[Marxism] Rolando Perez Betancourt: "Pasolini at 30" (Granma daily, Havana, Cuba)

["Walter Lippmann" <walterlx@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Rolando Perez Betancourt is Cuba's leading film critic. A volume
of his film reviews and other comments on cinema came out here in
Cuba some years ago. He writes frequently on film and other big
cultural topics for the daily newspaper Granma. The article here
which was translated for CubaNews by Joseph Mutti will be of
particular interest I think since so many people mistakenly have
the notion that Cuba today in 2005 resembles in any manner the
distorted images presented in Reinaldo Arenas's autobiographical
BEFORE NIGHT FALLS. 

Given the complex, contradictory and conflicted history of Cuba's
relationship with its homosexual citizens, the recent upsurge in
interest in the Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini marks a most
significant cultural and political change. The director, an open
homosexual, was assassinated thirty years ago this month and today
the facts about the political nature of his murder have begun to 
be publicly disclosed. Pasolini's work is highly regarded in Cuba
and this is the third story I've seen in recent times in the Cuban
media devoted to him and his work. Just yesterday, for example, we
read in the daily Granma that this years Festivel of New Latin
American Cinema, which is arguably the most important festival in 
the southern hemisphere, will honor the memory of Pasolini. This
is in line with the festival's "Accent on Cultural Diversity" and
was part of the press conference which was attended by Alfredo
Guevara, long the festival's head. Guevara, who has been a friend
of Fidel Castro since they were schoolmates at the University of
Havana in 1945, wore his familar cape at the news conference, and
often appears at public events wearing this distinctive clothing.

Spanish-speakers can read the report from yesterday's paper below. 
And "cultural diversity" here in Cuba and and should be understood
to mean an opposition to US capitalist hegemony over the culture
of the world. Ignacio Ramonet, the editor of Le Monde diplomatique
has written about this extensively. And within this contect it's of
course self-evident that such discussion of "cultural diversity"
has a clear implication in a place like Cuba as far as its LGBT 
population is concerned. A very interesting development...

Yesterday's Granma report on the upcoming film festival
http://www.granma.cubasi.cu/2005/11/11/cultura/artic02.html 
====================================================================

GRANMA DAILY
November 2, 2005
PASOLINI AT 30

ROLANDO PÉREZ BETANCOURT 
rolando.pb@xxxxxxxxxxxxx

A CubaNews translation by Joseph Mutti. Edited by Walter Lippmann.
http://www.granma.cubaweb.cu/2005/11/02/cultura/artic02.html

To see a movie by Pier Paolo Pasolini in the sixties or early
seventies involved an intellectual challenge of such vast proportions
that you were forced to grow up at any cost.

Marginality and eroticism coupled with violence were key aspects of
Pasolini?s first films Accattone (1961) and Mamma Roma (1962) which
contained expressive neorealist overtones that would lead him to more
experimental and critical forms of analyzing society, not least
bringing to the present references from the past: The Gospel
According to St Matthew (1964), Oedipus Rex (1967), Theorem (1968),
Medea (1969), The Decameron (1971) and especially his last, Salo, or
the 120 days of Sodom - an exemplary combination of a novel by the
Marquis de Sade, Dante?s Inferno, and a portrait of the so-called
Salo Republic, founded by the Fascists in 1943.

Prior to the cinema, Pasolini had moved the Italian literary world
with his novels Ragazzi di Vita (1955) and Una Vita Violenta (1959),
rough portraits of the social inequalities of Italian marginal life
he had always condemned in articles and essays that revealed him to
be one of the most lucid and committed minds of his time. Pasolini
not only attacked the right, but also those who from the vantage
point of "progress" do nothing. This led him to write in the Corriere
della Sera that "hope is a horrendous concept invented by political
parties to ensure its members tow the line."

At 20, Pasolini was arrested by the Gestapo in his native Bologna for
belonging to the Communist Party. In 1943 he escaped from a prison
camp and after the war appeared in Rome writing poems and essays
influenced by the Marxist, Antonio Gramsci.

He was always, as some referred to him, "an uncomfortable
intellectual", which along with his declared homosexuality made him a
target for a recalcitrant right-wing which did not forgive either his
movies or his penetrating public reasoning against the established
order.

Thirty years ago on November 2, 1975, Pier Paolo Pasolini was
murdered. A "crime of passion" declared the massive, malicious
propaganda in attempting to reduce the matter to a "spurious dispute"
between the artist and a 17 year-old youth, Pino Pelosi, who sold
sexual favors. Many others denounced the existence of a more complex
plot, among them the journalist Oriana Fallaci who was convinced it
was a "political conspiracy."

There were suspicions and even strong evidence that Pelosi was not
the murderer, or at least had been accompanied in the act, but the
youth acknowledged his sole guilt before the courts (if he had
admitted to the participation of others he faced a sentenced of 30
years rather the nine he received).

After three decades of conjecture and mystery, in May of this year
Pelosi, now a grown man, declared before Italian television cameras
that at the moment Pier Paolo Pasolini got out of the car where they
both were, he was murdered by three people. "And while they beat him
mercilessly they screamed at him: "stinking fag, filthy communist."
He was asked why he had not told this to the courts: "Because they
threatened to kill me and my parents if I spoke." Pelosi said he was
now revealing this because his parents were already dead and possibly
the murderers too.

The case has been reopened at the request of Pasolini?s family and
perhaps now people will listen to what film director and friend
Sergio Cinti has always maintained after dedicating a good part of
his life to reconstruct the facts minute by minute: "The judges
presided over a fraudulent trial... there were five attackers with
Pelosi as bait because they needed someone to blame for the crime; he
had to agree to their game. It was ?respectable people? who had tired
of Pasolini and ordered his murder to shut his mouth."



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