The Cinema of Poetry

This essay explores the theories of Italian poet and filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini on the language of cinema. In essays such as "The Cinema of Poetry" and "The Written Language of Reality" composed during the 1960s, Pasolini argues for the special status of film language as "pre-grammatical" and links it to visual signifying processes such as dreams and memories. He also views cinema as the inroads towards a general semiotics of reality since, for him, the basic unit of film language is not the shot but those objects of reality that constitute the mise-en-scene of the shot, hence cinema is posited as the written language of reality whose minimal units of articulation are the very objects of reality itself. Accused by semioticians such as Umberto Eco of semiotic ingenuousness in trying to reduce the facts of culture to nature, Pasolini responded by arguing that he was trying to do the opposite, that is to say, to culturalize nature by examining it as a language. Against the constructed naturalism of both commercial and neorealist films, Pasolini argued for the creation of a poetic cinema able to exploit its constitutional pre grammatical, oneiric and sacred relationship with the world. The essay concludes with an analysis of the film Medea in which Pasolini′s attempt to restore a sacred vision of reality merges with his concerns over the cultural genocide of traditional and emarginated peoples at the hands of neocapitalist homologation.