Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini 192275 was renowned as a controversial poet, novelist and essayist before he even considered picking up a movie camera. His unique sensibility was shaped by the mystical Christianity practiced by peasants in the region of Friuli, where he spent his youth, as well as Marxism, particularly the variant espoused by Antonio Gramsci, founder of the Italian Communist Party. And then there’s the wellknown fact of his homosexuality, which he sometimes experienced as some strange kind of excess grafted onto his being.Pasolini’s first films, Accatone 1961 and Mamma Roma 1962, take place among the thieves, pimps and prostitutes of the borgata, the impoverished district on the outskirts of Rome. Next followed Il Vangelo Secondo Matteo 1964, a documentarystyle treatment of the Gospel of St. Matthew with a decidedly Marxist bent, and Uccellacci e Uccellini Hawks and Sparrows, 1967, a picaresque fable starring the clownish Italian actor Toto and a large black crow given to compulsively spouting leftist political jargon. The late ’60s saw his interpretations of the classic Greek dramas Oedipus Rex and Medea, as well as critiques of contemporary families and society in Teorema 1968 and Il Porcile 1969.The perpetual outsider, Pasolini became increasingly disenchanted with society, especially the values fostered by consumer capitalism, and wrote, “I believe that the past is the only force able to contest the present …” Thus in the early ’70s, he returned to the precapitalist era of the Middle Ages with his extraordinary Trilogia della Vita Trilogy of Life, a series of three films based on Boccaccio’s Decameron, Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales and The Arabian Nights.

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