Thesis Abstract

SICK NARCISSUS: A STUDY OF PIER PAOLO PASOLINI AND MODERN ART FROM SELF-PORTRAITS TO SALÒ (1975) - By Kate C. Faulk (2015)

This thesis compares Pier Paolo Pasolini’s representation, application, and study of painting during the 1940s and the 1970s to construct a narrative concerning Pasolini’s personal iconography and self-portraiture at the beginning and end of his creative life. While studying art history at the University of Bologna, the young student seriously experimented with painting and poetry, and published his first book of poetry in 1941.  From the late 1960s to his death in 1975, Pasolini slowly returns to drawing, painting, and self-portraiture. Roberto Longhi’s lifelong influence upon Pasolini work surfaces in drawings and cinema. Pasolini’s philosophies, political opinions, and modes of self-expression follow a complex history. Art and the study of art history became avenues for self-expression, self-reflection and a personal language of images, which become embedded within his cinema. From his first exhibition at the University of Bologna in 1941 to his final work Salò or The 120 Days of Sodom (1975), Pasolini’s relationship to art began and ended in the context of fascism. In his cinema, Pasolini the filmmaker married painting and cinema in modes that challenge the viewer to negotiate reality and illusion. In The Decameron and in La Ricotta, Pasolini identified as artist and director in the tradition of a master painter, and avowed, “I am a force of the past.” The art historical subject of Narcissus became an enduring archetype through Pasolini’s life as a figure of innocence and self-reflection. Depicted as the boy with the flower, Narcissus appears in Pasolini’s poetry, paintings, and films. As a young man, Pasolini adopts this figure as metaphor of self-reflection in his painting and poetry. At the end of Pasolini’s life, Narcissus embodied his pessimistic attitudes. Instead of self-identification, Narcissus represented Italy’s youth, and their inevitable corruptibility by capitalism and oppressive social conventions governing the body. This is particularly the case in Pasolini’s Salò or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975). In this final film, the director transforms de Sade’s perverse text into a gruesome critique of fascism and capitalism. Unexpectedly, the horror unfolds within a luxurious estate housing an impressive art collection by modern artists like Lèger, Severini, and Balla. These abstract paintings and the choice of the setting itself, a confiscated Jewish manor, call into question the covalence between Pasolini’s artistic tastes, his personal politics, and his intentions recreating fascist Italy as the setting. From his first exhibition at the University of Bologna to Salò we see an ongoing negotiation between art, iconography, and ideology in Pasolini’s works. His films, essays, poetry, paintings, and drawings chart an intellectual self-portrait. One can trace the trajectory of Narcissus from 1947 to in 1975. In the final year of his life Pasolini effectively shatters his archetype of youth, beauty, and self-reflection. In Salò, the bodies of vital sexuality line up beside one another flower in hand to be married off into the fascist cult of youth, and ultimately to death.