PASOLINI MASTER THESIS

The representation of the female body in Pasolini's cinematographic work was

constructed - like a self-portrait of all the political struggles that inhabited his own body - in conjunction with his commitment as a poet-citizen. From the relationships he forged with psychoanalysis (Freud), commodity fetishism (Marx), the stigmatization of minorities and sexuality (Gramsci) or heterotopias (Foucault) which consciously or unconsciously shaped his system of representation, several female characters took shape in his cinematography (Jocasta in Œdipus for Freud and Marx ; the narratrici and vittime in Salò for Gramsci ;

Odetta, Lucia and Emilia in Theorem, as well as Zoumourrhoud in Arabian Nights for Foucault). Based on Foucault's research focused on the usefulness of the female body fully organized by the society itself, four archetypes from Pasolinian filmography stand out : the maternal body (Mamma Roma), the glorious body (Marilyn Monroe), the virginal body (Mary) and the mythical body (Medea). Pasolini's system of representation seen through the prism of modern thought of feminist film theorists and queer theories (Laura Mulvey, Teresa de Lauretis, José Esteban Muñoz), allows a new relationship to the marginalized body-politics, in a perspective preservation and survival of the experience of the bodies of actors and spectators (Walter Benjamin, Georges Didi Huberman).

Its current architecture is:

• Fetishisation of Reality / Sacred Charnelous Body
• Utopian Body / Heretical Body
• Female Corporeal Archetypes
• Disidentification / Survivance

The thesis is a direct prehistory for materiality,
performance-as-survivance,
body as surface/image, resistance to pure form and the later Nymph/Phantasmata project.