Cristian Pasotti Abstract

The Structure that Wants to Be Another Structure: Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Screenplays between the Unfinished and the Exploitation.

Pier Paolo Pasolini was a major figure in the Italian 20th Century culture: novelist, poet, film director, journalist and playwright. Pasolini was both a man of letters and of films; he is one of those rare authors whose bibliography is as important as his filmography (including his subjects and screenplays). Pasolini himself theorized the literary status of screenplays (whether produced or unproduced), in books like Heretical Empiricism.

The “Aesthetic of Unfinished” was a dominant trait of his work, and there is a fil rouge among a novel like Petrolio, the “filmed notes” represented by his late ‘60’s/early ‘70’s documentaries and his screenplays corpus. Moreover, Pasolini considered the screenplay ‘unfinished’ by nature, being a Structure that Wants to Be Another Structure (quoting the title of one of the most famous of his essays).

By discussing screenplays like “La Nebbiosa” and “The Canterbury Tales,” the aim of the paper is to reflect on the literary status of screenplays, on their exploitation by both producers and publishers, the concept of ‘unfinished’, and how this status can lead to the same philological issues of any other literary genre.