Pier Paolo Pasolini, Framed and Unframed: A Thinker for the Twenty-First Century

Description

This cross-disciplinary volume, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Framed and Unframed, explores and complicates our understanding of Pasolini today, probing notions of otherness in his works, his media image, and his legacy. Over 40 years after his death Pier Paolo Pasolini continues to challenge and interest us, both in academic circles and in popular discourses. Today his films stand as lampposts of Italian cinematic production, his cinematic theories resonate broadly through academic circles, and his philosophical, essayistic, and journalistic writings-albeit relatively sparsely translated into other languages-are still widely influential. Pasolini has also become an image, a mascot, a face on tote bags, a graffiti image on walls, an adjective (pasolinian). The collected essays push us to consider and reconsider Pasolini, a thinker for the twenty-first century.

Luca Peretti is Visiting Assistant Professor in Contemporary Italian Studies at Ohio State University, USA. He works on film history, non-fiction cinema, Jewish Italian culture, and Italian intellectual history. He co-edited Immagini di piombo: Cinema, storia e terrorismi in Europa (2014) and has published for, among others, Senses of Cinema, The Italianist: Film Issue, and Cinema e storia. He is also a freelance journalist. Karen T. Raizen is Visiting Assistant Professor of Italian at Bard College, USA. Her research focuses mainly on aesthetics and language in baroque opera and theater; her current book project explores the diffusion and evolution of the figure of Pulcinella from the Commedia dell'Arte tradition. Her publications have appeared in I Tatti Studies, Italica, and Senses of Cinema, among others. She also works as a translator and editor.

A rich and timely collection of essays on late 20th-century Italy's most controversial poet, novelist, filmmaker and polemicist Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922-1975). This volume bravely and deftly rejects the hagiography that often plagues 'Pasolini studies,' opening up his multivalent works to a long-overdue reassessment in line with urgent 21st-century questions, from climate change to the enduring racial regimes of western (neo)colonialism. * Rhiannon Noel Welch, Associate Professor of Italian and Cinema Studies, Rutgers University, USA * So much has already been said and written about Pasolini but Peretti and Raizen's volume nevertheless succeeds admirably in opening up some genuinely new vistas on the life, work and relevance to our own times of this fascinating, if frustratingly contradictory, figure. * Gino Moliterno, Senior Lecturer, Film and New Media, The Australian National University, Australia *