by Col Quisp » Sun Aug 07, 2005 1:04 pm
<!--EZCODE AUTOLINK START--><a href="http://direland.typepad.com/direland/2005/08/restoring_pasol.html">direland.typepad.com/dire...pasol.html</a><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK END--><br><br><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK START--><a href="http://www.theittlist.com/site/ittlist/ind/2211/">www.theittlist.com/site/i.../ind/2211/</a><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK END--><br><br><!--EZCODE QUOTE START--><blockquote><strong><em>Quote:</em></strong><hr>Wednesday, August 3, 2005<br>Pasolini Murder Case Reopened (2:05 pm)<br><br>Direland has the scoop on the re-opened investigation into the murder of filmmaker, poet, novelist and political commentator and thinker, Pier Paolo Pasolini. Aside from reporting on the case—which, of course, has appeared NOWHERE else in the U.S. media—-Doug provides a passionate introduction to Pasolini’s life and work, argues trenchantly for his lasting relevance, and demolishes the idiotic conventional notion that Pasolini was somehow a death-obssessive who sought his own murder. <br><br>posted by Brian Cook<hr></blockquote><!--EZCODE QUOTE END--><br><br>Pino the Frog, the minor who confessed to killing Pasolini after an S/M date gone bad, recanted his story in May 2005. Pasolini was murdered for his left-wing political stance:<br><!--EZCODE QUOTE START--><blockquote><strong><em>Quote:</em></strong><hr><br>In his recantation of his “confession,” Pino the Frog told Rai 3 that Pasolini was killed by a gang of three men in their 40s who surprised Pino and Pier Paolo having sex and shouted “dirty communist” and fag-baiting Sicilian epithets at Pier Paolo as they beat him to death. Pino insisted that this gang and their friends kept him silent by intimidation: “I was terrorized, they had threatened my father and mother. But now my mother is dead of cancer, and my father died 10 years after her. And these people are either dead or old, about 80 now. I am no longer afraid.” The well-known journalist Oriana Fallaci — in an article published a couple of years after the murder — articulated a theory of the murder as a political crime (the view always held by most of Pasolini’s writer friends, like Alberto Moravia and Italo Calvino). <br><br>Pasolini's politics, central to his identity, were unabashedly left-wing but iconoclastic. This prolific writer made time to pursue his engagement with the issues of the day as a columnist for several left-wing newspapers and magazines, and in the last two years of his life as a front-page columnist for the influential daily Corriere della Sera. In these columns he had what one may call a Gramscian, interactive relationship with his readers, particularly those in the working and under-classes, who recognized their lives in many of Pasolini's sympathetically realist films -- often groups of exploited workers or workers on strike would familiarly address "Pier Paolo" as a friend, and he would respond directly to them in his columns, not only drawing attention to their plight and showing solidarity with their struggles, but placing their concerns in a larger political and cultural context. A collection of these columns of dialogue with his readers, published in both Italian and French, makes for moving reading. But Pasolini's political idiosyncracies fit into no neat categories -- in his columns he was quite critical of the petit-bourgeois "infantile leftism" so in vogue in the 1970s Italy of the violent Brigada Rosa and similar groups. <br><br>Because these columns gave Pasolini a high political profile as a man of the left who was considered dangerous by the right, Fallaci's theory of Pasolini's murder as a political crime was no surprise -- and she unearthed proof that Pino the Frog’s Mussolini family had extensive ties to the neo-fascist party MSI (Italian Social Movement), which hated “Pasolini the fag” as the embodiment of left-wing “decadence” (and which had a record of violently disrupting his films and plays). After the Rai 3 interview, Sergio Citti said he had proof that the murder was committed by a gang and knows their identities — and the judge in Pino’s original trial gave an interview to the daily La Stampa, saying, “I always thought he was not alone,” adding that the possibility of the crime’s having been committed for political reasons was never examined by the police at the time. “The fascist angle? No one has ever investigated a motive,” the judge said. Could the “Sicilian epithets” Pino heard indicate Mafia involvement? (Pasolini was investigating the Mafia and prostitution for a documentary at the time of his death, and ties between neo-fascists and elements of the Mafia have been well-documented.) <hr></blockquote><!--EZCODE QUOTE END--> <p></p><i></i>
