The Body of the Actor: Notes on the Relationship between the Body and Acting in Pasolini's Cinema

What is the role or the function of the actor in Pasolini’s cinema? I shall try to put this very general and generic question in another way: how can we define, overall, the particular physiognomy of a Pasolini actor?There are undoubtedly some particular characteristics, but what are they exactly? The ICI Berlin Repository is a multi-disciplinary open access archive for the dissemination of scientific research documents related to the ICI Berlin, whether they are originally published by ICI Berlin or elsewhere. Unless noted otherwise, the documents are made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.o International License, which means that you are free to share and adapt the material, provided you give appropriate credit, indicate any changes, and distribute under the same license. See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/ for further details. In particular, you should indicate all the information contained in the cite-as section above. 85 T H E B O D Y O F T H E A C T O R THE BODY OF THE ACTOR Notes on the Relationship between the Body and Acting in Pasolini’s Cinema


THE BODY OF THE ACTOR
Notes on the Relationship between the Body and Acting in Pasolini's Cinema

Agnese Grieco
The purest language that there is in the world, actually the only one which can be called just LANGUAGE, is the language of natural reality. (Empirismo Eretico) What is the role or the function of the actor in Pasolini's cinema? I shall try to put this very general and generic question in another way: how can we define, overall, the particular physiognomy of a Pasolini actor? There are undoubtedly some particular characteristics, but what are they exactly? As a director, Pier Paolo Pasolini worked with widely differing types of actors. In fact, his actors were often of completely opposing types: the great comic actor, Totò, the divas Maria Callas and Anna Magnani, the Hollywood idol Orson Welles, the 'bourgeois actor' Massimo Girotti, the young Carmelo Bene, and Julian Beck, the cofounder of the Living Theatre. With actresses such as Silvana Mangano and Laura Betti, Pasolini enjoyed a long working relationship, more than just a friendship, which should not be forgotten. And these are just a few examples.
On the other hand, and in parallel with this, Pasolini also created his own type of actor: an excellent vehicle for his poetic style of cinematography, but not merely that. One example is the curly-haired Ninetto Davoli, whose smile and funny walk with joyful little jumps, which Pasolini interpreted as having a powerful anthropological message, form one of the unmistakable images of Pasolini's films. The same can be said of Franco Citti, who brought Greek tragedy to the outskirts of Rome, or for Mario Cipriani, who plays Stracci in La ricotta.
Pasolini also often worked with non-professional actors, as did Robert Bresson and other avant-garde directors in the same period. And even these non-professionals are quite different from one another. Together with working-class city boys and ordinary folk, who could be inhabitants of any village in 'the poor, ancient country of Italy', the director cast famous intellectuals such as Cesare Musatti and even writ-tural education which Pasolini will not renounce, even though he feels their limitations and weakness, as they represent for him a key for interpreting the world.
In theatre it is often said that choosing the cast in a play constitutes more than half of the director's job. What then? What path did Pasolini take here?

P O S T -B R E C H T I A N V A R I A T I O N S
It seems that Pasolini wants to force us -in some cases quite purposefully, at other times in a more subtle way -to step out of our prescribed role as passive spectators. The aim is to turn us into critical witnesses, fully conscious, if not in fact participating -as in the Appunti per un'Orestiade africana or Il Vangelo or La ricotta -in what is, basically, the act of creating a fictional work of cinema.
(It is important to pause here to consider the true sense of the word fiction, since it is between fiction and reality that the aesthetic and metaphysical -and not least political -game is played in Pasolini's cine ma.) The message here concerns the audience, but I ask again, what about the actors? This is not an essay about Pasolini's cinema. Before I go on, I must therefore apologize to the reader for the hybrid style and the sheer pace of this piece, which must seem rather casual at times. At least that is how it seems to me rereading what I have written. I am aware of this, but these are supposed to be working notes, or rather observations arising from questions about theory which are part of my work as a director and a playwright, especially in the context of trying to find a way to bring Pasolini's world to the stage. 2

T H E N A T U R E O F T H E A C T O R
In the complicated interaction between actor and director (whether professional or not, whether conscious of their means of expression or not), 3 Pasolini seems to be a master, both in terms of freedom and attention to detail and in terms of the craft of film-making and the communication of something beyond the tangible objectivity of an artwork.
Pasolini was an avant-garde director but it is important to understand what is meant by this term, because in his case we are dealing with the avant-garde in poetic or poietic terms, rather than in a formalist sense. 4 Pasolini, who, as he pointed out in a beautiful interview, taught himself filmmaking, always took non-canonical paths -paths that, I think, haven't been fully explored until today. 5 In this sense, I would like to reflect on some of the recurring 'figures' in Pasolini's cinema. By this I mean, for instance, the use Pasolini makes of actors as stylistic and critical models in which the aesthetic choices show his high ethical standards (which are, again, political in the widest sense of the word). Deliberately applying terms far from the common theoretical classifications used to discuss acting and avoiding the classical problem regarding the interpretation of a role from a psychological point of view, as occurs for instance in the model of the American Actors Studio, I think it is possible to identify three recurring 'types of actors' within Pasolini's work. I focus here on the style of his films, that is, his 'cinematographical writing'.
1) The actor as a self-aware quotation of himself: for instance, Totò in Uccellacci e uccellini (Hawks and Sparrows), where he is 'free to act' within the profound canon of his own craft, or, in a subtractive sense, Maria Callas in Medea, where she is deprived of her divine voice. In my opinion, even a 'heavyweight' performance such as that of Orson Welles belongs in this category. When he is asked to play the role of the director in La ricotta who represents Pasolini, his aura of being a 'huge genius' within the international star system works as a quotation, indeed an ironic one. 6 2) The actor as symbol of figural nature, the specific incarnation of a concept or model: for example, Silvana Mangano -or rather her face, her perfectly made-up nocturnal eyes -when she plays the character of the mother as Jocasta in the Greek tragedy of Oedipus the King or as a member of the rich, Lombardian bourgeoisie in Teorema. Or the 'stranger' Terence Stamp: after his success in Joseph Losey's Modesty Blaise, Pasolini asked him to play the role of the guest in Teorema, the object of desire and the source of redemption.
3) Finally the actor -by which I mean the actor's body and not his or her 'acting' -as an open stage (palcoscenico aperto): the open stage is the place for the unveiling of the actor's anthropological self , existing before and beyond the cinematic fiction of the part he or she plays. It is a place that broadens the anthropological and geographical boundaries of our perception as an audience in the light of Pasolini's political and poetic search for new aesthetic outlooks and perspectives of meaningeven, and perhaps primarily, in the Southern parts of the world, which represented for the director a widespread trans-European 'Third World'.
I think that it is through the application of these stylistic forms of the actor's mise en scène that Pasolini's cinema shows its deep anthropological vision and his poetry of resistance. I will leave the first two of these characterizations as simple suggestions, and I hope they may be useful. However, I intend to dwell a little longer on the idea of the actor as an open stage.

R E A L I T Y P R E S E N T S I T S E L F
At this point I think it is important briefly to mention some of Pasolini's theoretical writings, which provide the scenario for my reflections about his use of the actor. The direct textual references come from the collection Empirismo eretico. These texts are (in)famous for their complexity and ambivalence, which led to many debates amongst semiologists and non-semiologists alike. My overview of them focuses on specific aspects, in a broadly philosophical sense, which seem to have a significant impact on the question of the nature and function of the actor as a 'linguistic fragment of reality'. I shall not deal with the issues regarding Pasolini's profession and his craft -whatever they may be.
That the figure of the actor allows for such highly metaphysical reflections is 'the secret of Pulcinella', which in Italian means that it is an open secret and has long been apparent, from the Greeks to the paradox of Heinrich von Kleist's puppets to the contemporary incarnation of the concept in the actor Carmelo Bene. With respect to this point, I would also like to recall that Pasolini in Empirismo eretico tells us repeatedly that he would like to write a philosophy of cinema (thinking in particular of certain aspects and consequences that arise from the assumption of an all-governing code of reality); on the other hand, he also warns professional 'philosophers' that his approach to reality and knowledge is surely not a contemplative one (nor a particularly philosophical one in the traditional academic sense).
On the contrary, in the case of cinema Pasolini speaks explicitly and provocatively of a passion for reality; a desirous and poetic/poietic passion. This passion, he writes, must be understood as something that can be transformed from love for an object into an obsession. (And with this we are right in the middle of Pasolini's cinematographic world and of a phenomenology of love that is closely watched over by the guardian angel Roland Barthes.) It is an attitude -also a cinematographic attitude -that leads to the suspension of time in the intensity of the gaze, which is perceptive and expressive and goes beyond any visual mimesis. It is an aesthetic and erotic, perceptive and intellectual vision; from a subjective position, it is also is also 'extreme' -if you wish to call it that -in its ability not only to perceive the object in its obsessive quality but also to depict it for others.
Spia della presenza di tale film sotterraneo non fatto, sono, appunto, come abbiamo visto nelle analisi particolari, le inquadrature e i ritmi di montaggio ossessivi. Tale ossessività contraddice non solo la norma del linguaggio cinematografico, comune, ma la stessa regolamentazione interna del film in quanto 'soggettiva libera indiretta'. È il momento, cioè, in cui il linguaggio, seguendo un'ispirazione diversa e magari più autentica, si libera della funzione, e si presenta come 'linguaggio in se stesso', stile. 7 The desiring quality of Pasolini's philosophical and artistic attitude is constant in all his works. In the complex, not to say hazardous, theoretical network of Empirismo eretico, the central theme is the relationship between cinema and reality, which the author presents in a reflexive and self-reflexive way, in the manner of an artist's poietical reflection. The principal axiom set up by Pasolini is that 'cinema' is a langue and the individual 'films' are the paroles in Saussure's sense. 8 This axiom is combined with the supposition, full of philosophical and metaphysical meaning, that this langue/cinema, like a hypothetical continuous long take, is the reality: a reality which expresses itself, in so far as it is per se linguistic as a communicative system.
Questi capelli biondi sono troppi, formano un colbacco; ma il vento ha disfatto quel colbacco, e ne è rimasto un alto pennacchio che (adesso che il vento è caduto) forma un piccolo monumento sproporzionato al viso minuto. Il minuto viso ha occhi smarriti. Devono essere castani, ma lo struggimento li rende opachi, e sembra riempirli del giallo dei vecchi mali proletari. 9 Pasolini imagines and describes the meeting between Eco, a philosopher and semiologist, and a young Neapolitan proletarian boy. In order to further complicate this mental puzzle, he then wants us, the readers, to remain uncertain in the same manner as his interlocutor Eco. Perhaps, Pasolini tells us, Eco does not 'perceive' this blond boy in terms of a real encounter; perhaps it is instead like seeing him in a film 10 . We, the essay's readers, could easily see or imagine the scene's being filmed or described or even experienced: Umberto Eco meets Jerry Malaga -since that's what the blond boy is called. When the detailed description of the meeting ends, Pasolini asks himself: Ma che differenza c'è tra i capelli di Jerry Malaga e gli occhi di Umberto Eco? Essi non sono che due organismi della realtà, la quale è un continuum senza alcuna soluzione di continuità. Un corpo unico, ch'io sappia. I capelli di Jerry Malaga e l'occhio di Umberto Eco appartengono dunque allo stesso Corpo, la fisicità del Reale, dell'Esistente, dell'Essere; e se i capelli di Jerry Malaga sono un oggetto che si 'autorivela' come 'segno di se stesso' agli occhi ricettori di Umberto Eco, non si può dire che si tratti di un dialogo, ma di un monologo che il Corpo infinito della Realtà fa con se stesso. 11 Only at the end of the text do we come to understand that the meeting between the philosopher and the blond boy did not happen in real life, nor in a film, but in a play. Eco meets Jerry Malaga on the stage. Malaga, therefore, is an actor. As an object/subject, the actor, in a perpetual shifting of meaning, still remains an 'object in/of reality' -someone we see both as what he is and, at the same time, as what he represents. He was chosen by the director on the basis of that which he himself is to interpret as well as on the basis of his capacity to act out a part.
I won't spend more time on this topic here, but one cannot miss the fact that in this text and elsewhere in Pasolini's writings there is a certain similarity to Spinoza's concept of Deus sive natura (including 'natural thinking'), which is explicitly quoted by Pasolini as a theoretical and philosophical refuge for the artist -the artist who, as in the case of Brahma, seems to be an atheist, but at the same time is easily able to imagine a god as the creator of the world, a god/world/reality and a language of that world/reality. He can therefore also believe in and think of a language of the cinema, a language of reality, as a divine (hierophantic) language wherein reality reveals itself. Within the continuum that is cinema (reality/language), Pasolini tells us that films are an organization and manifestation of that reality. An organization and manifestation of reality is all that we are in fact able to perceive. And this manifestation is primarily created by a temporal, subjective and stylistic construction: the montage.
In discussing the theme of realism or naturalism (according to Pasolini, a question of stylistic nature, in the sense that cinematic language does not have a grammar but rather a style), he warns us that absolute cinema, the concept of cinema as langue (as a mental exercise) would lead us to the insignificance of being; more precisely, we would experience the insignificance of being. (The fixed camera shooting everything that passes in front of its lens. Cinema as an infinite long take.) The fear of this absolute naturalism, Pasolini writes, is equivalent to the fear of being, the fear of the continuum (insignificance), whereas a film, applying different technical means, above all montage, is able to originate an internal temporality, a conclusion, a death, a meaning: Praticamente dunque, la questione della differenza tra vita reale e vita ripro dotta, cioè tra realtà e cinema, è dunque una questione, come dicevo, di ritmo temporale. Ma è una differenza di tempi che distingue anche cinema da cinema. La durata di una inquadratura. O il ritmo del succedersi delle inquadrature, muta il valore del film: lo fa appartenere ad una scuola anziché a un altra, a un'epoca anziché a un altra, a una ideologia anziché a un altra. 12 In what sense can the generalizations in this semiological and philosophical discussion, together with the allusions to Spinoza, be useful in the context of our original discussion about the actor and our further reflections about his or her anthropological character? In other words, what are the consequences for the concept of the actor that arise from Pasolini's vision, Saussure's ideas, and Spinoza's hypothesis about a continual monologue that reality has with itself?
Before looking for some possible answers to this question, I would like to point out two other aesthetic and theoretical arguments which Pasolini discusses in Empirismo eretico: the tension involved in the importance of framing in cinema and the influence of the pictorial view which he adopted during his artistic education.
According to Pasolini, the first syntagm or piece of cinematographical writing that makes up the film consists of the frame (the shot). In order not to fall into the trap of formalism, he underlines repeatedly not only how the single take of the camera is the substantial and necessary frame (the shot), but also how the objects of the shot -the reality -are equally important. We can change the camera take, but the camera is still always filming objects (or people). In Gennariello in his Lettere luterane, Pasolini pauses to describe the importance of props. With the use of precise objects in cinema (furniture, the coffee cup from a certain period) a historical, psychological, and aesthetic message can immediately and clearly be communicated. This can also be seen in one of the many anecdotes which theatre people pass around: when Luchino Visconti was directing a Chekov play, he insisted on having 'authentic' nineteenth-century suitcases on stage instead of copies -even if they were made by the best artisans.
Amongst the things we see in a shot, needless to say, are the actors. They are subjects or objects, like other things, but they have a certain quality, a certain weight. In what sense? Let us take a look at a quote from Pasolini: Quello che io ho in testa come visione, come campo visivo, sono gli affreschi di Masaccio, di Giotto -che sono i pittori che amo di più, assieme a certi manieristi (per esempio il Pontormo). E non riesco a concepire immagini, paesaggi, composizioni di figure al di fuori di questa mia iniziale passione pittorica, trecentesca, che ha l'uomo come centro di ogni prospettiva. Quindi, quando le mie immagini sono in movimento, sono in movimento un po' come se l'obiettivo si muovesse su loro come sopra un quadro; concepisco sempre il fondo come il fondo di un quadro, come uno scenario e, per questo, lo aggredisco sempre frontalmente. 13 If you consider the final sequences of Mamma Roma, we have a long take that focuses on the dying Ettore. The boy is in agony, strapped to a table in the prison. 14 Ettore's body in the film is clearly rooted in its anthropological and sociological dimension as that of a subproletarian country boy who has been taken to the city and urbanized. At the beginning of Mamma Roma, Pasolini focuses on the 'ancient' face of the actor, which resembles some vague traits of Caravaggian paintings, and on his skinny body as he moves along in his indolent and insecure stroll. The director eventually shows us this body in the 'urban' context, dressed in an ironed white shirt -evidently a sad costume, in accord with his mother's dream of being petit-bourgeois. Mother and son dance together like a newly married couple in their new flat in the Roman suburbs: a petit-bourgeois metamorphosis, but for Ettore one without a transformation of the flesh. And thus Ettore's sociologically defined body becomes, in the movie's final scenes, the body of the (religious?) 'passion'. He undresses; in a sense, he lets his social stigmata slip off, without eliminating them, and -with the fundamental aid of the music -steps over the threshold into the transcendence of Ecce homo. Through Ettore's body -the actor's body -a door is thrown open to a reality that is no longer solely sociological, historical, and political. It leads him to the world of dreams, irrational, religious, violent, and primitive, which has been the backdrop of the film throughout, like a shadow.

T H E B O D Y O F T H E A C T O R I N P E R F O R M A N C E / T H E A C T O R A S A N O P E N S T A G E / A D I A C H R O N I C A N D T R A N S C U L T U R A L V I E W
One of the points I want to examine more closely is the fact that Pasolini, through his insistence on the body of the actor, introduces with expressive force -even violence -a temporal, diachronic element into the ideal continuum of the cinema and the stylistic rhythm of the film. In an expressive and not a mimetic way, Pasolini enhances 'reality' and rips it apart. With a focus on the body of the actor, even before any consideration the way he or she acts in the role, Pasolini lunges forward: a cut appears in the canvas of the painting and therefore also in the temporality of the film, in the flow of the cinematic linguistic reality. (This is part of the Zeitgeist or spirit of the times: Gilles Deleuze defines the focus on the body of the actor in cinema as one of the characteristics of art cinema or avant-garde cinema of the period.) 15 Each actor caught by the camera actually reveals himself or herself as something beyond his or her role in the drama, as an autonomous landscape, a unique world, an original, many-layered reality -an open stage of events that are not linear and are even unexpected. We can speak of the emergence of the past and the appearance of something lying beyond, as well as the emergence of a system of temporal and geographical coordinates which differ from those imposed by the so-called 'white man from the West', whom Pasolini often criticizes.
With the focus on the actor, there emerges a depth of memory within the ideal continuum of cinema/reality and within the temporality that is defined stylistically by the film (primarily due to montage). For Pasolini this memory is, however, one which always negates any reconstruction that would speak of victorious cultures in opposition to cultures that have vanished or that now seem insignificant. We must not forget that this position free of the limitations of time and space lies at the heart of 'our culture' when it is seen from a critical point of view.
The camera's freezing on the body of the actor at a significant moment when the action is suspended -often heightened by the use of music -becomes a constant stylistic device and, at the same time, a philosophical moment. It is an intellectual desire and obsession that transforms this body into a sacred portal, a threshold, as has already been mentioned. In less mystical terms, we could think of the typical image of a collection of Chinese boxes.
What happens to the actor -this particular fragment of reality, who, by a convention that is accepted on the part of the audience, is supposed to represent something other -in this theoretical and aesthetic context? Is this, or should this be, something other than his or her own, as it were, natural self? My hypothesis is that, when faced with this crux, Pasolini is revealed to be a master at providing anthropological freedom to his actors -even if this appears to be a paradox, given his severe attention to stylistic features. It is evident that the metaphysical question underlying the nature of the actor and his or her functionwhich is therefore a question about perceived reality -is openly presented in his cinema. It stretches from the Brechtian criticism of the actor's psychological identification that characterizes the Notes for an African Oresia and the Gospel According to Matthew to the fixed iconic status of a Medea/Callas 'deprived of her voice', to Silvana Mangano's abyssal stare and to Massimo Girotti's bourgeois interpretation of the industrialist in Teorema and even Totò's previously mentioned codified and self-referential performance in Hawks and Sparrows (in which he acts in his natural style, giving a performance full of the elements of traditional comic artistry). In an interview Ninetto Davoli recollects how Pasolini would allow him to do whatever he wanted; thus, he acted as he liked. These are only a few examples; the list could continue. In a certain sense the actor is left alone, naked, consigned to his or her reality in front of the audience. (Here we are approaching one of the political aspects, in Rancière's sense, of Pasolini's art.) And in light of what has been said, Pasolini can propose, as he does in Notes for an African Orestia, Black American culture within the White world -that is, their music -as a way of representing, in today's world, some of the conceptual and political issues contained in Aeschylus' text. He leaves us 'alone' as spectators for rather a long time in front of Gato Barbieri and a group of Black singers jamming in a backstreet studio in New York. Now I draw my conclusion; it will lead me not to the end of the road, which seems to me as yet only a country path, but rather to the end of my essay.

N I N E T T O A S A N E X A M P L E O F A N A C T O R / S T A G E
He is identical to himself. He is free to speak as himself in a story which is not his own. Speaking for himself, however, he is also effectively speaking for other worlds, preserving and bringing out their meaning which is still conserved within his body. In the everyday normality of a stroll, as well as in a hypothetical film, Ninetto evokes his distant 'black brothers' who have been studied by anthropologists. As the son of immigrants he embodies, without any need to act, the recent (and even future) immigrants from North Africa, as well as our Homeric heroes (or non-heroes). The director Pier Paolo Pasolini therefore invites us to perform a sort of new Copernican revolution, to experience in corpore vili the human being as the centre of the world. This must necessarily be accompanied by a theoretical humility in the face of the emergence of the power of the past and the so-called 'different' and 'unknown'.
I would like to end this piece (although, as I must remind you, these are just notes) by making a comparison. Let's consider a work by another director, who may at first glance seem a world apart from Pier Paolo Pasolini: Woody Allen. Let's remember his The Purple Rose of Cairo. In this sophisticated comedy, Woody Allen presents a paradoxical story. One of the characters from the movie within the film decides to step down from the screen and to start living in the real world. And this world is so 'real' that the young explorer who has escaped from the screen falls in love with a passionate cinemagoer and considers starting a new (real) and happy life with her. This is very disturbing. The other characters, still stuck in the film, are left open-mouthed; in fact they get quite angry. As if that were not enough, it seems that in other movie theatres where the film is being shown the same character, the courageous explorer -who is played, almost too well, by a young actor keen to make it in Hollywood -also has a dangerous tendency to want to live in real life. It is a disaster. What can be done?
The studio seeks out the actor and orders him to intervene and to put a stop to the mess -to the madness. So the actor gets involved. He goes to the town where his character's first defection took place. There the actor arranges for the naive, daydreaming cinemagoer with whom his character fell in love to fall in love with him instead. He convinces her that he, the real reality, is better than the fiction. Because of this, his disappointed cinematic alter ego decides to return to the 'celluloid world' of the movie. All's well that ends well, then?
Not by any means. The young actor, true to his role, leaves the romantic cinemagoer he has just won over (played by Mia Farrow, showing her best old-fashioned innocence) and returns happily to the movie business. Because this is what counts, Woody Allen tells us with bitter irony. At stake here are capitalist economic principles which demand that the fiction must remain what it is. The actors play the characters as best as they can, and the cinemagoers dwell in dreams for a little while in the movie theatres. If his problem had not been resolved, our real actor's career would have been ruined. So at the end we see him, a happy liar, sitting on a plane which will take him back to the Mecca of dreams, Hollywood, to shoot his next movie, while our cinemagoer sits down in front of the screen once again to see the next movie.
I like the idea that Pier Paolo Pasolini's actors, like his cinema, have an additional freedom and capacity for transgression -that, paradoxically, they are able, in some way, to step in and out of the screen, with our critical and oneiric complicity. Their reality is unique and open, even within the cinematographical fiction, in their director's desire for soggettiva libera indiretta ('free indirect subjectivity' or 'free indirect point-of-view shot') of their director. At least it's nice to think that Pasolini's actors have had, or at least in any case have shown us that there is always another option. This isn't just the comedy of lies which are told, but also of the truth which isn't told.

N O T E S
1 If we wanted to map out these coordinates, just to make it clearer, we could start with the following list. In Pasolini's cinema we can find: a) non-professional actors (ordinary people, the proletariat, Italians and non-Europeans, intellectuals, friends, and family members); b) professional actors, including: b1) worldfamous media or art icons (Maria Callas, Anna Magnani, Totò, Orson Welles); b2) actors coming from very different backgrounds such as Massimo Girotti or Hollywood's Terence Stamp, or actors from the French New Wave, such as Godard's wife in Porcile and Teorema; b3) avant-garde theatre actors such as Carmelo Bene or Julian Beck; c) 'Pasolinian' actors such as Ninetto Davoli, Sergio Citti, Mario Cipriani, Laura Betti, and Silvana Mangano (who, in particular, played many of the female roles); and, finally, d) actors and non-actors in his documentary films. 2 This paper assembles preparatory ideas for staging a play in Germany based on Pasolini's works, a performance that is part of a larger series of projects which have already been carried out in Berlin and which explored, amongst other things, the relationship between Pasolini and Dante and the combination of poetry and music in autobiographical narratives. 3 I don't wish to spend time to elaborate now on the differences between directing for the theatre and for cinema. In my opinion, these differences, albeit important, do not alter the deeper theoretical matters discussed here. 4 Think of Pasolini's criticism of avant-garde Italian poetry and on the other side his friendship with Jean Luc Godard.