Word: romanization
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Laura M. Roman Greenwich, Conn...
...poet, filmmaker, and social agitator, from the ruts of the dirt road in the early hours of Sunday, November 2nd. By that afternoon, all Rome knew that one of her most famous artists-in-residence had been found mangled in the midst of the slums of Ostia, a Roman suburb, on a strip of earth between huts of corrugated tin. That he had been beaten to death in a brawl with a (male) prostitute, a seventeen-year-old streetwalker. Monday Rome was in an uproar. L'Unita, the paper of the Paritito Communista Italiano (PCI) glorified Pasolini the poet...
...Pier Paolo Pasolini was, then, a political phony, a mediocre poet, an opportunist filmmaker capitalizing on the Roman desire for circuses with lots of blood and sex, and if his death was such a senseless piece of violence--why all the fuss? Was the shock expressed by all Italy, and especially Rome, merely political propaganda of the PCI, melodramatics of the intellectual elite, and bloodthirsty scan-dalmongering on the part of the greater public? Of course all this contributed to the clamor, but there was something else behind the strong reaction of the students who marched through Rome in mourning...
Pasolini's attitude toward religion, for example, brought the problem modern Italians confront into a sharper focus. Pasolini was an atheist, and had no sympathy for the political machinations of the Church. But his racial consciousness was Roman Catholic; he took his symbols and modes of thought from Christian myth. In his prose he used Biblical forms such as the parable, and frequently quoted Christ. He preserved an Old Testament belief that the body was foul and that women were evil. (In his Hell, the demons are women.) Pasolini wanted to be a Christ-figure, to have everyone hate...
...lived before 1789 knew how good life could really be. 1975 will probably never be thought of by anyone as such a critical dividing point in history. 1976 has a better chance. It is, after all, the two hundredth anniversary of the end of the Roman Empire in the west. Sobering thoughts--for Harvard and the world...