From Gospel to Grotesque: The Cinema of Pier Paolo Pasolini

Pasolini is in the canon – but only as a statue, not a voice. His name appears in film textbooks, his films screen at retrospectives, and Salò gets trotted out as a test of endurance. But the real Pasolini – the political heretic, the poetic Marxist, the queer Catholic mystic – has been mostly filed away, too unruly to teach and too dangerous to celebrate.

* * *

He was not a saint, though they tried to martyr him. He was not a prophet, though his films now feel like prophecy. Pier Paolo Pasolini exists at a rupture point in cinema history – a filmmaker who could not be claimed by the left, the church, the avant-garde, or even the queer movement that would later invoke his name. He walked with Marx in one hand and a crucifix in the other and seemed to scorn anyone who thought the two should cancel each other out. For years I struggled to make sense of him, not just politically but cinematically. His images were elliptical, ritualistic, often abrasive in form and impossible to categorize. And then something shifted. Watching The Gospel According to Matthew, and later Teorema and Salò, I understood that Pasolini wasn’t interested in being understood – he wanted to disturb, to accuse, to indict. His films don’t operate like texts; they act more like sacred wounds. They don’t ask to be interpreted. They ask what you’re doing standing there, watching.

He was canonized too late and for the wrong reasons. Today, Pasolini occupies a strange place in film history: quoted more than watched, admired more than understood. The same critics who once bristled at his fusion of Marxism and mysticism now praise his “boldness” in euphemistic tones, folding his films into a liberal narrative of queer expression and artistic freedom. But Pasolini did not make art to liberate desire – he made it to expose its cost. His cinema is not celebratory; it is confrontational, ascetic, often punitive. He films desire as absence, as violence, as something already corrupted by capital, history, or the state. When Teorema ends with a man howling naked in the wilderness, it doesn’t feel symbolic. It feels like a warning.

And yet his films endure – not because they were ahead of their time, but because they speak from outside of it. Pasolini was not interested in keeping pace with cinema’s evolution. He openly scorned the medium’s drift toward technical polish and psychological realism. Instead, he made films that feel carved out of stone or scraped from memory: raw, abrupt, stitched together by rhythm and myth more than by plot. Accattone doesn’t unfold – it aches. The Gospel According to Matthew doesn’t dramatize Christ – it testifies. Salò doesn’t depict fascism – it implicates the viewer in its consumption. To enter Pasolini’s world is to abandon the frameworks that normally guide us through cinema. Genre, identification, closure – none of these are reliable. What’s left is something messianic, and deeply unnerving.

Pasolini was a Marxist, but not the kind the party could control. The Italian Communist Party kicked him out in 1949 after news of his arrest for homosexual acts made the papers. They disavowed him, but he never disavowed them – not entirely. He kept speaking like a Marxist, writing like one, filming like one. But his idea of politics wasn’t rooted in theory or slogans – it was about memory, decay, and everything he saw being erased in postwar Italy. He mourned the loss of rural life, local traditions, even language itself. Pasolini was fluent in Roman dialect and Friulian – a minority language spoken in the northeastern region of Friuli, where his mother was from – and he published entire books of poetry in both. These were languages already slipping into oblivion as Italy raced toward uniformity. He could have written in the state-approved Italian of universities and television. He chose to write in voices that were being erased. Where the left saw progress, he saw a cultural massacre.

And when the student uprisings came in ’68, Pasolini didn’t join them. Instead, he wrote that he felt closer to the riot police – not because he supported the state, but because he saw the students as sons of the bourgeoisie playacting revolution. “The police are proletarian,” he said. “The students are not.” It was a provocation, but also a warning: the left had stopped seeing the ground beneath its feet. Pasolini’s politics were shaped by dirt, by hunger, by what was already disappearing. The future didn’t interest him. He saw it too clearly.

This is the tension that pulses through his films. In The Gospel According to Matthew, Pasolini strips Christ of Catholic iconography and reimagines him as a barefoot revolutionary wandering a scorched, peasant landscape. It’s a Marxist gospel told through neorealist aesthetics – harsh, reverent, and strange. And yet the film is filled with longing – for purity, for conviction, for a world that still believes in something. That longing turns to ashes in Salò. There, the fascists quote Nietzsche and Dante while mutilating boys and girls in a villa. Ideology becomes theater, desire becomes control, and beauty itself is used as a weapon. If Gospel was Pasolini reaching for the sacred, Salò is him burying it. That arc – from gospel to grotesque – wasn’t a surrender. It was a diagnosis.

Pasolini’s cinema was obsessed with the body – but never in the way people wanted it to be. He filmed flesh not to seduce but to implicate. His gaze was neither pornographic nor clinical – it was elegiac. The male body in his work is offered up again and again: as object, as symbol, as sacrificial altar. In Accattone, the street hustler’s body is all he has left, and it’s already marked for death. In Teorema, the visitor (played by Terence Stamp) passes through a bourgeois family like an angel of erotic rupture, awakening each member with quiet, inexplicable desire. But there is no ecstasy here – only collapse. Pasolini’s queerness wasn’t about liberation or identity; it was about hunger, power, and the loneliness of being outside every structure, even the ones that claim to offer salvation. In a time when cinematic queerness is too often filtered through catharsis or affirmation, Pasolini’s remains stubbornly tragic. His films are less about sex than about what happens after: the silence, the expulsion, the ruin.

That descent reaches its terminal point in Salò. There, the body is no longer just filmed – it’s consumed. The fascists in the villa don’t merely torture their victims; they narrate it, aestheticize it, stage it for one another like perverse theater. The young men and women aren’t characters – they’re vessels onto which power inscribes itself, often literally. Hair is shaved, skin is branded, identity is stripped. The camera doesn’t flinch, but it doesn’t leer either. Pasolini isn’t interested in sadism – he’s interested in what happens when all meaning collapses and the body is the only thing left to control. The queerness in Salò is not transgressive or liberating – it’s horrifying, emptied of eroticism, warped into spectacle. If earlier films like Teorema offered the possibility of grace through desire, Salò revokes it. The flesh no longer carries any transcendence. It’s just matter, subjected to ritualized degradation. What remains is not eroticism, but evidence.

This is what makes Pasolini so hard to reclaim: his queerness refuses comfort. There is no coming-out arc, no redemption, no synthesis between desire and safety. His films reject the idea that identity can be cleanly named or celebrated. Instead, they offer the body as a battlefield – between power and submission, between divinity and degradation, between the sacred and the state. Pasolini filmed the body not as a site of pleasure but as a text to be read, violated, and mourned. In doing so, he created a cinema that speaks not from within the margins, but from outside the map entirely

Pasolini didn’t believe fascism had been defeated, he believed it had changed clothes. In the years before his death, he warned that the true danger wasn’t political repression but cultural standardization. Where Mussolini imposed ideology through violence, television now did it through desire. He called it a “new fascism” – a quieter, more insidious force that erased class, history, and individuality not with fear but with consumer dreams. His enemies were no longer blackshirts but television hosts, advertisers, suburban developers. And he said so publicly, obsessively, with the tone of someone watching the tide roll in while everyone else is still sunbathing. His last interviews read like dispatches from a future he knew he wouldn’t live to see. One where resistance isn’t crushed – it’s just absorbed, aestheticized, made into content. We live in that future now.

That vision seeps into his final films, which move with the weight of someone trying to warn a world that’s already stopped listening. In Arabian Nights, The Canterbury Tales, and The Decameron, Pasolini embraces storytelling as a last refuge – raw, surreal, pagan, full of sex and allegory. But even these films feel unstable, like the ground beneath them is cracking. The laughter is uneasy. The pleasure is haunted. And then comes Salò, which feels less like a film and more like a curse hurled at the future. He called it a “film I hate,” and you can feel that hate – directed not just outward at fascists and capitalists and voyeurs but inward, at the very idea of cinema’s ability to intervene.

Pasolini died before Salò was released – beaten, run over, and left in the sand. Some called it a random killing. Others called it a warning. Either way, it felt inevitable. He had no political party left to defend him. No church, no country, no movement. Just films – angry, tender, impossible films. If they feel prophetic now, it’s because Pasolini was never trying to speak for his time. He was speaking past it, across it, through it. And the echoes are only getting louder.

Pasolini is in the canon – but only as a statue, not a voice. His name appears in film textbooks, his films screen at retrospectives, and Salò gets trotted out as a test of endurance. But the real Pasolini – the political heretic, the poetic Marxist, the queer Catholic mystic – has been mostly filed away, too unruly to teach and too dangerous to celebrate. Cinephilia has learned to tolerate him the way institutions tolerate ghosts: with a nod, a quote, a blurry Criterion cover. He’s remembered but not reckoned with. His films are rarely engaged on their own terms, because those terms are still too uncomfortable, too messy, too sacred, too furious.

Pasolini didn’t fit, and he wasn’t supposed to. He refused the roles available to him – martyr, saint, provocateur, auteur – and that refusal is exactly why he’s been quietly exiled from the stories cinephiles like to tell about the evolution of cinema. He made films that don’t reward close reading so much as demand confrontation. They’re not puzzles to solve; they’re wounds to sit with. You can’t domesticate him without distorting him. And maybe that’s the point. Pasolini doesn’t need to be rescued or rehabilitated. He doesn’t belong in a glass case. He belongs in the conversation, still shouting, still grieving, still warning. We don’t honor him by canonizing him. We honor him by listening.

 * * *

Unless otherwise noted, all images are screenshots from the films.