Pasolini: the sketches “to see the Earth from the Moon”
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2022 saw Pier Paolo Pasolini protagonist of countless scenarios; the centenary year brought back to life the thought and ideology of a man who never knew how to betray himself. Pasolini has been condemned, judged, mythologized; it is precisely the chiaroscuro of his character that eternally elevates him to the light, distinguishable from the clarity of his person. The political and public drama of death – as Paolo Volponi defined it – has now been freed from any kind of moral conjecture and today, one hundred and one years after its birth, only a distant shadow remains of the “Pasolini scandal”. In the versatility of his corpus, a peculiar aspect revolves around the poet’s experience as a storyboarder: the drawing accompanies Pasolini throughout his artistic production, starting with his university years and ending with the portraits of Roberto Longhi from ’75.
«I remember that you divided the sheet into about ten segments and depicted the creation of the world: I was barely thirteen years old and lived in Cremona».
Roberto Longhi and Pasolini: “What is a master?”
In October 1973, Mondadori published in the Meridiani series an anthology entitled “From Cimabue to Morandi”, dedicated to the writings of Roberto Longhi and edited by Gianfranco Contini. Pasolini writes an engaging review, sure of the fact that “in a civilized nation, this should be the cultural event of the year”. Roberto Longhi is the one to whom Pasolini declares himself indebted for his «figurative fulguration». The theater of the epiphany is Bologna: in 1939 Pasolini enrolled in the faculty of literature and in the academic year 1941-1942 he was a student of the teacher Longhi. The teachings of the charismatic professor are for Pasolini a school of thought and civilization, to the point of pushing the young scholar to agree on a degree thesis on contemporary painting, a project abandoned following the disorder caused by the war events.
In 1975, the year of his death, Pasolini created a long series of portraits dedicated to his master.
Narrative solutions: the drawings of Mother Rome
«Pasolini had very clear ideas for Beggar […] he knew all the places, he had all the shots in mind, indeed, he made drawings. For every shot, there was a drawing. The voice of Tonino Delli Colli, collected by Antonio Bertini in the volume Theory and technique of film in Pasolini (Bulzoni, Rome 1979), reveals how Pasolini’s directing activity was accompanied not only by clarity of purpose and profound knowledge of the city of Rome , but above all by a courageous graphic exercise, which ran parallel to the shooting. For Beggar And Mother Rome, the director carefully draws each shot: the schematization of the sequences was necessary for a visual verification of the different narrative solutions. The drawing helps Pasolini to fill what he himself defines as «technical ignorance» at the time of his first cinematographic dissertations; the “comic screenplay” de The Earth seen from the Moonhowever, hides a precise and completely different intention.
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