Abstract
Reviewed by: Lucia Re, University of California, Los Angeles, USA
There are many specific contributions in English on aspects of the work of Pier Paolo Pasolini (who was a prolific and enormously influential fiction writer, poet, film-maker and artist as well as critic and journalist), but Gian Maria Annovi’s book titled Pier Paolo Pasolini: Performing Authorship stands out as a truly top-rate achievement. It is the first to tackle the crucial question of how Pasolini crafted and shaped the complex body of his work in poetry, film, art and politics, together with the powerful myth of his authorial persona. The book examines the question of authorship in Pasolini’s work, that is, the centrality of what Annovi sees as a radical, transgressive and sometimes militantly “queer” authorial persona, self-consciously created and performed by Pasolini in and through each of his works in several different media (fiction, poetry, theater and performance, documentary and fiction film, painting, drawing and photography) and especially in his works from the 1960s up to his murder in 1975. This is the first book in English or any language to consider and assess Pasolini’s cross-disciplinary production across a variety of media and his unprecedented, multifaceted and endlessly provocative authorial persona, in light of influential theories of authorship and authority (Barthes and Foucault), as well as queer theory (Halberstam, De Lauretis, Bersani, Butler, Duncan, Edelman) and theories of spectacle and performance (Debord, Morin, Didi-Huberman, Žižek). Annovi probes Pasolini’s notions of authority, status, power, sexuality, and, more broadly, his function as cultural producer, and his resistance to the hegemonic practices of what Pasolini–who was also influenced by the Frankfurt school–considered to be the culture industry of the 1960s and 1970s in Italy and the Western world. Annovi shows how Pasolini’s innovative and genre-breaking production in various media is always connected to his ultimate work-in-progress—the creation and performance of an ever-shifting, reactive and rebellious authorial persona.
Far from being a narcissistic exercise, Pasolini’s interdisciplinary self-creation, according to Annovi, is a deliberate attempt to undermine his various audiences’ assumptions and to sharpen their critical ability to question the culture industry and the political status quo. The discussion of Pasolini’s different models of authorship, which include authors as diverse as Dante, d’Annunzio and Proust, is particularly enlightening. The book persuasively and brilliantly interweaves theoretical reflections with textual analyses that are clear and free of jargon. Chapter one delves into Pasolini’s theater and looks in particular at theatricality in relation to what for Annovi is the Pasolinian “performance of authorship,” focusing on the “Manifesto per un nuovo teatro” and the play Calderón, a complex and metatextual work inspired by two Baroque masterpieces: Calderón de la Barca’s La vida es sueño and Velásquez’s Las meninas. Chapter two, on Pasolini’s elaborate composition of La divina mimesis (published posthumously in 1975) offers a particularly original take on this underappreciated work, identifying it as a key text to understand Pasolini’s vision of authoriality and authority. Connecting La divina mimesis both to Dante’s Divine Comedy and to Pasolini’s film Teorema, and to the celebrated and controversial unfinished novel Petrolio (published only in 1992), Annovi argues that Pasolini’s staged “authorial failure” represents a queer performance, aimed at fighting against the expectations of mass culture and the culture industry. Chapter four, which is an in-depth analysis of Pasolini’s self-portraits (paintings, drawings and photographs), also stands out as a particularly original and fascinating section in this quite compelling and original book. Annovi, who has authored several essays and co-edited a volume on Pasolini, clearly knows the work of Pasolini and its context very well; the scholarship in the book is impeccable. The strengths of this book include its interdisciplinary range, its even-handed and non- jargony use of theory, and its clear and original focus on the question of authority and authoriality in Pasolini across a variety of media.
Although many of Pasolini’s own works are now available in English translation and he is more topical now than ever before, there are no comparable books with a scope or content similar to Annovi’s. Most studies of Pier Paolo Pasolini are either biographical or focus exclusively on his cinema. There is no other work that looks at Pasolini’s vast interdisciplinary production across media. Robert Gordon’s Pasolini: Forms of Subjectivity (1996) is a psychoanalytic study of Pasolini’s subjectivity but does not discuss the question of authorship specifically and does not consider Pasolini’s theater, painting, or fiction. Armando Maggi’s The Resurrection of the Body: Pier Paolo Pasolini from Saint Paul to Sade (2009) focuses specifically on the myth of Sodom, sadism and homosexuality in Pasolini’s unfinished or unpublished works related to Salò, which was Pasolini’s final and highly controversial film. Stefania Benini’s Pasolini: The Sacred Flesh (2015) is a study focused on the theme of the sacred and crucifixion in Pasolini’s work. For both its depth and breadth, Annovi’s book is a magnificent achievement.