly different from rational Greek life. Indeed, Medea is structured as a clash between two mindsets: the ritualistic, cyclical, sacred worldview of Medea\u2019s people and the pragmatic, secular worldview of Jason and the Greeks. Pasolini visualizes this by giving almost every incident a \u201cdouble reading\u201d \u2013 both magic and rational . For example, early on young Jason is mentored by a centaur (played by Laurent Terzieff). In the first telling, the centaur is shown as a mythic creature \u2013 an actor wearing shaggy furs to suggest a half-man, half-beast, imparting mystical wisdom to Jason in a pastoral idyll. But then Pasolini retells the same mentoring scene later with the centaur shown simply as a man (no fur, just a human teacher), giving the same advice in plain terms . This kind of duplication reflects Pasolini\u2019s interest in Mircea Eliade\u2019s theory of the sacred and profane: we see one event through two lenses \u2013 the sacred (mythic) interpretation and the profane (rational) explanation. The set and costume design aid this thematic structure. The centaur\u2019s fur costume and animalistic makeup in the first version signal that we are in the realm of myth. In the second, the \u201ccentaur\u201d wears an ordinary tunic; the scene is shot in a mundane rocky hillside. Thus, the film itself oscillates between hallucinatory ritual pageant and almost mundane human drama. When Medea arrives in Corinth, the design scheme shifts: Corinth\u2019s scenes were shot in the remains of Roman amphitheaters and Italian medieval courtyards, places with geometry and symmetry. The Corinthian costumes (e.g. King Creon\u2019s court) are modest tunics and laurel crowns, signifying classical order. Pasolini doesn\u2019t invest these with much glamor \u2013 in fact, the Greeks come off as somewhat dull and complacent aesthetically \u2013 but that is the point. Medea\u2019s exotic garb and passionate movements appear all the more striking against the Greeks\u2019 static white togas and stone columns. One memorable image is Medea standing isolated in a Pisa piazza doubling for Corinth, wearing a flaming orange dress with oriental patterns, while around her the locals, in plain Greek attire, stare in distrust. It\u2019s a visual metaphor for otherness. As scholar James Gleason wrote, \u201cPasolini\u2019s visual discourse is every bit as eloquent as the verbal\u201d in Medea \u2013 indeed, one could watch with the sound off and still grasp the collision of cultures through color, form, and costume alone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Ultimately, Medea builds to a nihilistic conclusion (Medea immolates everything, even the gods seem silent), and Pasolini considered it, in context, a kind of endpoint. It was, as one retrospective noted, his \u201cmost bizarre exploration of Freudian themes through Marxist eyes\u2026 a mixture of social anthropology and ritual theatre\u201d . The film\u2019s \u201coutright nihilism\u201d \u2013 its vision of irreconcilable worlds \u2013 prompted Pasolini to change course again. In the early 1970s, he pivoted sharply away from bleakness toward a celebration of life\u2019s pleasures in what became known as his \u201cTrilogy of Life.\u201d This trilogy \u2013 Il Decameron (1971), I Racconti di Canterbury (The Canterbury Tales, 1972), and Il fiore delle mille e una notte (Arabian Nights, 1974) \u2013 allowed Pasolini to indulge his love of pre-modern literature and earthy sensuality. Visually, these films are a feast of costume and set design, each with its own distinct palette and texture, thanks in large part to the continued genius of Donati (costumes) and Ferretti (sets). Pasolini wanted each film to have a unique look \u2013 \u201cevery film had to have its own specific colour code and a fabric,\u201d Donati used to say . According to Donati\u2019s notes: The Decameron was dominated by felt, The Gospel According to Matthew (as mentioned) by wool, The Canterbury Tales by heavy velvet (some costumes weighing 20\u201330 kilos!), and one might add Arabian Nights by light silks and cottons . These choices were not arbitrary: Pasolini believed that by giving each film a signature tactile quality, he could evoke the spirit of its setting. He also wanted to avoid the shiny, anodyne look of big-budget period pieces. \u201cMaking costumes is a way of escaping fashion,\u201d Pasolini held, \u201cavoiding fashion means the film doesn\u2019t risk becoming dated\u201d . Instead of trendy stylization, Pasolini sought a kind of historical fabulism \u2013 authentic in feel but liberated from pedantry. In the Trilogy of Life, he and his designers achieved this with aplomb.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Decameron unfolds in a bustling, ribald medieval Italy (mostly the city of Naples and its environs), and Pasolini himself appears in the film as an apprentice of the painter Giotto, laboring on a grand fresco of the Last Judgment. This framing device \u2013 we see the fresco slowly take shape throughout the film \u2013 is a clue to Pasolini\u2019s intent. He treats Boccaccio\u2019s 14th-century tales as sources for vivid visual tableaux, almost like stories painted on a church wall, full of color and incident. The costume design in The Decameron leans into a quasi-medieval folk aesthetic: donkeys, mud streets, and peasant blouses abound. Donati\u2019s use of felt gives many outfits a coarse, handmade appearance \u2013 one can imagine villagers felting wool into simple doublets and hats. In contrast to the heavy brocades of classic medieval epics, The Decameron\u2019s fabrics are flat-textured and solid-colored, which photograph beautifully in bright sunlight. Many male characters wear jerkins and hose in primary colors (reds, yellows, greens) without ornate patterns, reflecting a society of craftsmen and farmers rather than nobles. Yet Donati\u2019s flair for whimsy is evident too: one tale involves a na\u00efve gardener who pretends to be mute to live among nuns; when his ruse is discovered, the nuns gleefully seduce him. In these scenes, the nuns\u2019 habits are portrayed with tongue-in-cheek detail \u2013 their veils starched absurdly, their white wimples framing faces of comic lust. Another segment features a crafty rogue who fakes a miracle to steal money; he is dressed in a motley tunic that subtly marks him as a jester figure amid the credulous townsfolk. Pasolini wasn\u2019t aiming for literal verisimilitude; rather, he created a feeling of medieval life \u2013 boisterous, grimy, and sensual. The production shot on location in actual Neapolitan streets and dilapidated chapels, so the sets are often real environments enhanced with minimal touches. The fresco that Pasolini\u2019s Giotto pupil paints, however, was a set-piece \u2013 a vast wall on which a vibrant mural of heaven and hell appears by film\u2019s end. It\u2019s a direct nod to the film\u2019s inspiration in visual art. In the final moments, as Pasolini (as the painter) steps back from the completed fresco, he muses: \u201cWhy create a work of art when dreaming about it is so much sweeter?\u201d This self-reflexive line, spoken in a set filled with vivid painted demons and saints, underscores how The Decameron is a celebration of imagination and artifice. The film itself has been the work of art we were dreaming, and now it ends \u2013 in a painted dream of medieval cosmology.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In The Canterbury Tales, Pasolini shifted the setting to medieval England. This presented an interesting challenge: depicting Chaucer\u2019s world through an Italian sensibility. Pasolini once again used real locations (he filmed parts in actual English inns and castles, as well as in the countryside and some sets in Rome\u2019s Cinecitt\u00e0), but gave them a distinct look through design. Donati\u2019s costumes for The Canterbury Tales are significantly more elaborate than in The Decameron. As per their plan, velvet is the signature material: nearly every character of means is swathed in thick, plush velvet garments. The miller wears a velvet tunic, the merchant a velvet gown with fur trim, the Wife of Bath a sumptuous red velvet dress, etc. These costumes were reportedly extremely heavy \u2013 \u201clike 20 kilos\u2026almost impossible to imagine how they moved in it,\u201d Saillard remarks . That weight translates on screen to a sense of gravity and opulence befitting England\u2019s less sunny clime and more stratified society. Yet Pasolini plays much of The Canterbury Tales for broad comedy, especially the scatological and bawdy elements Chaucer loved. The rich costumes sometimes become props for gags: one memorably vulgar episode shows a corrupt Summoner hoisted into the air by a devil \u2013 as he\u2019s carried to Hell, his lavish robes flap uselessly while he howls. Pasolini himself has a cameo as Geoffrey Chaucer, seen occasionally writing down the tales. Fittingly, he portrays Chaucer dressed in a simple but elegant black garment, more sober than most around him \u2013 the observer amid the rogues. One of the trilogy\u2019s most striking set-pieces comes at the end of The Canterbury Tales: Pasolini stages Chaucer\u2019s vision of Hell. Here the production design and costumes go for broke in a surreal, nightmarish tableau clearly inspired by medieval art (Hieronymus Bosch\u2019s paintings in particular). We see sinners plunged into cauldrons of fire, enormous red devils with giant prosthetic genitals tormenting clergy, and grotesque demons devouring the damned. The set is a fiery cavern constructed with lurid detail, and the costumes\/makeup for the devils are intentionally outrageous \u2013 bright devil masks with giant phalluses, etc., a mix of the terrifying and the absurd. It\u2019s Pasolini\u2019s most literal depiction of the \u201ccolliding sacred and profane\u201d: Hell is at once a religious concept and an excuse for him to flaunt taboo images (like a demon farting, which he shows with gleeful impiety). The Hell sequence\u2019s visuals shocked many (the film, like the other two in the trilogy, was initially rated X\/NC-17), but they also underscore the carnivalesque tone Pasolini embraced. He identified with Chaucer\u2019s earthy humor and desire to turn the world upside down. In these films, nudity, defecation, erotic mischief \u2013 all the bodily realities \u2013 are front and center, and the costumes are often designed to come off at crucial moments. Pasolini delights, for instance, in showing a chaste young man lustfully tear off a woman\u2019s elaborate gown, or a lustful friar hiking up his habit. Clothing in the Trilogy of Life often serves to highlight the beauty of the unclothed human body by contrast \u2013 an embodiment of Pasolini\u2019s belief in the innocence of the natural body before it is shamed by modern \u201cuniforms\u201d of repression.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Finally, Arabian Nights (1974) took Pasolini\u2019s visual adventurousness to non-Western locales. Filming in Yemen, Iran, Nepal, and Ethiopia, he sought to capture the exotic, storybook atmosphere of the One Thousand and One Nights. Arabian Nights is arguably the lushest and most sensuous of the trilogy, reveling in oriental fantasy. Pasolini was careful, however, not to impose Western orientalist clich\u00e9s. Instead, he used many authentic local garments and crafts to shape the film\u2019s look. As Saillard points out, for Arabian Nights Donati often \u201cused existing clothes\u201d sourced in the locations themselves . This was partly practical (the sheer number of extras and costumes needed in bazaar and festival scenes made local procurement wise) and partly philosophical: by using real traditional attire from Persia, Yemen, etc., Pasolini hoped to avoid a Eurocentric \u201cArabian Nights\u201d pastiche. The result is a film where fabrics and costumes burst with color and variety: Yemeni merchants in striped djellabas, Persian courtiers in embroidered silk coats, dancing girls with jingling anklets and hennaed hands, and, of course, no shortage of bare skin in the film\u2019s many erotic interludes. In fact, Arabian Nights is suffused with sensual textures \u2013 the soft swish of sheer veils, the glitter of inlaid jewelry, the warm glow of sun on bronzed skin. Its cinematography (by Giuseppe Ruzzolini) captures a veritable tapestry of hues, from the blue mosaics of Esfahan to the golden sands of the Arabian desert. One could say that Pasolini indulged in a kind of visual hedonism here, aligning with the film\u2019s thematic celebration of love in its many forms. The narrative follows the young man Nuredin in his quest to reunite with his beloved slave-girl Zumurrud, but branches into story upon story \u2013 a structure mirroring the interlaced tales of the Nights. Each tale has its own mini world of costumes: for instance, one tragic romance is set in a fantastical version of a Chinese court, for which Donati created flowing silk robes and delicate headpieces quite distinct from the Arab garments elsewhere. Another tale involves a mischievous demon who invisibly manipulates a prince and a common girl into a sexual tryst; the prince is dressed in pristine white robes, symbolizing his purity (or naivet\u00e9), while the girl wears simple village garb \u2013 their coupling is filmed tenderly, often nude, highlighting that human desire transcends social costume. Through all these episodes, Pasolini maintains a tone of wonder and present-tense myth: we are always aware that these are ancient tales, yet he films them with an eye for the spontaneous and real. He populated scenes with real bazaars and villagers when possible, and even moments of magical realism (like a man transformed into a monkey) are handled with straightforward simplicity rather than elaborate effects.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It is worth noting Pasolini\u2019s guiding conviction that pre-modern cultures, whether in 14th-century Florence or in some imagined \u201cOrient,\u201d possessed an authenticity and freedom that his own contemporary Italy was losing. By 1974, he was voicing bitter critiques of the homogenizing effect of late capitalism, which he dubbed an \u201canthropological mutation\u201d destroying ancient cultures. The Trilogy of Life was, in a sense, his ode to the life-affirming erotic and communal values of the past \u2013 and the visual richness of those films is a direct expression of that affection. As Pasolini himself said, he made them \u201cout of a belief in the progressive potential of the past\u201d \u2013 paradoxical as that sounds. The costumes, architecture, and landscapes of the trilogy are celebratory: colorful, abundant, brimming with life, in stark contrast to the drab, conformist clothing and sterile cities of the modern world that Pasolini despised. Indeed, an exhibition of Pasolini\u2019s work notes that even the costumes in these films function as a kind of statement of truth \u2013 \u201cbanners of truth or \u2018embodied reality\u2019,\u201d as the curators put it . In Arabian Nights, for example, the innocence of Nuredin and Zumurrud\u2019s love is \u2018true\u2019 because it unfolds in a world uncorrupted by modern prudery, symbolized by their carefree nudity and the frank sensuality of the surrounding culture. In Pasolini\u2019s eyes, a medieval peasant\u2019s rough tunic or a Bedouin\u2019s robe was an \u201chonest\u201d costume, carrying an embedded reality of who those people were, whereas a modern suit and tie (or the Fascist uniform, or the business blazer) was a kind of lie, a repression of humanity. He once remarked that after the 1960s, \u201cthere are no longer any visual differences between peasants and the bourgeois\u201d \u2013 a lament that mass-produced clothing had leveled class distinctions and regional identities . His films, especially the trilogy, lovingly restore those differences in all their vivid variety. It\u2019s telling that Pasolini and Donati arranged for the Trilogy of Life costumes to be preserved in the Farani tailoring house archives in Rome, where they remained long unused \u2013 a \u201cfragile legacy\u201d of an Italy that, in some ways, never was except through Pasolini\u2019s imagination . In recent years, those costumes have been exhibited and even modeled (notably by Tilda Swinton in the \u201cEmbodying Pasolini\u201d performance ), revealing how modern designers from Yohji Yamamoto to Alessandro Michele have drawn inspiration from Pasolini\u2019s visionary wardrobe . The loose, ancient-style shapes, the \u201cdecorative excess\u201d and raw edges in Pasolini\/Donati designs anticipated a certain avant-garde fashion sensibility . As Saillard quipped, in some of Margiela\u2019s deconstructed couture you can sense that \u201crough edges\u2026 authority because the idea is worth more than the savoir-faire \u2013 that\u2019s quite a Pasolini notion\u201d .<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Yet, just as Pasolini had celebrated the pre-modern life force, he soon recoiled from what he saw as its misappropriation by consumer culture. In 1975, disillusioned by how audiences seemed to receive the Trilogy of Life as mere erotic entertainment, Pasolini publicly renounced his trilogy and set out to make a film that would be a bitter antidote: Sal\u00f2, o le 120 giornate di Sodoma (Sal\u00f2, or the 120 Days of Sodom, 1975). This final work, released just after Pasolini\u2019s own tragic murder, is his most controversial and visually austere film \u2013 a far cry from the exuberance of the trilogy. Sal\u00f2 transposes the Marquis de Sade\u2019s tale of obscene atrocities to the last days of Mussolini\u2019s Fascist rump state (the Republic of Sal\u00f2 in 1944), making it a scathing allegory of power, corruption, and degradation. Every element of Sal\u00f2\u2019s visual design is calculated to disturb and indict. The setting is largely a grand countryside villa and its walled garden, where four fascist libertines imprison and torture a group of youths. Production designer Dante Ferretti chose actual mansions around Mantua for location shoots, then modified interiors to fit Pasolini\u2019s vision . Although the buildings were somewhat decayed, Ferretti added a surface \u201cpolish to each room\u201d through strategic set dressings \u2013 \u201cgrandiose Art Deco light fixtures, oversized mirrors and furniture\u201d . Thus, the villa\u2019s rooms have an eerie elegance: high ceilings, gleaming parquet floors, luxurious chandeliers. This refined backdrop starkly contrasts with the unspeakable acts committed there. With Ferretti\u2019s touch, Sal\u00f2 \u201ctakes a historied location and ups the ante by staging it with floor-to-ceiling Fernand L\u00e9ger\u2013esque murals, and art-nouveau and Bauhaus paintings\u201d adorning the walls . The clean geometry of those modernist murals (blocks of color, abstract shapes) and the stylish 1930s decor create an atmosphere of cold, sterile beauty \u2013 a fitting environment for clinical evil. One almost senses the influence of De Chirico\u2019s empty formalism or the metafictional sets of Brecht\u2019s Mahagonny. The color palette is subdued: lots of black, white, gray, and a sickly pale light from shuttered windows. Tonino Delli Colli filmed Sal\u00f2 with a static, detached camera style; shots are often symmetrical, as if the depravity is being recorded in an official log. Indeed, Pasolini deploys distance as a tactic: the infamous final sequence of torture is mostly viewed through a pair of binoculars from afar, as if we the audience are complicit voyeurs powerless to intervene.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The costumes of Sal\u00f2 are deceptively impeccable. The victims \u2013 the kidnapped teenagers \u2013 for most of the film wear a uniform of simple peasant-style clothing: plain white smocks or undergarments for the girls, and military-green fatigues or black shorts for the boys. This uniformity reduces them to anonymous bodies, blank canvases for abuse. Over the course of the film, they are gradually stripped of even these modest clothes, reinforcing their abject vulnerability. By contrast, the libertines and their collaborators are dressed with immaculate formality. The four male libertines (the Duke, Bishop, Magistrate, and President \u2013 representing societal elites) spend much of the film in tailored black dinner jackets or fascist uniforms. They dine in tuxedos, calmly discussing torture over fine china \u2013 an image as grotesque as any in the film, because of the juxtaposition of civilized appearance and barbaric intent. In one chapter of the film, the libertines don women\u2019s clothes and makeup (one wears a bridal gown) for a deranged \u201cwedding\u201d scene \u2013 a visualisation of perversion of roles and the mockery of innocence. The supervising guards (young fascist soldiers) wear black shirts and jackboots, the emblematic garb of 1940s fascism. Late in the film, there\u2019s a scene where a few of these guards dance a waltz together in a lavish salon, wearing the silk dressing gowns of the libertines (the exhibition notes refer to these as \u201cexecutioners\u2019 dressing gowns\u201d ). The gowns are elegant \u2013 one pink, one blue, one green \u2013 a chilling pastel softness draped on agents of brutality . It\u2019s as if Pasolini momentarily costumes the fascists in the raiment of decadent courtiers, highlighting the continuity between aristocratic privilege and fascist excess. Throughout Sal\u00f2, the clash between the appearance of cultivated refinement and the reality of grotesque violence is the central visual irony. As an observer quipped, Sal\u00f2 is \u201ccoldly violent and emotionally brutal,\u201d yet one finds oneself drawn in by its \u201chorrifyingly beautiful interiors\u201d . Pasolini wants the viewer to recognize that the face of tyranny may wear a well-tailored suit or a silk gown \u2013 that perverse power often hides behind aesthetics of order and cleanliness. Indeed, Pasolini believed that the new fascism of consumerist, bourgeois society had merely \u201cchanged clothes\u201d from the old fascism . In Sal\u00f2, fascists literally change clothes in perverse games, but their essence remains vile. As one critic in The Nation summarized, Pasolini\u2019s view was that postwar neo-capitalism had not defeated fascism but altered its costume \u2013 a thesis Sal\u00f2 drives home with pitiless imagery.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
There is a harrowing sequence near the end of Sal\u00f2 that crystallizes Pasolini\u2019s visual strategy. The libertines have moved the remaining youths to a circle of hellish punishment. We see them sitting at a distance, at the center of a courtyard, as one by one the young victims are tortured and mutilated. We watch this through the aforementioned binocular perspective from the libertines\u2019 point of view in an upper window. The torturers below are methodical, almost ritualistic in their tasks. The victims are naked, their earlier simple costumes now entirely gone \u2013 they have been stripped of all identifiers of humanity. The setting is an enclosed \u201cgarden\u201d of torture; significantly, this final arena is outdoors, cold and muddy, a far cry from the decadent interiors. Yet Pasolini\u2019s camera remains deliberate and formal, almost tableau-like. The composition of each torture scene is carefully arranged (scholars have noted that some of these tableaux were inspired by classical artworks \u2013 for example, one burning victim recalls the posture of St. Sebastian, and a scalping scene evokes Goya\u2019s grotesqueries). In the midst of this carnage, the libertines are upstairs in their genteel robes, observing through binoculars as if at an opera. One libertine even delicately applies lipstick and dons a wig to heighten his pleasure, costuming himself even at the final atrocity. The final shots show two young guards (mere boys, really) in the villa\u2019s parlor, now removed from the violence, awkwardly slow-dancing to a radio tune. One guard asks the other for the name of his girlfriend back home; he replies \u201cMargherita,\u201d and the banal conversation fades as the film ends. These guards, dressed in standard Italian soldier uniforms, in this moment appear normal \u2013 just youths making small talk, swaying to music. The utter banality of evil is captured in their simple dance and simple clothes, after we\u2019ve witnessed an hour of utter horror. Pasolini leaves us with this dissonance: the uniformed boy-next-door as executioner, humming a pop song. It is a deeply political message encoded in a quiet visual moment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Pasolini\u2019s murder shortly before Sal\u00f2\u2019s release cast a shadow of reality over the film\u2019s nightmare. Many couldn\u2019t help seeing Pasolini\u2019s own violated body in the final images of violated youth. With Sal\u00f2, Pasolini had intended to create a \u201clast scream\u201d of protest \u2013 against the dehumanization he perceived in modern society, against the loss of genuine sacredness. The film\u2019s uncompromising images ensure it remains notorious and seldom \u201cenjoyed\u201d in the usual sense. Yet even here, Pasolini\u2019s meticulous artistry with set, costume, and camera cannot be denied. In an ultimate irony, he composed Sal\u00f2\u2019s barbarity with the same care a painter brings to a canvas \u2013 the symmetry, the color control, the chilling elegance all serving to make the content all the more revolting. One might say he achieved a perverse kind of sacredness in Sal\u00f2 by portraying evil with such clarity that the viewer is forced to confront it, with no comforting distractions. In Pasolini\u2019s own artistic journey, Sal\u00f2 stands as the negative image of Accattone or The Gospel According to Matthew: where the early films found grace among the damned, Sal\u00f2 finds damnation among the outwardly graceful.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Reflecting on Pasolini\u2019s complete oeuvre, a remarkable consistency of vision emerges despite the diverse genres and tones. Pasolini\u2019s cinema is ultimately a cinema of bodies and spaces, of surfaces and souls made visible. His training as a poet and painter gave him an acute sensitivity to how things signify in themselves \u2013 a torn shirt, a cobblestone street, a ray of light on a wall. He once wrote that cinema is \u201ca language of reality,\u201d a medium where the world\u2019s real images (rather than abstract symbols) communicate directly . True to this belief, Pasolini filled his frames with the real textures of life: the weathered faces of non-actors, the tactile grain of coarse cloth, the dust in a peasant\u2019s courtyard, the flicker of firelight on a cave painting. These elements often carry sacred or political weight not through heavy-handed explanation but by their very presence. A critic in Senses of Cinema noted that Pasolini\u2019s style is often \u201cRomanesque or frontal,\u201d as if each shot were a tableau in a church nave, confronting the viewer directly with its symbolic import . Indeed, think of Magnani\u2019s Mamma Roma walking toward us down a nocturnal road, street lamps receding behind her \u2013 a modern Mater Dolorosa trudging through an urban Via Crucis. Or the sight of the rag-covered Accattone, perched on a wall, gazing at the sky with the distant look of a martyr receiving a vision. Or again the figure of Jesus in Gospel, striding through a crowd of old Italian contadini who could have stepped out of a Renaissance Nativity scene. These indelible images speak in Pasolini\u2019s \u201cnon-conventional, non-symbolic language\u201d of cinema, which relies not on literary dialogue but on the signifying power of reality itself . As Pasolini learned working with Delli Colli, a 50mm lens could capture an actor and his environment in sharp focus together \u2013 \u201ceverything more concentrated\u201d \u2013 and he liked that because you see the person and their world as one . In his films, clothes, backgrounds and faces all converge to express an idea or emotion. Pasolini assembled around him a \u201cgreat group of artists\u201d \u2013 cinematographers like Delli Colli, designers like Ferretti and Donati \u2013 to help implement his vision . They in turn recall him as an instinctive visual thinker. \u201cPasolini was something else,\u201d Delli Colli said, remembering the young director\u2019s reverence for the image, his \u201cspecific suggestions\u201d and references to painting . Though not initially versed in technical cinematography, Pasolini quickly grasped its essence. By his third film he was coming to set with shot plans and even aperture settings prefigured \u2013 \u201che had planned everything the night before,\u201d Delli Colli marvelled . Such meticulous preparation speaks to Pasolini\u2019s quasi-scholarly approach to mise-en-sc\u00e8ne: he choreographed light, color, and costume like elements of verse, each to contribute to the overall meaning.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It would be a mistake, however, to imagine Pasolini\u2019s films as static museum pieces of art history. For all his learned references and careful compositions, there is a wild, beating heart in his cinema. He adored faces \u2013 especially those of ordinary people: the toothless grins, the fierce eyes, the weathered brows of peasants and slum-dwellers. In them he found a kind of sacred authenticity that polished actors could not convey. This is why he cast people like Franco Citti, Ninetto Davoli, or actual villagers over and over. He once described the sub-proletariat (the underclass) as Italy\u2019s \u201creal Christ bodies\u201d, living embodiments of a lost sacrality. That sense comes across whenever his camera lingers on a non-actor\u2019s face simply gazing \u2013 as when the camera surveys the peasant onlookers during Christ\u2019s procession in Gospel According to Matthew: each face, carved by poverty, becomes a visage of timeless devotion. Pasolini\u2019s aesthetics of poverty was not to glamorize suffering but to assert the presence of grace in the marginalized. And in parallel, his aesthetics of ritual and sensuality insisted that human physicality \u2013 sex, laughter, eating, excreting \u2013 could be as ritualistic and meaningful as any church sacrament. In Trilogy of Life, the act of love is frequently portrayed as a natural rite, free of guilt. The films are full of rituals: weddings, funerals, religious processions, seasonal festivals, strange initiations (like the test of the virgin in Arabian Nights). Each is shown with attention to the textures of ceremony: the specific garlands worn, the chants uttered, the movements prescribed. Through these, Pasolini communicates an idea of the sacred and profane colliding \u2013 the notion that in the ritual act (be it holy communion or a pagan sacrifice, be it a wedding feast or an execution) the deepest truths of a culture are revealed. Perhaps this sensibility is rooted in Pasolini\u2019s Friulian childhood amid peasant religious festivals, or in his readings of anthropology (he was influenced by Frazer, Eliade, and others who wrote of cyclical time and \u201chierophanies\u201d \u2013 eruptions of the sacred in the everyday ). Pasolini believed in cycles of death and rebirth, in the \u201ceternal return\u201d of nature\u2019s seasons as a genuine sacred time, as opposed to the linear, materialist time of modernity . This is why his films so often end with a sense of completion or renewal despite tragedy: the death of Accattone leads to the dream of peace; the finale of Medea returns to the rising sun; the Trilogy of Life films all close with life going on \u2013 the painter dreaming of another work, Chaucer closing his manuscript, Nuredin and Zumurrud reunited in love. Even Sal\u00f2, nihilistic as it is, ends with that banal dance \u2013 life, in its most vacuous form, still goes on. One could say Pasolini staged myth as present-tense reality throughout his work: whether adapting Sophocles or the New Testament or Boccaccio, he insisted on bringing those stories into the now, into visceral contact with the viewer\u2019s world. He famously said he filmed the past \u201cwith the eyes of the present.\u201d In doing so, he made viewers experience Oedipus or Christ or Chaucer\u2019s rakes not as distant figures in books, but as immediate, flesh-and-blood presences. This immediacy was achieved by his concrete visual strategies \u2013 the gritty sandals and sweat of Gospel, the mixed-culture costumes of Oedipus, the erotic candor of Decameron.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In the end, Pasolini\u2019s cinema leaves us with images that are sacred in their very physicality. A tattered piece of clothing, a patch of rough burlap on a peasant\u2019s shoulder, becomes a holy relic of a world more honest and more human. His longtime designer Donati once remarked that Pasolini \u201cwas more interested in clothing\u2019s social status than fashion\u201d , and indeed in Pasolini\u2019s hands a costume speaks volumes about class, power, and aspiration. Each film\u2019s costume palette \u2013 be it the boiled wools of Gospel, the felt of Decameron, or the velvet of Canterbury \u2013 serves as an visual code, a \u201cvocabulary in motion\u201d to express Pasolini\u2019s thoughts . Likewise, every landscape or set was chosen or modified to carry meaning: the slums of Rome as the stage of a modern Passion, the deserts of Morocco as the canvas of myth, the lush gardens of a palace as the cynical playground of fascist predators. As one exhibition on Pasolini observed, his costumes (and by extension, all his visual designs) function as \u201cbanners of truth\u201d \u2013 they reveal what lies beneath society\u2019s surfaces. If a character is cruel or foolish or saintly or lustful, Pasolini finds a way to show it in their outward appearance or immediate surroundings. This is not done through caricature but through poetic realism. He had, in the words of Delli Colli, something \u201cintangible but very clear\u201d in mind for each film\u2019s look . He communicated this vision to his crew often by citing an existing artwork or a certain quality of light he wanted. And crucially, he allowed for imperfection and accident. \u201cIt\u2019s very important to make mistakes,\u201d Ferretti recalls Pasolini believing, \u201cbecause when you make a mistake, it makes everything appear more believable. When everything is perfect, it looks too fake\u201d . Pasolini\u2019s willingness to embrace the rough edge \u2013 the unpolished performance, the asymmetrical composition, the dirty face, the torn fabric \u2013 is precisely what gives his films their soulful authenticity. Life is imperfect, and thus truth lives in imperfection. In a pristine studio set he felt no life; on a real location with cracks and weeds, he found truth. Even on those occasions when he built sets, Ferretti notes, Pasolini would often insist on a 360-degree construction \u2013 four walls \u2013 so that the camera and actors could roam freely and catch stray, unplanned details . That openness to the unpredictable within a carefully conceived frame is a hallmark of his style.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Pasolini\u2019s cinematic oeuvre, spanning little more than fourteen years, forms a rich tapestry of visual storytelling that has influenced countless filmmakers, designers, and thinkers after him. His contemporaries like Bertolucci and Fellini admired his audacity (Bertolucci said Pasolini \u201cinvented a new language\u201d ). Today, the enduring fascination with Pasolini \u2013 marked by centenary retrospectives and exhibitions of his costumes \u2013 attests to the depth of his artistry. He was a dissident who chronicled the abuses of power and a dreamer who exalted the dignity of the oppressed. And he did so not with grand speeches but with images that burn into the mind. In watching his films, one finds oneself repeatedly struck by the poetry of the concrete: the way a simple gesture or object can transcend itself. A forlorn boy tied to a bedframe under a stark light (Mamma Roma) evokes the sacrifice of a saint ; two peasants laughing under a tree (The Decameron) become timeless figures of joy; an exiled father wandering naked in volcanic wasteland (Teorema) crystallizes existential despair; a lavish chandelier glowing above an atrocity (Sal\u00f2) signifies the chilling refinement of evil. These are Pasolini\u2019s dialectics of image. Through dress, fabric, space, light, and cinematic texture, he created a sacred grammar of the visual \u2013 one that speaks of the eternal human drama between the spirit and the flesh, the exalted and the debased.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Perhaps Pasolini\u2019s own words best capture his mission. Reflecting on his work blending realism and the sacred, Pasolini wrote: \u201cTo scandalize is a right, to be scandalized is a pleasure\u201d \u2013 a statement which, paradoxically, has a moral urgency. He scandalized precisely to jolt his audience into sensing the sacredness he felt had been lost. In the luminous black-and-white of Accattone or the blazing palettes of Arabian Nights, Pasolini is always urging us to see \u2013 to really see \u2013 the humanity on screen, in all its pain, glory, and reality. We emerge from his films shaken, perhaps, but also strangely elevated, as if having witnessed a dark ritual or a forgotten prayer. The last shot of The Gospel According to Matthew shows Christ\u2019s disciples looking up at an empty sky after the resurrection \u2013 a moment of loss, yet bathed in radiant light and accompanied by exultant music. It encapsulates Pasolini\u2019s cinema: mourning the vanished sacred in the modern world while simultaneously rediscovering it in the cinematic image itself. His camera, with its tender attention to textures of cloth, skin, stone, and light, became an instrument of revelation. Through it, Pasolini indeed made everything sacred \u2013 or at least, he allowed us a glimpse of the sacred hidden in everything.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Pier Paolo Pasolini stands as a uniquely visionary figure in cinema \u2013 a poet, painter, and polemicist who made films with the soul of an artist and the eye of an anthropologist. From his earliest forays into Italian neorealism to his later excursions into myth and allegory, Pasolini crafted a visual language at once earthy … <\/p>\n