Daniel Blokh
Writing on Burning Paper, Fireflies Press, 200 pages, $38.50
Writing about film is an inherently clumsy task. As a medium which distills the living, breathing world into moving images, cinema is perhaps furthest removed from the stasis of words arranged on a page. It always feels reductive to describe a movie in words, the fullness of its moving frames lost in its translation into text. Perhaps this is why directors tend to write more interesting film criticism than film critics. When they describe a movie, they veer away from its immediate images and relay the feeling of watching it, reminisce about their lives, and draw sweeping, irresponsible conjectures. They know that the best way to approximate the feeling of film is not prose, but poetry.
Writing on Burning Paper, Fireflies Press’ new collection of essays on Pier Paolo Pasolini, is the first book I’m aware of to adopt this approach as a formal principle: every contribution to this project is written by a filmmaker. The result is a volume which far exceeds film criticism, becoming a noteworthy work of art on its own terms. Writing on Burning Paper may take Pasolini as its explicit focus, but what this volume brings into view is cinema itself—specifically, its unparalleled ability to compel desire.
Such an approach feels particularly apt for Pasolini, the Italian auteur whose symbolic contribution to film history exceeds his immediate output. Avowedly communist, openly homosexual, and ultimately murdered by a male prostitute in what some suspect was actually an assassination ordered by Italy’s Catholic nationalist government during the country’s volatile “Years of Lead,” Pasolini has since become somewhat of a heroic martyr of the European left. His character has been so difficult to capture in words that Fireflies Press founders Giovanni Marchini Camia and Annabel Brady-Brown, in their introduction to the collection, cycle through a litany of descriptions to acquaint readers with Pasolini’s persona—“the restless idealism, the combative zeal, the tortured introspection, the earnestness, the irony, the contradictions, and, above all, the impegno – a word so integral to everything he was and represented, it’s frustrating that it should only translate into english as commitment.”
Many critical commentaries of Pasolini have tried to capture this elusive impegno through a cross disciplinary integration of his film, literature, and public life (for example, Bloomsbury’s Pier Paolo Pasolini, Framed and Unframed and Stacy Szymaszek’s The Pasolini Book). Unlike this long lineage of ‘Pasolini studies’, Writing on Burning Paper consists of personal reflections on Pasolini’s influence. Some filmmakers contribute essays, like the sardonic playwright-turned-director Mike Leigh’s matter-of-fact reflection on Pasolini’s formal influence; others write poems, like Brazilian director Gustavo Vinagre’s heartbreaking piece imagining Pasolini transported to the present, attending a film festival in Recôncavo Baiano where he performs such ordinary tasks as taking photos with fans and eating maniçoba by the river. Still other filmmakers contribute screenplay excerpts, letters, paintings, and drawings. Altogether, these eclectic reflections depict Pasolini’s persona more clearly than any critical analysis could.
The complexity of Pasolini’s impegno is on full display in this anthology. Despite his saintly image, Pasolini was a difficult and divisive person whose extreme dissidence alienated many even among the Italian left, with which he was affiliated throughout his life. Pasolini’s radical anti-fascism led him to declare consumerism “a worse form of fascism than the classic variety,” to support cruel Soviet military actions like Khrushchev’s 1956 invasion of Hungary, and to side with the policemen during the European student protests of 1968—a stance he justified with the policemen’s working class background and the students’ bourgeois privilege. It is to the credit of the book’s contributors that they openly probe these decisions and apply their consequences to the political conflicts of today.
In his films, too, Pasolini created a contentious cinematic aesthetic. His dedication to Italy’s oppressed and outcast peoples pushed him to provocative extremes unseen in Roberto Rosselini and Vittorio de Sica’s more viewer-friendly works of Italian Neo-realism. In Pasolini’s films, the suffering and sexual depravity occuring in the unseen fringes of Italian society is paired with beautiful stylization and elegant music, bringing out the beauty of his characters in moments of their greatest pain or cruelest sadism. A few moments from his filmography exemplify this tendency—the striking images of a woman forced into prostitution wandering the streets in Mamma Roma (1962), or the beautifully-scored sequence of the pimp protagonist of Accattone (1961) stealing his own child’s necklace to sell off when his prostitute’s injury leaves him without a source of income. But none is as notorious as Salò, or the 120 days of Sodom (1975), which depicts the brutal kidnapping, sexual abuse, and scatological torture of a group of teenage boys and girls by Italian fascists. Breillat, a controversial filmmaker in her own right, aptly describes the process of watching Salò as an “excruciating, relentless revealing of my self.”
These many contradictions of Pasolini reveal themselves in the essay collection’s tangle of fondness and repulsion. Each contributor writes with great admiration for Pasolini, and yet each holds him at a distance, alienated by some aspect of his art or politics. For Berlin-based Serbian director Dame Komljen, director of such tender and surreal films as the genre-defying Afterwater (2022) and All the Cities of the North (2016), Pasolini is a misanthropic muse to love and hate: “I wanted so bad to get closer to him and he never let me in. Just like a real father.” For Breillat, Pasolini is a “big brother of cinema” who shares her cinematic inclinations while also deeply disturbing her with his shocking portrayals. For the Italian filmmaker Roberto Minervi, Pasolini is an advocate for revolutionary potential in America; for the Romanian director Radu Jude, a teacher of the pleasure of filmmaking; for the legendary French New Wave auteur Luc Moullet, a quietly sympathetic face among the general derision of the Italian left. Taken altogether, these reflections create immense anticipation for their enigmatic object. True to Goethe’s claim that translation “arouses an irresistible yearning for the original,” these essays’ translation of Pasolini’s essence and significance arouse a powerful yearning for the work of Pasolini himself.
As though anticipating this yearning, Fireflies Press has included a separately bound poem, Poet of the Ashes, written by Pasolini in 1966 and translated by Stephen Sartarelli. Arriving tucked into the essay collection, Pasolini’s poem more than earns its place in the collection, elucidating with shocking clarity that “poetry of unpoetic/things” (to draw a line from his own poem) with which he caught the attention of so many viewers. Beginning from his birth in Bologna in 1922, Pasolini’s verse relays his brother’s death at the hands of Garibaldi Partisans, his own conversion to Marxism upon witnessing a peasant revolt, and his entanglement in a media circus trial after a false accusation of robbery. “I’ve told you these things / in an unpoetic style / so that you won’t read me the way one reads a poet,” he announces; the irony of expressing this thought in verse is a perfect fit for a director who took the grit of neo-realism further than his predecessors while simultaneously poeticizing his brutal themes and images with beautiful and eclectic soundtracks. Another stanza so succinctly expresses Pasolini’s celebration of darkness that it feels vaguely prophetic of his eventual murder by a male prostitute: “I would like to spin a eulogy / of filth, of poverty, of drugs and suicide… / because drugs, disgust, rage / and suicide / are, along with religion, the only hope remaining: / pure protest and action / by which we can measure the world’s vast wrong.”
The poem is an account of Pasolini’s transition from literature to cinema, a subject he himself points out is unavoidable in discussions of his work. Particular emphasis is placed on Pasolini’s renunciation of his fascist-sympathizing father by publishing his first book in his peasant mother’s Friulian dialect, a gesture which sets the precedent for Pasolini’s later renunciation of Italian nationality as a whole by adopting the universal language of cinema. A poet only derives power from their “love of the language of the not-I,” Pasolini states, and while poetry is “the vehicle of expression that evokes [life], nothing more,” cinema is “the language of action, of life representing itself,” which is “infinitely more fascinating!” Toward the end of the poem, this praise of film’s unique capability to capture the poetry of reality reaches the fever pitch of a manifesto:
“I shall be – as poet – a poet of things.
Life’s actions shall be only communicated,
And they themselves will be the poetry,
Since, I repeat, there is no poetry other than real action.”
Given the tension between film and literature suffusing this collection, Fireflies Press is wise to include a poem in which Pasolini directly confronts the discursive distinctions between these mediums. For all its praise of cinema’s superiority to literature, this poem—like the entirety of Writing on Burning Paper—is a gorgeously composed testament to the unique capacity of writing. Rarely has a book about film so clearly demonstrated the power of poetic text; the image of Pasolini refracted through this book’s meditations and confessions is more alluring than any documentary film about him. Pasolini may denigrate language as nothing but “the vehicle of expression/ that evokes [life],” but the potency of that evocation, the power of desiring from a distance, is what brings us back to the written word again and again.