A cinema comedy cliché says: Italy argues with its hands, convinces with its volume and philosophizes with football.

In such an environment, a post-serial composer like Luigi Nono had to come up with the idea that music that wants to attack the existing needs sounds that, in pain at the stupidity of the world, withdraw far: barely audible, they fade away.

Dietmar Dath

Editor in the Feuilleton.

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The film director Pier Paolo Pasolini, after whose death that Nono commemorated the deceased with strange male choirs, proceeded less subtly.

Like Nono, however, he also liked to work against the norms of the media he used.

So he wrote verses with the film camera - not in any way lyrical image sequences, every kitschy artist can do that, but literally verses: character chains that turn a narrative or thought process in the way that the written line in the bound speech can do, that of the reversal of the path in the plow is like harnessed oxen in the field, from which movement (“versus”) the phenomenon we call verse takes its current name.

One of Pasolini's most striking film verses can be found in "The First Gospel - Matthew" (1964): Renato Terra, who plays Satan, tempts the Redeemer played by Enrique Irazoqui.

The look of Jesus says: I do not want the world that you offer me and I will destroy it.

Christ and the devil stand in a dust that could also be steam.

Fast cuts (desert, city, desert again) show here that Pasolini knows: a scene can be something completely different from a shot, just as a verse does not have to be identical to a sentence.

The scene turns the film.

Previously he shimmered in shades of inwardness, now God's Word can become deed: Jesus tells the disciples to help him as workers at the harvest.

He speaks to poor farmers, fishermen, the needy and the sick.

The wake-up call, you see, is reaching them, but not citizens, not people of power or status.

In one of his “limping poems”, which can be found in the very valuable volume “After my death to be published.

Late Poems” finds easy, he himself sighs about this perspective, about “il deprimente disprezzo per la borghesia”, i.e. the “depressing contempt for the bourgeoisie”, which is presented here in the context of a lyrical declaration of solidarity for the organization “Potere Operaio” (“Workers Power ’) and ‘all other extreme left splinter groups’.

Neither in poetry nor in film has Pasolini taken such an explicit, dogmatic “class standpoint” as head-on as Rainer Werner Fassbinder did in the television experiment “Eight Hours Are No Day” (1972).