Pasolini’s Intermediality: Translating Auerbach’s Literary Theory into Film Practice

Throughout his career, Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922-1975) experimented across a variety of artistic media, including poetry, fiction, cinema, drama, and painting. Yet it is in his early cinema – the so-called “national-popular phase”, including Accattone (1961), Mamma Roma (1962), La Ricotta (1963) and Il Vangelo secondo Matteo (1964) – that he first originally interpreted the “conceptual fusion” of different arts, taking inspiration from a text of literary criticism translated into Italian in 1956: Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis. The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. Such a crucial encounter between literary and film theory in his work was recorded by Pasolini himself soon after his collaboration with Federico Fellini for Le notti di Cabiria in 1957: “Fellini dragged me through that countryside lost in a honey of ultimate seasonal sweetness as he told me the plot of the Nights. A Peruvian kitten next to the big Siamese tomcat, I listened, Auerbach in my pocket” (“Nota su Le notti”). Auerbach is not simply evoked per allegoriam here, but he proves to be the main model through which Pasolini rethought representation from literature to cinema. In particular, two concepts had a strong impact on his cinematographic style: the “mingling of styles” and “figural realism”.

In Mimesis, the German philologist and comparativist identified two significant moments in literary history, in which the traditional separation of “high” and “low” styles was surpassed: the history of Christ, which combined everyday life and sublime tragedy; and the Divine Comedy, which, drawing on the Christian tradition, again mixed divine and human elements. The concept of figura was employed instead to explain how Dante represented his historical characters as a prefiguration of their divine destiny. Figural interpretation establishes indeed a connection between two facts or people, in which one of them is not self-referential in its meaning, but also means the other; and the other also includes and resolves the former.

The originality of Pasolini’s intermediality is based on the manner in which he translated Auerbach’s concept of “mingling of styles” into a form of hybridization of artistic media, at the same time using the concept of figura to create semiotic interconnections between the protagonists of his films (Accattone, Ettore, Stracci, and Jesus Christ) and the figura Christi. The attractive feature of Mimesis was for Pasolini the radical mingling of “high” and” low” cultures, as a revolutionary characteristic of Christian religion (Christ impersonating at once altitudo and humilitas in his life and passion). Pasolini’s early films can be seen in fact as a progressive figural approximation to the passion of Christ, first only suggested through symbolic associations with music (such as Bach’s in Accattone), paintings (such as Mantegna’s Cristo morto or Pomtorno’s Deposizione, in Mamma Roma or La ricotta respectively), and sculptures (the figure of the Angel and the cross in Accattone), and then through the full identification with Christ in person in Il Vangelo secondo Matteo. The mingling of styles was thus used in his cinema as an aesthetic strategy to re-define the hierarchical boundaries of social representation. At the same time, through his figural realism, Pasolini constructed the filmic discourse on his “poveri Cristi”, the dimension of sacredness, namely of “exclusion” from society (in Agamben’s definition of homo sacer), being his form of resistance to Italian society in the 1960s.

[This topic is discussed more extensively in this recently published book: Emanuela Patti, Pasolini After Dante. The “Divine Mimesis” and the Politics of Representation, (Oxford: Legenda, 2016)