Volume 54, Number 14 · September 27, 2007
The Passion of Pasolini
By Nathaniel Rich
BOOKS DISCUSSED IN THIS ARTICLE
P.P.P.: Pier Paolo Pasolini and Death
edited by Bernhart Schwenk and Michael Semff, with the collaboration of Giuseppe Zigaina
Catalog of an exhibition at the Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 208 pp. (2005)
Pasolini: A Biography
by Enzo Siciliano, translated from the Italian by John Shepley
Bloomsbury, 436 pp. (1982)
Pasolini Requiem
by Barth David Schwartz
Vintage, 785 pp. (1992)
Stories from the City of God: Sketches and Chronicles of Rome, 1950–1956
by Pier Paolo Pasolini, edited by Walter Siti and translated from the Italian by Marina Harss
Handsel, 232 pp. (2003)
The murder of Pier Paolo Pasolini, like much of his life's work, seems to have been designed expressly to provoke shock, moral outrage, and public debate. His mutilated corpse was found on a field in Ostia, just outside of Rome, on November 2, 1975. He had been repeatedly bludgeoned and then, while still alive, run over by his own car. The next day, the Roman police received a confession from a seventeen-year-old street hustler named Giuseppe Pelosi, nicknamed 'Pino la Rana' ('Joey the Frog'). Pelosi claimed that Pasolini had tried to rape him, and that he had killed the famous filmmaker and writer in self-defense. But the physical evidence showed that most of Pelosi's story had been fabricated—including, most significantly, his assertion that he and Pasolini had been alone.[1]
Review, 4795 words
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