In 1965, at the Pesaro Film Meeting, Pier Paolo Pasolini presented his first major work on film semiotics, the essay The Cinema of Poetry. With this essay, Pasolini entered a larger debate, at Pesaro and beyond, about the semiotics of the cinema, a debate including such figures as Christian Metz, Roland Barthes, and Umberto Eco. Many of the semioticians who participated in this debate rejected Pasolinis semiological arguments as unscientific. Recent Pasolini scholars have attempted to explain this dismissal.Some critics, such as Giuliana Bruno and Maurizio Viano, have suggested that Pasolinis semiotic ideas were ahead of their time, looking forward to poststructuralist themes. Other critics, such as Christopher Wagstaff and Sam Rohdie, have suggested that the essay owes an unacknowledged debt to an older aesthetic theory namely, the expression theory of Benedetto Croce. Certainly, this complicated and often contradictory essay is rich enough to support both readings. In this article, I will explore the Crocean connection in more detail, examining how Pasolini bases his definition of the cinema of poetry on ideas from Croces aesthetic theory. However, this does not mean that Pasolinis theory can be reduced to a set of Crocean themes. Instead, this discussion of Croce should help us to situate Pasolini in a particular time and place. An amateur semiologist engaging with French and Italian professionals, an artist working in the media of poetry and film, and a selfconsciously heretical thinker interested in everything from Marxism to myths, Pasolini was always combining ideas and contaminating theories. In The Cinema of Poetry, Pasolini attempts to combine a more traditional Crocean theory with the newer ideas of semiotics. As we shall see, the combination often results in contradiction; in some cases, however, the ideas turn out to be complementary.

Telephone: +44 (0)115 951 4261
Fax: +44 (0)115 951 4270
Website: http://www.scope.nottingham.ac.uk/article.php?issue=jun2001&id=276§ion=article