Pasolini’s Bodies and Places

Around 1980 in Rome, a small cooperative around film critics Michele Mancini and Giuseppe Perrella produced a mysterious, elaborate and yet effortless looking 600-page book of black-and-white photographs entitled Pier Paolo ‘Pasolini: Corpi e Luoghi’ (Theorema 1981). According to some reviews of the time this is the most Pasolinian publication to date (Alberto Farrasino), an indispensable tool for future research (Tullio Kezich), not just an illustrated book but a unique model of critique (Adriano Aprà).

With its relentless and yet playful classification of some 2,000 film stills ranged under the categories of “bodies” and “places”, whatever page we turn to, Mancini and Perrella stage an ever-shifting space. With a hidden reference to Walter Benjamin and a correspondingly revolutionary attitude, quotation here is understood as a form of “appropriation”, as a practical use of an archive.

Entitled ‘Pasolini’s Bodies and Places’ and translated by Ann Goldstein and Jobst Grapow, this new quasi-facsimiled edition in English is a first step towards an exploration of the original.