One of Europe's most mythologized Marxist intellectuals of the 20th century, Pier Paolo Pasolini was not only a poet, filmmaker, novelist, and political martyr. He was also a keen critic of painting. An intermittently practicing artist in his own right, Pasolini studied under the distinguished art historian Roberto Longhi, whose lessons marked a life-long affinity for figurative painting and its centrality to a particular cinematic sensibility. Pasolini set out wilfully to "contaminate" art criticism with semiotics, dialectology, and film theory, penning catalogue essays and exhibition reviews alongside poems, autobiographical meditations, and public lectures on painting. His fiercely idiosyncratic blend of Communism and classicism, localism and civic universalism, iconophilia and aesthetic "heresy," animated and antagonized Cold War culture like few European contemporaries. This book offers numerous texts previously available only in Italian, each accompanied by an editorial note elucidating its place in the tumultuous context of post-war Italian culture. Prefaced by the renowned art historian T.J. Clark, a historical essay on Pasolini's radical aesthetics anchors the anthology. One hundred years after his birth, Heretical Aesthetics sheds light on one of the most consequential aspects of Pasolini's intellectual life, further illuminating a vast cinematic and poetic corpus along the way.

A reexamination of Pasolini life and work as a poet, novelist, filmmaker, journalist and cultural theorist reflecting new developments in semiotics, post-structuralist theory, and historical research on Italian literature and film.

"This book casts the poet and filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini in a fresh light: his life and work in relation to the visual and performance arts of his time in both Europe and the US. Lavishly illustrated with both documentary and fine art images, it shows how essentially conservative Pasolini was politically and aesthetically despite his reputation as an avant-garde writer and filmmaker. But it also shows how truly advanced Pasolini was when it comes to interdisciplinary art, making him enormously relevant today"--

Cinepoiesis, or cinema of poetry, strikes us as a strange combination, a phrase we initially read as an oxymoron. Poetry is often associated with the abstract and the evocative, while cinema suggests the concrete and the visible. Yet, various visual media use strong and often contradictory images, whose symbolic force and visual impact stimulate the public’s attention. Abstract and emblematic images surround us, and the poetic nature of these images lies in the way they speak beyond their apparent limits and stimulate connections on a subjective level. A prosaic world like the contemporary one, though, no longer seems to hold a place for poetry. We are inundated by the need to tell and to be told, the need to build our lives through narratives. But it is precisely here, in this contemporary landscape, that the cinema of poetry attempts to establish a space for itself, exchanging the productive and industrial apparatus for the poetic stimulus of a sensory experience. A Grammar of Cinepoiesis is a theoretical and practical guide to the cinema of poetry, to its tools and forms. It examines how the language of a “cinema of poetry” works both in its theoretical foundations and in its modes of representation, and how it takes shape in the exemplary practice of Italian authors such as Pier Paolo Pasolini, Michelangelo Antonioni, Federico Fellini, and the more recent Franco Piavoli and Matteo Garrone.

Across 13 essays "e; 12 of which were previously unavailable in English "e; Deleuze specialist Anne Sauvagnargues reveals the continuing potential of Deleuze, Guattari and Simondon to invent new concepts and new modes of creativity and existence. She redeploys their work, together with other key philosophers including Bergson, Lacan, Deligny and Ruyer, to create new concepts including geophilosophy, the artmachine, the ritornello, schizoanalysis and the machinic assemblage.

Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922-1975) was arguably the most complex director of postwar Italian cinema. His films—Accattone, The Canterbury Tales, Medea, Saló—continue to challenge and entertain new generations of moviegoers. A leftist, a homosexual, and a distinguished writer of fiction, poetry, and criticism, Pasolini once claimed that "a certain realism" informed his filmmaking. Masterfully combining analyses of Pasolini's literary and theoretical writings and of all his films, Maurizio Viano offers the first thorough study of Pasolini's cinematic realism, in theory and in practice. He finds that Pasolini's cinematic career exemplifies an "expressionistic realism" that acknowledges its subjective foundation instead of striving for an impossible objectivity. Focusing on the personal and expressionistic dimensions of Pasolini's cinema, Viano also argues that homosexuality is present in the films in ways that critics have thus far failed to acknowledge. Sure to generate controversy among film scholars, Italianists, and fans of the director's work, this accessible film-by-film treatment is an ideal companion for anyone watching Pasolini's films on video.