In France, Germany and Switzerland, from the 1960s onward, public broadcasters devoted programmes to Pasolini; in the Unite States, by contrast, it was a small independent production company: Eye International Pictures, run by Frederick Hayman-Chaffey and Anthony J. Ciccolini Jr., that in 1970, after the release of Medea, made a documentary on the poet-director, which received very limited distribution. The director, Carlo Hayman-Chaffey, does not spare Pasolini criticism, highlighting his contradictory Marxism – given his fascination with the Sacred – and focusing in particular on Oedipus Rex and The Gospel According to St. Matthew. The film is a ‘portrait in motion’, in which statements by Pasolini alternate with, or overlap over, sequences showing him walking through Rome’s working-class suburbs, visiting a local office of the Italian Communist Party, or strolling near the Basilica of St Peter and St Paul. As the persistent close-ups suggest, Pasolini has already assumed the status of a ‘character’. The documentary’s attention to the controversy surrounding the poem Il PCI ai giovani!! (1968), in which Pasolini criticised the student movement, reveals how strongly it resonated in certain American milieus. The poet-director takes the opportunity to reaffirm his “refusal to share any kind of racial hatred – especially against individual police officers”, while later stating: “I believe that the student movements express a genuine revolutionary demand.” He discusses his troubled relationship with his father and his absolute love for his mother (“a textbook Oedipal complex”), expresses his aversion to the family unit, and mentions his never realised project for a film on Saint Paul conceived aganist the Church as a structure of power. He reiterates his condemnation of the Soviet repression of Czechoslovakia in 1968 and recalls that he had distanced himself from the USSR as early as 1957. Finally, he reads one of his most beautiful Friulian poems, Il nini muàrt [The Dead Child]. Also interviewed are Alberto Moravia, the brothers Sergio and Franco Citti, Ninetto Davoli and Cesare Zavattini, who does not hide his reservations about Pasolini’s cinema.

Roberto Chiesi