The aim of this article is to investigate the theoretical implications of Pier Paolo Pasolini's documentaries. By focusing specifically on three of his non-fictional works ( La rabbia, Appunti per un'Orestiade africana and 12 dicembre ), I have tried to examine Pasolini's controversial attempt to rescue the term 'realism' from its epochal disgrace. My central contention is that, against today's typically postmodern prescription to dismiss realist aesthetics, Pasolini's documentaries should be interpreted as ideologically informed efforts to preserve not only a (...) specifically chosen dimension of the real, but more importantly a dimension of the real that defies discoursive appropriation. While in the 1960s and 1970s film theory was progressively turning its back on the classic realist text and concentrating increasingly on questions of self-reflexivity, with the intention of debunking the reactionary nature of any hypostitized representation of outer reality, Pasolini, defending his own notion of mimetic realism, refused to liquidate cinema's potential to imitate what exists outside. On the contrary, in a manner reminiscent of Lacan, he strove to recuperate to semiotic analysis the emphasis on the non-symbolic and constitutionally non-conceptual fixity of the Real's most hidden dimension. (shrink)

This article re-examines the subversive nature of Roberto Rossellini's realism by focusing on the representation of subjectivity in the ‘Trilogy of War’ and, more precisely, by endeavouring to extract the repressed kernel of Rossellini's cinematic subject. Starting with a theoretical evaluation of André Bazin's defence of Rossellini's method, it then moves on to use Lacanian psychoanalysis as a way to access the characteristic imbalance, or decentredness, of the Rossellinian subject. Concentrating on two hallmarks of Italian neo-realism such as Rome, Open (...) City and Paisà, the article suggests that the Italian director's realistic approach hinges on the subtle exposure of a certain subjective excess that cannot be reduced to the historical and symbolical significance of the narratives, but should rather be related to the Lacanian notions of jouissance and sexual difference. In that way, the disturbing excess of Rossellini's subject can be regarded as correlative to what Bazin had named the elliptical dimension of his neo-realistic style. (shrink)

This paper is part of a wider project that brings together psychoanalysis and film by focusing on the most disruptive and potentially subversive Lacanian notion, that of the Real. My work explores the dialectical relationship between film as a process of symbolic signification and the unconscious/Real underside that it produces, arguing that only by attempting to read the traces of unconscious desire secreted by film can we encroach upon its "truth". The key cinematic concepts of editing, suture and gaze are (...) here re-assessed through Lacanian theory, while their theoretical and political potential is measured against the work of Italian directors Michelangelo Antonioni and Pier Paolo Pasolini. (shrink)

This article looks at Marco Bellocchio’s 2002 film My Mother’s Smile to re‐assess the central feature of Bellocchio’s cinema, i.e. its attempt to delineate a subjective strategy of subversion against a social order perceived as fundamentally repressive. In line with the director’s previous output, the film takes the Catholic Church and the family as its explicit polemical targets, endeavouring to unmask the nefarious ideological pressure they exercise on the ordinary individual in today’s Italian society. However, my reading draws on Lacanian (...) psychoanalytic theory to try and locate the disavowed kernel of Bellocchio’s narrative. Deploying Lacan’s controversial musings on ‘the gaze’, ‘desire’ and ‘femininity’, I suggest that the true stance of rebellion voiced by the film’s protagonist hinges on his recognition that the inconsistency of the ideological predicament he consciously struggles against paradoxically coincides with the traumatic inconsistency at the heart of his own attitude of defiance. (shrink)

Drawing on Lacanian psychoanalysis, this article looks at Pier Paolo Pasolini's critique of capitalist ideology by attempting to unravel the deepest libidinal kernel of his controversial positions. While Pasolini is often perceived as a Frankfurt-School type of intellectual intent on dissecting the contradictions of contemporary Western societies (and, for many, as falling prey to these contradictions himself), I argue that there is another way of approaching the core of his engagement, one which emphasises Pasolini's uncompromising determination to identify the breaking (...) point of ideology through a complex strategy involving the staging of masochism. The prospect of liberation from a given power mechanism can only emerge, according to Pasolini, after the subject has become aware of the obscene pleasure he or she derives from being caught in such a mechanism. Through references to key films such as Salò and Medea, the article shows how, in Pasolini's universe, 'liberation hurts', since it implies the traumatic assumption of the unconscious attachment to that from which the subject wishes to be emancipated. (shrink)