Mystery of iconic filmmaker’s death lingers

Rome – Provocative Italian filmmaker and poet Pier Paolo Pasolini had no shortage of enemies but half a century after his brutal murder on a beach, his death remains a mystery.

On 5 March, Italy marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of one of its leading left-wing intellectuals, while a retrospective of his estimated two dozen movies is planned for Los Angeles.

But the most crucial questions that have gripped Italy since his mangled body was found on a beach of Ostia outside Rome on 2 November, 1975 – who ordered his killing and why – remain unanswered.

Pasolini was only 53 when he died, beaten with fists and sticks, then run over by an Alfa Romeo GT, either his own or someone else’s.

A 17-year-old male prostitute, Giuseppe “Pino” Pelosi, was stopped while running away from the filmmaker’s car and admitted killing him, saying Pasolini tried to rape him.

Pelosi was jailed for nearly 10 years but in 2005, he recanted on his confession, instead blaming three unnamed men with Sicilian accents.

The investigation was reopened in 2010, based on DNA found on Pasolini’s clothes, but only one sample could be identified – Pelosi’s.

In the years since Pasolini died, theories have swirled about why the artist was killed, ranging from blackmail to a hit by the farright or mafia.

Pasolini lived his life unafraid of controversy as he took aim at bourgeois values, Catholic censorship and the threat of neo-fascism, while exposing the hardships of life through an often unbearably grim lens.

He was “an uncomfortable person for those in power”, his childhood friend, Silvio Parello, told AFP at his Rome workshop that has become a shrine to the filmmaker. Through his essays, poems, plays and films, Pasolini highlighted the downsides of Italy’s post-war “economic miracle”, which brought modernity but, also, shanty towns and growing inequality. “All his life he sought out an archaic, pre-industrial, pre-globalised peasant world, which he saw as innocent,” another friend,

He longed for the ‘innocent’ peasant life

Italian writer Dacia Maraini, told AFP.

Pasolini was already known in Italy for his poetry when he began making films. His last movie, Salo or the 120 Days of Sodom, was released after his death.

The films range from gritty realism to loose adaptations full of symbolism – “Salo” was based on the work by the Marquis de Sade – while his novels reveal a fascination with small-time hooligans from the Rome suburbs.

“To scandalise is a right. To be scandalised is a pleasure,” he said in his last television interview, in Paris, on 31 October, 1975.

But not everybody appreciated what he was trying to do.

Shortly before his death, the filmmaker received threats over Salo, a critique of Fascist Italy that caused outrage because of its depiction of violence. –