Pier Paolo Pasolini
Italian · 1922–1975
Italian poet, novelist, and filmmaker whose fierce intellectual provocations — from Heretical Empiricism to Salò — exposed the sacred within the profane and indicted consumer capitalism as the new fascism.
Wikipedia ↗“Io sono una forza del Passato. Solo nella tradizione è il mio amore.”
Italian
“I am a force of the past. My love lies only with tradition. I come from the ruins, the churches, the altarpieces, the forgotten villages where brothers lived with the simplicity that gave every gesture the weight of the sacred.”
“La morte compie un fulmineo montaggio della nostra vita.”
Italian
“Death performs a lightning montage of our life. Only death gives our actions their definitive meaning. As long as we are alive, our actions remain ambiguous, suspended, incomplete. It is death that selects the truly meaningful moments and places them in sequence.”
“Il cinema di poesia attinge i suoi materiali da un fondo linguistico diverso dal cinema di prosa.”
Italian
“The cinema of poetry draws its materials from a different linguistic fund than prose cinema. The images of reality are essentially oneiric — they share with dreams the quality of absolute subjectivity projected onto an apparently objective screen.”
“La realtà è un linguaggio. Il linguaggio dell'azione.”
Italian
“Reality is a language. The language of action. Every object, every gesture, every face is a sign in a semiotic system that we read before we are even conscious of reading. Cinema does not reproduce reality — it is the written language of reality.”
“Il vero fascismo è il fascismo del consumismo che ha distrutto e degradato l'anima umana più violentemente di qualsiasi forma classica di fascismo.”
Italian
“The real fascism is the fascism of consumerism, which has destroyed and degraded the human soul more violently than any classical form of fascism. It has achieved what Mussolini never could: the complete homogenization of all Italians into obedient consumers.”
“Io so questo: che tutto ciò che è ideologia è una bugia.”
Italian
“I know this much: that everything which is ideology is a lie. What is real is under ideology, beneath it, tortured by it. The face of a peasant says more truth than any manifesto — because the face has not yet learned to lie in the language of power.”