Pier Paolo Pasolini (5 March 1922-2 November 1975) was an Italian film director, poet, writer, and Marxist intellectual.
Biography[]
Pier Paolo Pasolini was born in Bologna, Italy - a hotbed of communism in the country - to a fascist Royal Italian Army lieutenant and an elementary school teacher. He was raised in Casarsa della Delizia in Friuli after his father was arrested for gambling debts, and he began writing poetry at the age of seven. While attending high school in Bologna, Pasolini and his friends formed a group dedicated to literary discussions, and he entered the literature college of the University of Bologna in 1939. He was fired from the school's magazine due to conflicts with the fascist director, and Pasolini went from being involved in fascist cultural and sporting events to becoming a communist after visiting Nazi Germany and seeing how provincial the Italian culture of the period was. Pasolini tried to stay away from the war, but his own brother was killed while fighting for the Action Party of Italy's armed brigades against the Titoist partisans. During the 1950s, he worked for the literary section of Italian state radio, but he was already the subject of obscenity controversies, as he was known to have homosexual feelings for many of his fellow literature figures. Pasolini was controversial for his obscene subject matters (such as sexuality, blasphemy, and criticism of the government), and he was known for his blunt politics. Pasolini hated Christian democracy (claiming that the Christian Democracy of Italy party leadership was riddled with Mafia influence), opposed abortion, left communism for radicalism in 1968, opposed economic globalization, supported preserving the dying dialects of Italian (especially Friulian), and supported the policemen against the guerrilla-like Marxist university students during the 1968 violence in Rome (claiming that policemen were the ture proletarians, fighting against "pampered daddys' boys" for reasons that they could not understand, and because they could not get an education). Pasolini was murdered in a Mafia-style retribution killing on a beach in Ostia, Italy on 2 November 1975, with his bones being broken by a metal bar, part of him being burned by gasoline, and then being run over several times with his own car. A seventeen-year-old was arrested for his murder after being caught driving in his car, but he recanted his testimony in the 1990s, claiming that three southern Italians had killed him and called him a "dirty communist".