The life and death of Pier Paolo Pasolini
The career and achievement of the filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini is being celebrated thirty years after his brutal murder, but the political controversy surrounding his death haunts Italy still. Pasolini’s work spanned the disciplines of poetry, literature and cinema, while his political commitments were intense, controversial and unpredictable. The recurring theme dominating Pasolini’s life was power. In his work, as in his personal experiences, he encountered power in all its hidden, conspiratorial and censorious forms. More than thirty legal cases were brought against him for blasphemy and obscenity arising from his films and writing. His confrontations with power kept him simultaneously at the margins and the centre of Italian public life. He was a dissident not only from the Italian mainstream but also from the Italian Communist Party (PCI) and the wider left, whose orthodoxies and conventions he often contested.
He attributed the way of life of the Roman poor to the combination of economic deprivation and the seedy underworld which characterised the repressive 1950s, which Pasolini saw in some ways as a continuity between the fascist era and the subsequent Christian democrat regime. He defined this regime as “clerico-fascism” for its repressive use of the state and its manipulation of power. He argued that this was illustrated in Rome by the marginal existence of the sub-proletariat which was in conflict with a criminal police force.
In the early hours of 2 November 1975, the body of Pier Paolo Pasolini – writer, poet, film director and one of Italy’s leading intellectuals – was found on wasteland in Ostia, just outside Rome. Several hours later, Pino “The Frog” Pelosi, a 17-year-old male prostitute, was arrested speeding along the Ostia seafront in Pasolini’s Alfa Romeo. Pelosi was accused of Pasolini’s brutal murder. It was alleged that Pasolini had picked up Pelosi outside Termini train station, taken him to a pizzeria and then driven to Ostia for sex. Pelosi himself claimed that he had killed Pasolini in self-defence after the latter had attempted to sodomise him with a wooden stick, but after a lengthy trial he was found guilty in 1976 and sentenced to nine years in jail.
He attributed the way of life of the Roman poor to the combination of economic deprivation and the seedy underworld which characterised the repressive 1950s, which Pasolini saw in some ways as a continuity between the fascist era and the subsequent Christian democrat regime. He defined this regime as “clerico-fascism” for its repressive use of the state and its manipulation of power. He argued that this was illustrated in Rome by the marginal existence of the sub-proletariat which was in conflict with a criminal police force.
In the early hours of 2 November 1975, the body of Pier Paolo Pasolini – writer, poet, film director and one of Italy’s leading intellectuals – was found on wasteland in Ostia, just outside Rome. Several hours later, Pino “The Frog” Pelosi, a 17-year-old male prostitute, was arrested speeding along the Ostia seafront in Pasolini’s Alfa Romeo. Pelosi was accused of Pasolini’s brutal murder. It was alleged that Pasolini had picked up Pelosi outside Termini train station, taken him to a pizzeria and then driven to Ostia for sex. Pelosi himself claimed that he had killed Pasolini in self-defence after the latter had attempted to sodomise him with a wooden stick, but after a lengthy trial he was found guilty in 1976 and sentenced to nine years in jail.
On the night of his murder, Pasolini had dined with Ninetto Davoli and his family at the Pommidoro restaurant in the San Lorenzo district of Rome. Davoli had come from a poor Calabrian family and been discovered by Pasolini in the Rome slums in the early 1960s. He became Pasolini’s main actor, for a time his lover and subsequently one of his closest friends. It was Davoli who had to identify Pasolini’s corpse the following day.
Many people were unhappy with the murder verdict. The actress Laura Betti ↑ , who had appeared in many of Pasolini’s films, organised a campaign for an inquiry into his death. She argued that it had a deeper political significance. After all, Pasolini had made many enemies. In the weeks leading up to his murder he had condemned Italy’s political class for its corruption, for neo-fascist conspiracy and for collusion with the Mafia. In articles for Corriere della Sera he had called for Italy’s political class to be put on trial.
Other friends and supporters of Pasolini ↑ , like the film director Bernardo Bertolucci, used the absence of blood on Pelosi’s clothes and the nature of the marks on Pasolini’s body to cast doubt on the notion that Pelosi alone could have committed the murder. Bertolucci, who worked as an assistant on Pasolini’s first film Accattone, spoke of the way Pasolini’s life and public image had been “savaged” in the period leading up to his murder. Pasolini’s last film Salo o le 120 Giornate di Sodomdepicted Mussolini’s fascists as sodomites, and he had received death threats from active neo-fascist groups.
The doubts that emerged over responsibility for the killing did not abate after Pelosi’s confession. The trial pathologist, Faustino Durante, suggested that the murder was likely to have been committed by more than one person. The newspaper Paese Sera published a letter from a witness saying that a car containing four people from Catania in Sicily followed Pasolini to Ostia. This material, though submitted, was never used in the trial. These concerns were partially reflected when a court decided in 1977 that Pasolini had been “murdered by Pelosi and persons unknown”; but at the appeal in 1979, this judgment was amended and Pelosi now regarded as the sole murderer.
In 2005, the 46-year-old Pino Pelosi made a startling new statement ↑ in an interview for RAI 3: “I am innocent. I didn’t kill him”. He now accused three strangers - “youths with southern accents” – of the killing..
