Pasolini and the myths of Eros, Death and the Sacred: From Bach and Dante to Caravaggio and Bataille

Abstract

The analysis focuses on Pasolini’s cinema from a mythological and intermedial perspective by studying the procedures of pictorial, musical, literary and philosophical codification in Accattone (1961), Mamma Roma (1962) and Teorema (1968). Thanks to the intermedial approach, the multiple strategies of a mythological codification of the protagonists of the Roman borgata come to light, who become mythological figures of ambiguous valence that oscillate between eros, death and the sacred.

In our analysis of Mamma Roma we show that Caravaggio is not only a pictorial reference but also a spiritual reference, a figure of thinking of ambiguity in the sense of Deleuze. In Pasolini and Caravaggio’s thinking of ambiguity, life and death, Eros and Thanatos, the real and the unreal, the sacred and the profane are like two mirrors endlessly reflecting each other. In the film Teorema, references to Georges Bataille’s concept of the sacralization of Eros come to light.