English Texts

Portuguese or Tunisians, who, poor things, can only
take on the behaviour of the French bourgeoisie as
quickly as possible. And both the intellectuals of
the right and the intellectuals of the left think so,
identically.’ We could go on but the text is sufficiently
eloquent to explain who are the protagonists of this
dance of sovereignties that Pasolini is travelling:
the sub-proletariat, now, are the Moors too.
Let us mention one more dance. In Saló or the
120 days of Sodom Pasolini wanted to make the
reverse of his Trilogy of Life. By taking Sade’s novel
to the political adventure of the fascist republic of
Saló, in the last gasp of the nazi-fascist occupation
of Italy, he wanted to reveal the true condition of
the orgiastic in the modern world through that
founding society where the coexistence of eroticism
and violence became unbearable. I have to say
that a recent version of the film is on sale on the
newsstands in Spain in a collection circulating under
the name Midnight Cinema. Perhaps banalisation
has reached Saló too to cap it all. The fact is that
the film opens and closes with a dance. The
connection with the tranquillity of the real world
is a dance. At the beginning is an elegant ballroom
dance, although in the film we can only hear
the music since the footage was stolen from the
producers’ studio when Pasolini was just starting
the editing. Again at the end, to the same music,
some boys are resting for a moment from their work
as torturers and collaborationists. As they dance
with each other in couples, a trivial conversation
takes place: ‘What’s your girlfriend’s name?
Margheritta.’ The room, the ballroom from where the
Count watches and enjoys the tortures of the prisoners
in the courtyard, is decorated with reproductions
of modern paintings, especially Futurist ones. But
let us not deceive ourselves about the historical
references, the film is about our time, a metaphor for
the consumer world that has become a concentration
camp. The bodies of the past recovered by Pasolini
from the Neapolitan sub-proletariat or the North
African emigrants are now subjected to tortures in
the modern capitalist city: only in crime, in the social
outskirts that he still regards as the space of the
sacred, can they wonder, where am I the boss?
Let us remember for our story a crucial moment
in Pasolini’s life. He is finishing the filming of The
Thousand and One Nights with the great scene of
the dance in the Esfahan mosque. The mullahs have
put pressure on the Teheran government to throw
them out of the mosque since in the scene dozens
of naked dancing girls have profaned the sacred
precinct of El Muzzein. Pasolini has to stop the shoot
and, as was his custom, takes advantage of the
break to put the finishing touches to the project
for his next film. He is preparing one entitled Lotta
continua in which he will deal with the alliance
between the traditional left and the capitalist forces
when political and trade union interests decide
to crush any other representation. He decides on
a change and sketches what will be Saló, a film
in which he makes it quite clear that the triumph
of the techno-fascists in this society is achieved on
the condition of their triumph as anti-fascists in the
realm of the consumer society. The shooting problems
are solved and the dance scene is finished.
We see how Pasolini is permanently occupied
with that discourse of political legitimacies and
sovereignties. His clear anti-fascist position consists
of now revealing to us the new faces with which
the political monster is appearing. With the left he
argues about the construction of the community,
on the misunderstanding that it is not a matter of
nostalgia but of ensuring other ways of making
society after economic mercantilism and legislative
banality have finally wiped out all social ties. It is
a misunderstanding in which he nevertheless decides
to proffer all his memories of his childhood in Frioli
and his affirmation of a past world that has now
disappeared forever. As Pietro Barcellona has pointed
out, his criticism of the ‘emptying’ of the social ties,
which the abstractions of the right and of money
have meant in modernity, do not imply any nostalgia
for earlier times or mystical natural or primary
communities. We know that the idea of community
cannot be thought of as an oppressive and
authoritarian space, but as a free choice based
on the awareness that only in reciprocal relations
without the involvement of money can there be a
true acknowledgement of difference and peculiarity.
The community can be the place where individual
peculiarities are defended and valued, where our
conversion into ‘social illiterates’ can be avoided.
That determination referred to by Barcellona was also
Pasolini’s, his whole attention was focused there, all
his denunciations were of the creators of that social
illiteracy. When he says that ‘the most adorable people
are the ones who do not know what their rights are’
or ‘civil rights are, in substance, the rights of others’ he
is referring to the same thing, the otherness of a subproletariat
whom we require to shed their community
ties, to become social illiterates if they want to join
the ranks in our modern cities. His insistence on those
people, on constantly pointing out all we can learn
from them as repositories of the ties of our community,
the community we are shaping, frees him from his own
melancholy calls to feel nostalgia for community.
It is quite exemplary that Pasolini should detect the
emergence of the new conflicts of modernity among
the North African sub-proletariat, that he should
point, in the social fringes they inhabit, to the crisis
of community values, which only on the basis of a
banal, corrupt law and the conversion of any social
communication into an exchange of money does
consumer capitalism maintain in our cities. An analysis
as early as his allows us to remove ourselves from
any cultural differentiation since Pasolini himself is
culturally identifying a world that comes from Naples,
Andalusia or North Africa. It is therefore a structural
and economic problem to which the cultural ingredients
are added as phantasms, smoke screens with which
to evade the centre of the problem, the class struggle,
the creation of a new community. As in the example
he takes from the Gramsci of The Mystery of Naples:
‘Goethe was right to demolish the legend of the organic
“idleness” of the Neapolitans and to observe that,
on the contrary they are most active and industrious.
But the issue is to see what the effective results of
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