Deleuze writes that “[a] close-up does not tear away its object from a set […] of which it would be a part, but on the contrary it abstracts it from all spatio-temporal co-ordinates, that is to say it raises it to the state of Entity.”(⊕) Think e.g. on the close-up of a face, which are, traditionally, the privileged objects of cinematographic close-ups. What does a closed-up face express? A “quality,” a “force,” an “affect.”(⊗) Accordingly, it has the “entity” of an affect, a force, or a quality.(⊛)
Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), says Deleuze, is “the affective film par excellence.”(⦿) It’s close-ups break the present into two complementary dimensions:
there is a whole historical state of things, social roles and individual or collective characters, real connections between them – Joan, the bishop, the Englishman, the judges, the kingdom, the people: in short, the trial. But there is something else, which is not exactly eternal or suprahistorical […] [but] “internal.” It is like two presents which ceaselessly intersect, one of which is endlessly arriving and the other is already established. […] [O]ne goes the whole length of the historical event, but that one ascends inside the other event: the first has long been embodied, but the second continues to express itself and is even still looking for an expression. It is the same event but one part of it is profoundly realised in a state of things, whilst the other is all the more irreducible to all realisation. This mystery of the present in […] Dreyer […] is the difference between the trial and the Passion, which are nevertheless inseparable. Active causes are determined in the state of things: but the event itself, the affective, the effect, goes beyond its own causes […] It is the anger of the bishop and the martyrdom of Joan; but, all that will be preserved from the roles and situations will be what is needed for the affect to be extracted and to carry out its conjunctions – this “power” of anger or of ruse, this “quality” of victim or of martyrdom. To extract the Passion from the trial, to extract from the event this inexhaustible and brilliant part which goes beyond its own actualisation(⊚)
is, in short, Dreyer’s filmic endeavour, as well as the reason of his cinematographic and artistic success.
Maria Falconetti in Dreyer’s La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc (1928)
It is also Pasolini’s, who admired Dreyer immensely. One can appreciate it in his close-ups of Ettore, the young peasant protagonist of Mamma Roma (1962) played by Ettore Garofolo, whose suffering expresses not only that of an individual, nor even only that of a social class, but that of a way of being-in-the-world which came to an end with the “anthropological revolution” (the term is Pasolini’s) brought about by neo-capitalism. One can also appreciate it in his close-ups of Margherita Caruso in his adaptation of Matthew’s Gospel (1964), whose silent opening shots manage to extract fromCaruso’s expression the profound sadness of an unjust feeling of rejection in which all similar feelings ever felt by anyone take shape beyond the particular story, legend in this case, told in the film. And one can appreciate it in his close-ups of Ines Pellegrini and Franco Merli playing Zumurrud and Nur ed-Din – whose gazes are not just innocent but the very embodiment of innocence itself – in Flowers of the Arabian Nights (1974).
Margherita Caruso in Pasolini’s Il vangelo secondo Matteo (1964)
Franco Merli in Pasolini’s Il fiore delle Mille e una notte (1974)
Comparing with today’s standardisation of the cinematographic image (to which we have alluded en passant in an entry titled “Perceptual Capitalism”) there is an intensity in both Dreyer’s and Pasolini’s close-ups (to just mention two outstanding examples) that is no longer there. But not only because acting has declined (Pasolini often worked with non-professional actors, like Ettore Garofolo) or because cinematographic photography has become conventional and cinematographic direction formulaic. The main reason for such loss of intensity lies elsewhere in our view, to wit, in the tacitly-consensual annihilation of cinematographic poetry on behalf of an over-simplified cinematographic narrative in which the plain narration of actions and events takes precedence over any poetic reading of qualities, forces, and affects – and over any phenomenological approach to them for that matter.(⊙) In this manner, narrative has imposed itself upon both poetry and philosophy; and the result is both the industrial and independent cinema we now have, which merely differ from one another in the complexity of themes they touch upon and their more or less honest and straightforward exposition of these.
Put differently: it is at extracting something internal, intensive, virtual, and in that sense a trans-temporal (but not exactly supra-historical) being from a given, concrete, actual, and thereby limited, state of things that Pasolini’s “cinema of poetry” (again, the expression is Pasolini’s own) aims. And there is in this an intimate connection between Pasolini’s cinema and Hölderlin’s poetry, which Pasolini read and translated.(⦷)
How should Pasolini’s “cinema of poetry” be defined, then? And an Andenken, to use a Hölderlinian term, i.e. as “rethinking” and a “remembrance” of the “sacred” that combines (a) nostalgia for bygone meaning and coherence; (b) perceptiveness to their liminal gleaming in a degraded, neo-capitalist, world in which everything is consumable; and (c) awareness of that gleaming’s politically-disruptive force.
Thus the difference between Pasolini and the Neo-Realists (especially Rossellini and De Sica, for Fellini, Antonioni, and Visconti became something else): while these narrate social oppression (in an extraordinary way, as there is nothing in them of today’s mostly-banal narrative cinematographic technique), Pasolini poetises the suffering of the socially-oppressed soul.
Ettore Garofolo in Pasolini’s Mamma Roma (1962)
But what do we mean by meaning and coherence, whose loss Pasolini’s cinema hence laments? We mean the naturalness of the fundamental affective aspects of being on which human lives ultimately rely however differently they may be experienced and portrayed. Thus, for example a sorrowful departure cannot be but a departure whose regretfulness must be perceptible as such regardless of the particular circumstances in which it may be experienced and independently of the fashion in which it may be depicted; likewise, a beautiful encounter cannot be but an encounter that brings perceptible joy regardless of the specific circumstances in which it may be experienced and independently of the way in which it may be portrayed; and so on and so forth.
It is not about narrating or describing that regretfulness or that joy, then; it is about letting them happen on the screen. Be sure, though, that we are not invoking here any type of essentialism, if for “essence” one understands something like an atemporal norm or model. We are interested in that which is concrete here and now; but we are interested in what lives in the concrete, that is to say, we are interested in that of which, viewed from a poetic perspective, the concrete can be said to be not the copy but the overflowing expression, while that which is thus expressed in it – to borrow from Deleuze again – “goes beyond its own actualisation.” For otherwise how could we, too, and anyone with a minimum of sensibility, feel Ettore’s despair, Mary’s sadness, or Zumurrud’s and Nur ed-Din’s innocence. Put otherwise, “something” must flood the viewed and the viewer in order to unite them in a vision.
Elsewhere, we have called that something the “sensible” that confers meaning to the “sensuous.” We could just as well have called it the “thinkable” that is immanent in the sensuously sensed in spite of not being reducible to it. We are also willing to call it the “sacred.” It is sacred because it is precious, it is treasured because of being precious, and it is precious and treasured because it provokes awe. It is in this sense, then, that Pasolini’s cinema is a nostalgic Andenken of the sacred that is simultaneously perceptive of its liminal gleaming in today’s neo-capitalist, degraded world and aware of its disruptive force. To label Pasolini, as it is customary, an “atheist” is, therefore, a complete nonsense.(⊜)
What about – moving from one cliché to the next – Pasolini’s “communism?” Here too, things may not be as obvious as they may seem at first sight. To clarify them, then, we should like to venture the following definition: Pasolini’s communism is Pasolini’s commitment to resist, by means of such Andenken, the advance of neo-capitalism and its menacing “anthropological mutation.” This, by the way, explains Pasolini’s intellectual enmity towards the two factions that composed the Italian Communist Party of his time: the Stalinist and the Euro-Communist, whosemainly-economic concerns and authoritarian and reformist politics, respectively, could not satisfy his poetic and philosophical aspirations; as for the emerging New Left, he did not feel attracted to its anarchic and purely emancipatory drive.
This said, let’s now return to Pasolini’s cinema. From quite early on Pasolini found himself fighting against two contrary, yet for him likewise unsatisfactory, cinematographic styles – or, rather, two ways of understanding and doing cinema. One was about filming situations and actions (e.g. someone’s motivations and doings and the consequences of these, à la Hawks) in the wake of the more-traditionally-bourgeois narrative genre: the modern novel (of which, let us add it, today’s cinema is, in its majority, a low-cost permutation); Pasolini saw in it the aesthetics of early capitalism, with its encouragement of individual initiatives. The other one was about filming the lose connections between independent series of events (à la Resnais) in the wake of the counter-narrative put forth by the French nouveau roman to the glory of a world from which, as Naomi Greene puts it, “human elements, coherence, and meaning had […] [seemingly] vanished”(⦶); Pasolini saw in it in turn the aesthetics of neo-capitalism.
Again, none of these options, one eulogically modern, the other one post-modern avant la letter, satisfied Pasolini. And so, against both, Pasolini proposed something else – and for this reason his cinema may be legitimately defined as propositional, which should be deemed anything but odd in someone who dedicated a good many efforts to examine and reframe formal issues relative, principally, to the semiotics of cinema.
Pasolini proposed – proposes – to re-turn and re-tune in to the gaze of the human who that is about to vanish – if it has not definitely vanished, we may suspect today – under the effect of the aforementioned neo-capitalist “anthropological mutation”; a gaze still perceptive of the sacred because of being the gaze of someone who still lives in connection and communion with the sacred.
Pasolini explores this political counter-gaze by means what he calls “free indirect subjectivity” (after the notion of “free indirect speech” in literature, which designates the speech of a character that takes up the narrative to express her/his own thoughts and feelings).(⊖) More exactly, he uses the camera to show the gaze of the pre-modern or pre-capitalist eye. For, he writes, the latter “embraces another kind of reality from that which the gaze of a cultivated bourgeois sees when it is directed at it: in fact the two see ‘different’ things; the very same thing appears differently to their respective ‘gazes’” (⊘).
The extra-modern peoples of Africa and elsewhere and the European peasantry of the mid-20th century, including those peasants that had recently migrated to the suburbs of the big cities, seemed to Pasolini to be far more capable of perceiving and expressing the sacred – or, again, of the fundamental affective aspects of being that frame, by definition, any authentically-human life – than the modern industrialised classes.(⧀) In fact he recruited many of the protagonists and non-protagonists of his films among them. Accordingly, it is their gaze, still sensitive to the sacred regardless of whether some of such subjects may be already undergoing a transformative process for the worse, that Pasolini attempts to capture with the camera and to reproduce on the screen.
There is no exaggeration in saying that, in this manner, Pasolini anticipates what is called in contemporary anthropology the “ontological turn”: different cultural perspectives do not only vary from one another in epistemological or cognoscitive terms, that is, they do not only amount to different interpretations of the world, but convey different realities, different ontologies.(⧁)
To conclude, we would like to stress that by thereby showing the premodern gaze, by making it happen on the screen before the viewer’s eyes, whose own gaze is thus invited – provoked – to undergo a perspectival shift, Pasolini builds a new reality. For, as he himself suggests, cinema is not evocative, it is not literature, it works with and produces reality – or, images in movement:
Cinema expresses reality with reality. […] We ourselves make cinema by living, […] by existing practically, that is, by acting. All of life, in the whole of its actions, is a natural, living, cinema. […] By living we represent ourselves, and are present at the representations of others. The reality of the human world is nothing other than this double representation in which we are both actors and spectators: a gigantic happening, if you like.(⦹)
(⊕) Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), pp. 95-96 (translation by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam).
(⊗ ) Ibid., p. 97.
(⊛) Ibid., 102.
(⦿) Ibid., p. 106.
(⊚) Ibid., pp. 106-107.
(⊙) See here our phenomenological analysis of ancient-Greek statuary, in which e.g. the “horse-ness” of every horse (i.e. its “idea” or εἶδος [eidos], as Plato has it) shines forth through, and is embodied in, such or such singular horse. Aside: notice, then, Deleuze’s (unconfessed) Platonism.
(⦷) See Roberto Amaba, “Dioses desconchados. Ruinas de Pasolini y Hölderlin,” Shangrila 23-24 (2015), pp. 54-74. There is also an intrinsic relation, then, between Hölderlin’s and Pasolini’s own written poetry, an extensive selection of which can be found in Pier Paolo Pasolini, Selected Poetry: A Bilingual Edition (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2014). Yet this relation usually goes unnoticed and Pasolini’s poetry is exclusively put under the influence of that of, say, Baudelaire and Rimbaud.
(⊜) The politically-disruptive force of the sacred in Pasolini, it could be argued, is like that of the anonimous “Visitor” in his 1968 film Teorema. On the “sacred” according to Pasolini, see Stefania Benini, Pasolini: Sacred Flesh (Toronto, Buffalo [NY], and London: University of Toronto Press), 22-27; Sophie Scheller, “Le Sacré selon Pasolini : la vision de Médée,” ASDIWAL: Revue genevoise d’anthropologie et d’histoire des religions 4 (2009), pp. 125-129. On Pasolini’s Medea, see our comments here and our performance here.
(⦶) Naomi Greene, Pier Paolo Pasolini: Cinema as Heresy (Princeton [NJ] and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 1990), p. 94.
(⊖) See further Pier Paolo Pasolini, Heretical Empiricism (2nd ed.; Washington, DC: New Academia, 2005), pp. 79-101, 167-186; Deleuze, Cinema 1, pp. 72-76, 228 n.2; Cinema 2: The Time-Image (London and Minneapolis: The Athlone Press and University of Minnesota Press, 1989), pp. 148, 183-184, 307 n.34, 313 n.49, 314 n.56; Naomi Greene, op. cit., pp. 115ff.
(⊘) Pier Paolo Pasolini, Empirismo Eretico (Milan: Garzanti, 1972), p. 182 (our translation).
(⧀) M. Maingois, “[Interview with] Pier Paolo Pasolini” (Zoom, Oct. 1974), p. 24. Even if the pre-modern sacred was often at risk of being institutionalised and alienated, as Pasolini acknowledges (see the excerpts quoted in Benini, op. cit., pp. 22-23).
(⧁) See for an introduction Martin Holbraad and Morten Axel Pedersen, The Ontological Turn: An Anthropological Exposition (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017).
(⦹) Quoted in Greene, op cit., p. 99 (Greene’s translation).