“I want a formally perfect film”: Pier Paolo Pasolini on the making of Salò

Gideon Bachmann visited Pasolini on several occasions during the shooting of his film Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom, based on the book by the Marquis de Sade but placed in the 1943 Fascist republic in Northern Italy which Mussolini set up after the fall of Rome and before his final defeat. Shooting took place in the spring of 1975, and editing on the film was completed during the autumn. News of Pasolini’s murder, on 1 November, came when this article was already in proof.

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From the script: 

BLANGIS: “On the day of judgement, God will surely scold us in these terms: ‘Since you saw that on earth all is vicious and criminal, why did you lose yourselves on the road of virtue? The perpetual disasters which I, God, have imposed upon the universe, how could they fail to convince you that I love only disorder? Every day I supplied you with examples of destruction, so why did you not destroy? Imbeciles! Why did you not imitate me?’”

CURVAL: “Thus even in our monstrosities we will never be free of the model of God! As each one of us inflicts upon the bodies of his victims his own anarchic will, all we become is God on earth!”

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Day one

Pasolini has been shooting here in Mantua for nearly a month. Originally he had planned to shoot the film in 37 working days, but now the schedule has been extended. When I mention to him that the Marquis de Sade is reputed to have written the book on which this film is based in 37 evenings in the Bastille, he is surprised; and a bit sorry that he won’t be able to duplicate this feat after all.

I am reminded of something that struck me when I went to Iran to see him work on Arabian Nights (1974). I had been reading the script. I remember saying that some viewers might not know what the Tuluth characters were, which Sheherezade had talked of and which were now part of a character’s lines. And Pasolini had said, “Why, what are they?”, making me realise that his sources were researched only superficially, and that, to him, everything contributed by virtue of its physiognomy, its external aspect, as it were, and not necessarily through its intrinsic meaning. He had confirmed this later when discussing his choice of non-professional actors, stating that his films were ‘realistic’ inasmuch as they utilised ‘real’ faces. The magnificent Abbasid mosques, the Persian faces and the literary masterpiece he was mining were all on the same level as the book he was now using, written by a tormented soul in an 18th-century prison: points of departure, textures of environment. What interested him was the relevance to himself, to the experience of making his film, his statement.

It is a behaviourist view: Pasolini doesn’t interfere, doesn’t impose sentiment, doesn’t believe in the human being as an originating agent. Language becomes part of the whole, part of the fateful altogether. It is, in Skinner’s term, ‘verbal behaviour’. The difference between various Arabic written characters and the cultural implications of this difference does not interest him; and the hows and wherefores of de Sade’s circumstances in writing his confused, megalomaniac psychopathia sexualis will not interfere with Pasolini’s stylised, abstracted exhumation. I begin to see the connections, and the reasons for so much of the criticism levelled at him. And I have an immediate approach to what is in the process of happening around me.

On the surface, it seems that he has changed his style. There seems to be none of the sense of immediacy to which I had become accustomed by seeing his documentary-size crews at work in England, Iran and contemporary Italian landscapes. There are, this time, some real actors involved, and I see at once that he is making them repeat lines and actions in front of the turning cameras until he gets what he wants. Which implies that he wants a very specific thing. His erstwhile ‘magmatic’ method, the letting-things-happen in front of the camera by setting up only the atmosphere and the dramatic condition and giving the non-professionals the leeway of being themselves, has given way to greater rigidity.

I have always felt that Pasolini was tremendously hurried when shooting and that he seemed impatient with the machinery required to turn his ideas into images. De Sade, who didn’t have much time either, or didn’t think he did, might have inspired a work in the same style: hurried, prolific, irresistible. But this time Pasolini’s haste, he says, is more calculated. “Previously I experienced reality by taking from it, as much and as intensely as I could. But this time I want a formally perfect film. In de Sade there is the same apparent conflict between style and structure, but he didn’t have the cohesion in him, after all, to care for the finesse of the page. He was a writer of structures, sometimes elegant, sometimes open and flexible, but his flexibility is like that of an accordion: the basic ideas remain in order as if lined up on a spit. In juxtaposition to him, I was educated in a literary climate where form counts. For him the ideas were the important thing, and some of his pages are pretty bad, though there are always phrases that stand out in extraordinary beauty. I think that if he had cared for the page as such, I could have felt more of a sense of identification. His would have been the same kind of elegance I am striving for.”

I have come on a pleasant day, when the sun had early swept away the Po valley fogs. The shooting is at Cavriana, some miles from Mantua, in the Villa Mirra. It is one of those Napoleon-slept-here places from the immediate pre-Umbertine days, later used as headquarters, after World War I, for a variety of well-meaning international causes. Pasolini has chosen it for its resplendent decay, its overgrown gazebos and its rose bushes choked by wisteria, and perhaps the cemetery smell of its hedges. In a keeper’s cottage on the edge of the grounds he is shooting scenes in dormitories where the victims of orgies pass their tormented nights, to be awakened in the cruel morning by the renewal of the daily, sadistic regimentation.

He has divided the film in a “Dantesque” manner into cycles – blood, manias, excrement – to give it, he says, “a certain theological verticalism”. I happen to have arrived on a shooting day in the excrement cycle, and the first scene I watch is the rude awakening of a group of nude girls as they are having their chamber pots controlled. Since the fruits of their digestion are strictly reserved for the delectation of their tormentors, the girls who in the night had had recourse to the pots are to be punished. Aldo Valletti, one of the four torturers, and Caterina Buratto, the procurer-mistress of the dorm (who as Rena Buratto was one of the stars of the ‘white telephone’ era [of the 1930s and 40s] and came to later fame as the mystery woman in 8½ and Giulietta’s mother in Fellini’s Juliet of the Spirits, 1965) officiate. Sandro Barelli had spent hours giving that prison wall aspect to the walls, ruining with graffiti and urine stain the specially printed Liberty wallpaper. Again and again cross-eyed Valletti, who in 20 years of playing extras had never spoken a line on screen, marches into the room sniffing questioningly, attempting a forbidding look. But the incongruity of the scene does not translate easily into a recordable image: patiences wilt under the arc lights and only Pasolini remains unruffled through the many takes.

Since coprophagy occurs at regular intervals, Sergio Chiusi, special effects department head, has had to produce a comestible product. Swiss chocolate, broken biscuits, condensed milk and marmalade, which is then squeezed through plastic tubing to dress it in its habitual form. Since it is lunchtime, I try a piece on my sandwich. As usual, it’s the idea of it that disgusts; a perfect illustration of Kierkegaard: the event assumes its contents after the fact. History, seen backwards, creates its own significance. It is precisely what Pasolini is doing to de Sade by resettling him in Fascism. I am subject to the same suggestiveness: I spit out the chocolaty mess. Laughter roars up around me – half the crew has gone through the same experiment with the same result.

It is hard, of course, to take all this seriously when these scenes are one’s first glimpse of a film which has considerable ideological pretension. But the professionalism of crew and actors is complete. Pasolini never divulges the meaning of individual scenes to anyone involved with the production (least of all to actors and technicians), yet all are convinced of being involved in an enterprise of total respectability. At the same time there is a feeling of complicity in the air; all seem aware that while the aim is high the form will lend itself to misinterpretation. The variety of sexual clarities displayed arouse a sly smile in many a corner, but there is this absolute trust in the man who has chosen this subject matter in order to express things that go beyond it. Obviously this is the only way a subject like this can be turned into film. I cannot discern any difference in the treatment, on the set, between the purely sexual and the rest of the logistics. The pathological is treated straightforwardly, until the differences between it and the ‘normal’ become our own invention. I stand there, wondering if a less earth-bound culture, a less immediate functionalism in daily life than that of the Italian, could have formed a race which so simply accepts aberrations as part of social intercourse.

Day two

The film has moved to another villa, now a farm, decrepit and only partially inhabited. Three rooms have been completely refurbished: Léger-type murals cover the walls of one room from floor to ceiling, art nouveau and Bauhaus paintings have been hung on those of the ‘viewing room’, and curtains woven at a cost of 6 million lire, according to period designs, in golden-beige uni colours, hang heavily alongside the high windows. Pasolini, as usual, mans his own camera, while Tenino delle Colli, the lighting director, sets up the intricate early morning sun that the brutes outside the windows are to simulate. The whole place reverberates from the vibrations of the generator down in the hall. It doesn’t matter, of course. As with all Italian films, no direct sound is being recorded.

Tenino shot La ricotta (1963), which I have always considered Pasolini’s best film, and they have worked together many times. He tells me that Pasolini wants this film to be ‘crystalline’, almost dry in formal construction, and that he would have preferred to shoot it in black and white. Apparently he agreed to Grimaldi’s demand for colour with the reservation that he might be allowed to print it in a special process to create an almost black and white effect on colour stock, to increase the feeling of starkness and abstraction. Tenino gives me the simplest explanation for Pasolini’s need to man the camera himself: he hates to see rushes, apparently, and looking through the camera during the actual shooting is the only way he can see what he’s getting on to the film.

Personally, I think it goes deeper than that. For a man who writes – poetry, essays, articles, novels, political analyses, scripts and translations – and makes films, directs theatrical groups, teaches, produces, travels, collects, and lives so intensely, it must be hard to allow for the necessary group effort that the cinema entails. For a man who essentially writes his films, the need to hold the instrument, his caméra-stylo, in his own hands, is not only understandable, it is obvious.

Tenino tells me that Pasolini never uses a normal focal, it’s either wide-angle or a long lens, and that he uses the zoom strictly as a quick method to change lenses, not for editorialising by claiming to be moving in or away. Often, he says, Pasolini keeps the camera running while asking an actor to repeat a scene. He is almost always at shoulder level, likes backlighting, hand-holds without worrying over unsteadiness, and likes to get shots over with as fast as possible. Sometimes he deliberately avoids camera proximity and the drama that this evokes, fearing that he might be forced into a reverse angle, an unnecessary burden. In the end he explains to me the business of shooting from shoulder height: since both he and Pasolini are not very tall, what I had thought was the level of their shoulder was actually the level of their eyes.

I grab a moment between takes to ask Pasolini about his use of music. “There will be no accompaniment, no unmotivated music in the film. If I use any at all, it will be dramatically significant. I may use Carmina Burana, the Orff adaptation. Typical Fascist music.” I am somewhat stunned; a medieval oratorio dedicated to corporeal pleasures seems a far cry from what pleasure has been reduced to here. But Orff fits in with the Kokoschkas and the Feiningers.

Pasolini tries to help me out. “You see,” he says, “these four torturers are not proletarians. They are, as they were in de Sade, intellectuals, and in my story they do in fact quote from contemporary French philosophers. They are in a villa which they have perhaps confiscated from some rich deported Jew who owned these paintings, and they are cultured in the same pseudo-cultured way as the German and Italian party hierarchy were, with pseudo-scientific ideas and pseudo-racist rationalisations. It was what Hitler and Mussolini called a ‘decadent’ world, it was to be destroyed but exerted its fascination upon these louts. It so well expresses this era of Fascism, when all real values had disappeared under a heavy coating of power-seeking and exploitation. It was the last time that the human power drive expressed itself in such direct, linear, almost symbolic terms. Today all has become covered with sophistication: education, and the failures of the systems that we have invented, have blinded us to the basic, underlying causes for these failures. We tend to lose track of the problems in our need for rapid solutions and the illusions we thus have to believe. It is just one of the ways in which the story maintains its contemporary meaning. Orff, Severini, Duchamps are part of it, as the Fascists are part of it. I have also brought the killing up to date. In the executions I have used the four modes of killing still practised by our legal institutions: hanging, shooting, the garotte and the electric chair, methods de Sade could invent only partially.”

The scene being shot seems to me almost too symbolic. Again and again Paolo Bonacelli, one of the four main characters, marches to the end of the corridor between the rooms, mounts a pedestal upon which a beautiful, carved wooden chair with a high back has been placed, is handed binoculars, and peers out beyond the set, through a simulated window: one of those anticlimaxes frequent in watching the shooting of films. What he is looking at will be filmed later, in Rome. All is done without emotion, without facial movement. Since I know he is supposed to watch the climax of the film, the final executions, this apparent lack of emotion stirs my curiosity. Pasolini explains that the film is conceived as a rite, a ritual. He quotes a line from the script to show the rigidity and sense of order that he has imposed. The four killers have established a rule that during the final executions each of them in turn will be the killer, two will be his accomplices, and one will watch from this window. “Thus,” the line goes, “each one of us will in turn have the philosophical pleasure of contemplation, the particularly abject pleasure of complicity, and the supreme pleasure of action.” He goes on to say that he must constantly remind the actors of the ritual aspect of the proceedings. “This time I want even the non-professionals to act like professionals. I now refuse to use cut-aways in order to ‘fix’ a badly delivered line. I insist on exact delivery.”

But I see that he practically avoids rehearsing. He instructs the actors briefly, then starts shooting at once. It seems wasteful, all these retakes as the actors repeat. He may be trying to be different, but it must be hard for him, after years of applying a freer method. He admits this, stating that he is hoping to find a middle road. He doesn’t want to miss something that might come out of an actor before his intuition has been smothered by exactness. “I try not to make them feel too responsible for their failures, and shooting at once helps the feeling of our doing the work together. I am seeking perfection, since the modernistic disregard for form seems to me to be an element of alienation for the viewer used to a certain cinematographic language. The whole structure serves as a sort of fancy wrapping for the horrible content that is de Sade’s contribution, and that of the Fascists. I want to convey a sense of elegance and precision, of irreality. This film is less real because it is more perfect.”

Day three 

Another Emilian villa. This one is not far from Bologna and is now a public park. It’s a foggy morning, and children have come in busloads from nearby towns at Pasolini’s invitation, to look wonderingly at the boys in Nazi uniforms so familiar to them from their comic books. We are in 1943, and the Germans, then supreme in the Friuli area, have rounded up, at the behest of the four sadists, groups of youngsters from the surrounding towns, who are now to parade, nude, for the choosing of the 40 or so victims of the forthcoming debaucheries.

It is the classic scene of every pornographic novel, with or without literary pretensions, the first moment of the manifestation of supremacy of one being over another. Since the film is to be made without emotion, I find it hard to understand the willingness, even complicity, with which these boys, even as film actors, expose themselves for the camera’s anatomical panning and tilting. There is joggling for position, pride of the chosen, sly jockeying and competition. For a moment, the film scene and the reality of its filming seem one. These boys are proud of their bodies in front of Pasolini as they might have been, in their innocence, in de Sade’s castle in Switzerland two hundred years ago. When they were picked for the film, they were not told about the script. There might be some nudity, they knew, seeing that it was a Pasolini film. But none were aware of the portent of what they are involved with. And yet, so strong is the career strife, so important the parts in a Pasolini film for their financial future, that none rebels.

Since this ‘picking’ scene is straight out of de Sade, I get a chance to discuss the story of the film itself with Pasolini. He has transposed the work, but has maintained its action, the organisation of orgies and their realisation, and in the end the death of everybody. He keeps repeating that he simply wants to replace the word ‘God’ as de Sade used it, with the word ‘power’, since the sadists are always the powerful ones. The four protagonists are a banker, a duke, a bishop and a judge, the representatives of constituted might. In a visionary way, through the sexual metaphor, he wants to illustrate the relationship between exploiter and exploited, to show that in both sadism and power politics human beings become objects, bodies become wares, and that our economic organisation, throughout history, has tended to be basically sadistic. 

Marx, he says, didn’t invent this knowledge, nor are his followers eliminating it. The idea of productivity entails possessiveness, and this in turn creates hierarchies of exploitation. But he doesn’t consider this unnatural: in nature the submissive instinct is as strong as the domineering one. All the systems of thought which create value judgements, stating that one is better or worse than the other, were systems imposed from above, Christianity and Marxism not being exceptions, and thus no system can justly claim to be ‘popular’. The ‘ruling class’ is simply that group whose ideas permeate a particular moment in cultural time. The instincts, valueless in themselves, remain. Only one economic system has touched the basic chords of our being, ‘consumerism’. We no longer accept our fate stoically, like old peasants. In our fight to raise our social standards we become little dictators, little power seekers. That is why fascism has a universal appeal. The real, individual values, acquired throughout history, are lost in the new permissiveness. Non-emotional sex, industrialised exploitation, and the final disintegration of the family and the tribe that he calls the “terrible double bottom of our new liberties”. What we are doing by trying to destroy our traditions is a descent to the greatest conformism in history.

It turns out he is not concerned with being understood, however. What he hopes to create is a mystery, in the medieval sense. “A holy presentation, and thus profoundly enigmatic. If it were easily understood, it would be simplistic. Not to be understood or even to be misunderstood is an intrinsic dimension of this work. For example, in the script I use quotations from Blanchot, Lautréamont, Klossowski, even Nietzsche. But only as part of the story, depicting the consciousness of the characters in what they are doing. They interpret de Sade for me. I don’t use psychoanalysis in the film as a tool of direction, just as I am not using our modern way of understanding things emotionally. I am in no way trying to arouse sympathy, the film would lose its sting if I did. In this I am also true to de Sade: I have not shown victims whose side the viewer could be on. Pity would have been horrible as an element in this film, nobody would have stood for it. In any case, I don’t believe in pity.”

Since he is beginning to touch on specifics, after these excursions, I try to nail him down. Is there a way of getting from the image to these meanings except through the brain? Or, more important, how can he turn his ideas into pictures? How is he going to illustrate Klossowski? Willingly, he goes into details, and hearing him discuss Klossowski’s ideas of the eternal repetitiousness of the act of love, I realise the man is talking about himself, about his eternal reaching out, and his eternal disappointment. All this harking back to other authorities, I begin to feel, is a search, a need to find that he is not alone, that at least in disappointment he has peers. Disappointment in man and in God.

“From Klossowski I have picked excerpts at random. The things about the gesticulations of love, of eros, which eternally repeat themselves. The code of repetitiousness, which brings him to the conclusion that sodomitic gestures are the most typical because they are the most useless. It’s the most gratuitous gesture, and thus the most expressive of the infinite repetitiousness of the act of love, and at the same time the most mechanical. It is even worse for the executioner or the torturer, because he can undertake his gesture only once, upon any single victim. Instead of killing one, he must kill thousands, in order to be able to repeat his gesture. Another adaptation I have borrowed from both Klossowski and Blanchot is the model of God they propose. All these Nietzschean supermen are just another form of Gods on earth. Their model is always God. In negating him they accept his existence. Especially since they deny him with passion, and not just in a rationalist, libertarian way. By not refusing him coldly they render him real, in the best tradition of our Western anti-clericalism. Somehow, it seems to me that this is the first time I am making a film about the modern world.”

But picking from de Sade, why just from The 120 Days of Sodom? Writing only five hours a day, in the dusk hours, in a hurry, the Marquis produced a book that is necessarily sketchy, deteriorating, in the second half, into a numbered listing of tortures. Using the ‘Dantesque’ manner of cycles, and of these the three of blood, manias and excrement, Pasolini had wanted to represent, initially, three of the 120 days, one day per ‘cycle’. This idea fell more or less by the wayside, and no clear distinction has remained separating the days. The lighting, for example, is always even, and adds to the feeling of ritual. Ritual and order are always the means by which authority, power, suppression and fascism manifest themselves. In this morning’s scene, the choosing of victims, I see his main perpetrators walking about with notebooks into which they carefully make notations and from which they read laws they have themselves concocted. Votes are collected in a glass urn; the four monsters will pick only those victims they can all agree upon. One after another the boys lower their pants, the camera passes, once up and down, away, the next, once up and down.

Outside, in the formal gardens, peasants have grouped. At first I think they are the real mothers and fathers, happy for their sons’ aspiring careers. Then I recognise the black shirts under ragged, double-breasted jackets. They are the actors who play the Fascists of their day, for once not the uniformed, symbolic marchers, but the grassroot farmers, the ones who had supported Mussolini in 1922 and had brought him to power, caught now, at the last gasp of the regime, with their stubborn peasant belief that a man who starts out as a socialist must needs remain one. If ever a lesson needs learning, it is the one that seeps out of the sad eyes of these men, who really lived what they are now acting. A lesson which, with today’s advances of socialism in Emilia, has a new significance. The lesson of vigilance and creative doubting.

For Pasolini, placing the film in the period of the Salò Republic was simply an expedient, because it is a time and a place he himself experienced when as a student he fled from Bologna into this region and here began writing poetry as a partisan. It is also a period recent enough in history for people to identify with, so that it will not remain pure allegory. Because, despite everything, he wants his work to have meaning and usefulness for the people he feels so much part of.

“I want us to realise that there are basic human instincts that must be recognised. My insistence in replacing de Sade’s ‘God’ with the power concept is based on the realisation that today one needs to fight the power exercised over man’s body as much as in his time one needed to oppose the power exercised over his beliefs. Control over the mind implied control over the body. Today we have come full circle, because what is being exploited is man’s mind and his body. In consumer society we are being given a false sense of freedom, because we are suddenly allowed to do things that had been taboo. But as one of the characters in my film says, in a society where nothing is permitted everything can be done, whereas in a society where something, one thing, is permitted, only that thing can be done. When Curval says that we are all God on earth, he is really expressing the false sense of liberation of consumer permissiveness, the idea that we must all fight for ‘equality’ in what we buy, we must all become, as in the business world, more cruel in order to succeed. Isn’t that what Hitler wanted? De Sade was a romantic, he thought he was describing something special. Today we know that he wasn’t.’

Last day 

Today is the last shooting day. Pasolini has finally come to Cinecittà for the last scene in the film – the death of all the boys and girls who had not been tortured to perdition. It is common practice in Italian filmmaking, when shooting takes place on locations outside Italy or away from Rome, to come back here, to the safety of the illusion factory, for the scenes of sex and violence. On the Arabian Nights locations, the same had occurred: scenes were shot without their culminations, which were later done, in concert, at the Labaro studios outside Rome, where for a period of a few weeks nothing but highlights of sexual encounters were shot. The lower parts of male anatomies, close-ups of intercourse, a stabbing or two, all utilising only body fractions, in order to fit, in the cutting, the faces which had been photographed in Eritrea or Yemen.

The courtyard of one of those Emilian villas has been reproduced in the studio by the set designer, Dante Ferretti. It represents the view from that non-existent window in the villa near Mantua, that the four protagonists had seen through their binoculars. The victims were to be violated, tortured and killed, in that order, to underline the idea of the ‘mercification’ of the body. Pleasure obtained by a single human being from the total subjugation of another, Pasolini says, represents the precise relationship between boss and worker in capitalism. It had been his decision to place de Sade in 1943 which had made the film fall into shape in his mind, because, in the political climate of this short-lived Fascist satellite, the total anarchy of power, which de Sade had only been able to imagine, had become manifest. Here the domination by the German-supported Quislings had been absolute. Men and women had been reduced to objects. He knows: his brother died as a partisan in this area, near his mother’s birth town of Casarsa.

The most striking aspect of watching these scenes actually being shot is the lack of emotion with which they are set up, rehearsed and performed. I do not seem to be watching a girl’s stomach cut open with broken glass or another girl’s scalp lovingly removed in close-up, but the well-oiled activation of an industrial process. Pasolini does not want these scenes, which he says he abhors, to stand out in any way from the rest of the film, but rather to appear as the logical conclusion to a philosophy which is not particular only to the monsters he has chosen to portray. But although I know that it is a plastic skin with a bag of red paint inside which is being cut, and although I have watched the make-up men work for two hours to place a false, removable scalp over a girl’s hair, the effect of seeing the scenes actually done is chilling. Pasolini is calm, angry only at the time it takes to set up each trick shot. Once a nipple has been cut, it takes over an hour to replace a new false breast, reconnect the plastic tubing to the ‘blood’ supply being pumped from a few metres away, reinstruct the torturers to make another, more realistic attempt at portraying an activity of which none could have had previous experience. The crew take it all as rather a joke; the enormous false penises with which Pasolini has had the executors equipped arouse an unending stream of double-entendre.

But this is not a funny film. All the people here have worked with Pasolini before and carry great esteem for him, but even these hardy souls shake their heads doubtfully at what they see, prophesying that the film will never pass censorship in Italy. Even Pasolini himself is resigned to this idea; he wants no publicity. “In Italy they would just store up the information to take us to court. We must build up a reputation for the film abroad before trying to spring it on the Italian authorities.”

This last day is the culmination of a week in the torture courtyard. I have seen sodomisation, rape, hanging, shooting, scalping, a variety of anal activities, executions by garotting and electric chair, disfigurations of all sorts, beauty defiled in all possible ways, human bodies destroyed. But no sign of pleasure from the torturers, only anger, aggressiveness, disdain. De Sade, rationalising, described subtle joys. Pasolini, socialising, has eliminated these. Even for sadists or masochists, I assume, this will be a sad film, at best an intellectual exercise. I could imagine that for a moviegoing public it will be too cold, too remote for identification, offering no opening for emotional involvement. Towards evening Pasolini is alone, thinking and frowning. He hasn’t joked with his crew today, hasn’t played soccer for a month, has worked on a closed set for a week. All these are unusual for him, whose joy in life stems mostly from human contacts. I can practically hear his loneliness stealing across the set, his isolation from his easy-going countrymen who take it all as just another Pasolini curiosity. He would like to reach them, but has to claim distance and ‘mystery’. The cinema, industrialising his poetry, may yet destroy him.