A new plot twist to Pasolini’s murder

[emad]

From Richard Owen in Rome


ON NOVEMBER 1, 1975, Pier Paolo Pasolini, the celebrated gay film director, poet and Marxist, had dinner with friends and announced that he was heading home.

Instead he went to the piazza in front of Termini, Rome’s main railway station, a gay pick-up point, where he met Pino Pelosi, a 17-year-old rent boy. The pair went to a restaurant. According to Pelosi’s later account, the director drank beer and watched the boy wolf down a bowl of spaghetti. They then headed for the beach resort of Ostia, near Rome, in Pasolini’s Alfa Romeo.

Pasolini’s battered body was found next morning on wasteland near the sea. Pelosi, who is now 46, confessed to the killing, was convicted of the murder and given a nine-year sentence, of which he served seven years. He then served a series of others for petty crimes. But now prosecutors in Rome have re-opened the inquiry in the light of a claim by Pelosi on Italian television that he did not commit the crime after all.

At the time Pelosi readily confessed. In his televisioninterview, however, he said that five men “with Southern accents” had beaten Pasolini to death while shouting insults such as “dirty Communist”.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3-1613939,00.html

[vi5]

1. Is this the same guy who directed Salo: 120 Days in Sodom?

I've posted about that movie. I've never seen it but have been intrigued by it. I fear it would disturb me far too much.

When the guy says 'Southern accents' is he talking about American southern? If so what would 5 southerners be doing in Italy, and how would they likely know who Pasolini was and whether or not he was a communist? Something sounds odd about that story.

[Enraged_Ape]

2. Maybe the were the guys from "The Farm Film Report"

"May the Lord blow ya up real good!"

[Gruenemann]

3. north versus south Italy

There is a major divide between northern and southern Italy. There is even a political party--the Lega Nord--that wants to partition the country between north and south. The cultures are very different between north and south--probably more so than in the US. Each region--sometimes each city--has a distinct accent.

[vi5]

4. Well then that's a different story....

Just checking.

[kenny blankenship]

7. Watch Mamma Roma instead

to tell you the truth not only is Salo repulsive to watch, it's a kind of boring. Well, as boring as anything that's intended to convey the gut churning cruelty of fascism through stark on-camera sadism could be. You'll be wanting to look away from the image much of the time. But worse than just being a gross-out festival, the particular perversions of each fascist partner was supposed to have some allegorical relationship to the actions of the Italian fascist state, or to the deadender regime briefly established in the town of Salo after Mussolini's death. This regime which controlled the part of Italy that remained under German occupation after the Allied capture of Rome, went on a spree of basically motiveless massacres until the Allies swept it away. If you don't know the detailed history of fascist Italy--and I don't-- you can't fathom the metaphorical linkage between what the film shows the Fascists doing to their young victims and what the Salo government did.

[kenny blankenship]

5. Pasolini had probably received more death threats during the 60s & 70s

than any other man in Italy. The 1970s were also a time of political violence there. His murder has long been rumored to have been an assassination. Unless the kid was an accomplice to a plot to kill Pasolini and knows something I doubt a new inquiry will turn up anything.

Last night I was flipping cable channels and passing some religious channel I saw they were showing Pasolini's Gospel According to St. Matthew. I caught it just about where they nail Jesus to the cross. Then I thought that the people showing this movie would probably have wanted to torture and execute the director whose movie they thought was so good and so useful to them, if only some Mafia/P2 hitmen hadn't already executed Pasolini thirty years ago.

[Gruenemann]

6. that movie, incidentally

was shot in southern Italy--Pasolini wanted to use a setting that was really bleak, run-down and desert-like.

[kenny blankenship]

8. Didn't Mel Gibson use the same town?

For his Snuff-film of the Christ?

[Gruenemann]

9. If he did.....

BLASPHEMY!!! That would be a crime against cinematography!