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C h a p t e r F o u r Poesis in Pasolini Theory and Practice Not surprisingly, the early reception of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s notions on the cinema di poesia (cinema of poetry), first elaborated in a paper at the Pesaro Film Festival in 1965, was divided to the extreme.1 The most common resistance regarded Pasolini’s positing of an identity between the language of the unconscious, which he believed that cinema was uniquely qualified to capture, and the discourse of “reality” itself.2 In a departure from the position taken by such theorists as André Bazin, who had written that the cinematic sign follows photography in its capacity to “index” the external world by mechanically registering its imprint in time and space, Pasolini argued that film could capture a nonmimetic reality beholden to memory, dreams, and other manifestations of the unconscious.3 Stephen Heath’s representative critique dismissed what he called Pasolini’s “natural attitude” to film: “In the context of a cinesemiotics [Pasolini’s thinking] can only lead to the denial of cinema as a semiotic system: cinema becomes not a process of the articulation of meaning, but direct duplication of some Reality; it represents ‘reality’ with ‘reality’” (109). Heath’s remarks square with the acid commentary of Umberto Eco, who in the words of one scholar “blacklisted” Pasolini’s cinesemiotics (Bruno 98).4 Pasolini, according to Eco, “contrasts . . . the most elementary aim of semiotics, which is to reduce the facts of nature to cultural phenomena and not to retrace the facts of culture to natural phenomena” (142). Never one to back down from a polemic, Pasolini retorted: Un giovane biondo, caro Eco, avanza verso di te. Non ne senti l’odore. Forse perché non ce n’ha; o perché è lontano, o perché altri odori formano un diaframma tra te e lui, o forse perché tu hai il raffredore. Strano, perché un certo odore dovrebbe averlo, addosso. . . . Caro Eco, le cose stanno esattamante al contrario di come tu le interpreti. . . . Tutte le mie caotiche pagine su questo argomento (codice del cinema uguale codice della realtà, nell’ambito di una Poesis in Pasolini 71 Semiologia Generale) tendono a portare la Semiologia alla definitiva culturizzazione della natura. (“Codice dei Codici” 277, 279; Pasolini’s italics) A blond young man, my dear Eco, advances toward you. You do not sense his odor, perhaps because he has none; or perhaps because he is far away, or because other odors divide him from you. Or perhaps because you have a cold. This is strange, because he certainly should have a certain odor about him. . . . Dear Eco, things are exactly the opposite of how you interpret them. . . . All my chaotic pages on this topic (that the code of cinema equals the code of reality, within the context of a general semiotics) tend to bring semiotics to the definitive transformation of nature into culture. (trans. Bruno 98) This quotation adduces the aporia separating the poet and theorist of cinema. From a rational perspective, Eco is of course correct in reminding Pasolini that the natural world will always resist human attempts to render it a pure cultural construct.5 Yet, from Orpheus onward, a dream of poets has been to animate the inanimate or at least give voice to the voiceless. No doubt aware of the quixotic nature of his claims, Pasolini persisted in offering them in the name of the mythopoetic aspects of his craft.6 Film, he believed, could write with things instead of words.7 Pasolini believed cinematic language to be ontologically poetic, even though he agreed that, historically, the discourse of film had been relegated to the province of narrative and prose by political and commercial corruptions .8 Yet Pasolini insists in “Il ‘cinema di poesia’” that the poetry of cinema will out, and along with it the irrational nature of the medium. This occurs, he argues, despite the fact that the oneiric quality of film was tamed, submerged , and reduced to modes of narrative-based intelligibility because of cinema’s mass appeal and commercial value. The undeniable ascendancy of narrative film, in Pasolini’s view, led to all manner of absurd comparisons between the cinema and the theater, as well as the novel. His critique of the novel as a false cinematic analogue is consistent with his distinctions between the so-called cinema of poetry and its eclipse by the rampant adaptation of novelistic sources for the screen.9 The key to understanding this discrepancy between the...

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