Pasolini's Cinema of the Outside and the Problem of the Renewal of Marxism: Ontology, Semiology, Semiotics and Pedagogy

My thesis explores Pasolini’s work with a twofold purpose, historical and philosophical. It extracts for the first time a consistent political philosophy from his multifaceted activity as an intellectual, literary critic, poet, journalist, and cinema director, spelling out the specific relevance of his cinematic oeuvre for the debate on the crisis of Marxism. In my historical and theoretical reconstruction, Pasolini’s cinematic turn in the late 1950s was an early formulation of the problem concerning the conditions of possibility for political dissent. His film production in the 1960s and 1970s, his cinema theory in the mid-1960s, and even the pedagogy of cinema displayed in his latest writings and films in the mid-1970s can all be read as attempts to solve that problem in the face of the changing nature of capitalism. My main point is that Pasolini elaborates a Marxist political theory of cinema while constantly reforming his cinematic language. He conceives the latter as potentially transnational and trans-classist, and hence capable of exposing the hegemonic functioning of capitalism with the purpose of resisting it. What this study defines as ‘the outside’ of capitalism thus reflects Pasolini’s theorisation of ‘reality’ as the multiplicity of elements that – forgotten, excluded, and denied by capitalism – resist its totalising ideology, as well as his pedagogical commitment to offering his audience the opportunity to perceive the existence of an alternative reality behind the fiction screened by capitalist ideology.

Grantor dc:publisher

Oxford Brookes University

Year dc:date

2023

Author dc:creator

• Bardin, Massimo

Contributors dc:contributor

• Browning, Gary
• Bardin, Andrea
• Bulley, Dan

Statement dc:rights

• All rights reserved

Language dc:language

en

DOI dc:identifier

https://doi.org/10.24384/hg1r-h945

OAI identifier oai:identifier

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