Pasolini: The Apocalyptic Anarchist

Best known as the director of Teorema, Mamma Roma and Salo, Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922–75) was one of the most productive and exhilarating talents in 20th-century art. As well as being a filmmaker, Pasolini was also a wide-ranging and virtuosic writer, journalist and public intellectual. He used the spectrum of his life’s work to chronicle and honor the outcasts and underclasses of society whose very existence, for Pasolini, constituted a form of resistance to the status quo. Throughout his career, Pasolini refused the seduction of grand narratives and nostalgia, reading the hidden signs of his time through an all-embracing poetics of experimental thinking.
In this volume, philosopher and writer Hans Ulrich Reck looks at Pasolini’s provocative and inspiring work from the perspective of a contemporary Europe characterized by homogenization, labyrinthine regulation and hypocrisies protected by codes of political correctness. Pasolini: The Apocalyptic Anarchist finds that the artist has been proved bitterly right about many things.