LE CENERI DI PASOLINI

The Ashes of Pasolini is nothing more than a... selfportrait of Pier Paolo Pasolini. It is a documentary film, a collection of material that has been chosen and organized with philological acumen and historicalcritical rigor. It is strongly marked by a subjective, poetic flow and structure. It is a documentary film of poetry where the documents are not suppressed under the authoritarian voice over of the 'Expert' who guides and reduces everything into a reassuring hierarchical pyramid of explanations. The Ashes of Pasolini is thus Pasolini's autobiographical narration of his own human and artistic adventure, the contradictory and irreducible complex lived out by the greatest Italian postwar poet under the impulse of the extreme Mayakovskian shout: 'Professor, if you would take off your bicycleeyeglasses, I myself will tell you about the weather, and about myself'."
"Over the last few years, I have believed and publicly affirmed that cinema and television are two different forms of artistic communication, two different languages. I ended up with the polemical theorization of 'cinema as spacialtemporal art' and 'television as audiovisual art'. At the same time I tried to criticize, the prevailing school of thought holding that cinema has a naturalistic, objective, and documentary vocation on the one hand, and on the other hand, a dreamlike, subjective, and fantastic nature. And so I maintained that great cinema is always the combination of both aspects, the two sides of the same coin. Think of Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc, De Sica's Bicycle Thieves, and Altman's Nashville... Then, in these last few months of feverish activity, I made The Ashes of Pasolini a film that is still a documentary, a biography that is also an autobiography, a prose work that is also a work of poetry. And, as I was working, my task seemed to show me the way and the degree to which the 'theory of the two sides of the coin' could end up working out. However, the fact is that this job is simultaneously one of film and of television. It seems to include the spacialtemporal set up and the audiovisual one. lf this is true, maybe it would mean that, beyond film and television, one can work out a new form of artistic language and communication. Did I say too much? But this is simply the 'director's statement'. And the director is always the one obsessed with the search for the truth which is possible only in the practice of creative activity, and not in politics and practical life. As Marx wrote (you remember Marx, don't you ?), 'The nature of the spirit is still always the truth, and what nature would you give it? Modesty? Only the ragman is modest, says Goethe. Do you want to make your spirits into ragmen?'." (Pasquale Misuraca).

Regia e Screenplay: Pasquale Misuraca.
Assistente alla Director: Marcello Simonetta.
Consulenza musicale: Alessandro Fiorelli.
Sound: Maurizio Argentieri.
Editor: Pasquale Misuraca, Alessandro Cottani.
Cast: Pier Paolo Pasolini.
Production company: Fuori Orario, Rai3 ALLA scrI, via Del Pertuso 7, 01030 Bassano Romano (VT), tel. +39-0761-634536.