From 1961 to 1975, Gideon Bachmann, an American journalist and filmmaker, conducted friendly conversations with Pier Paolo Pasolini, conversations which he recorded. Although some extracts from these conversations were published in the press, they remained unpublished until 2015. Here they are today translated into French, they are fascinating to read. There is of course a lot of talk about cinema but also politics and political philosophy. “When I speak of the relationship between the artist and society, I must think of the political relationships between the artist and society and not of the moralistic relationships between the artist and society.” This sentence is important for understanding Pasolini’s cinema and poetry. It also illustrates the big difference between the 1960s and 1970s and the current era: today, moralism has won out over politics. But if Pasolini claims to be a Marxist, he is in no way an activist, not disciplined enough for that, too sensitive: “The artist does not transform social reality in the organizational sense of the term, he transforms it in an intimate way.” And then, attached to the world of proletarians and sub-proletarians, he was always very critical of the bourgeoisie, a state of mind which gave him great lucidity in the analysis: “The false revolution of 1968, which presented as Marxist but which was in reality only a form of violent self-criticism of the bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie used youth to destroy the myths that bothered them.” In these interviews, Pasolini of course talks about his latest, very controversial film, Salò or the 120 Days of Sodom. He also talks about the next film he wanted to direct, Porno-Teo Kolossal: “In Naples, a Magi sees a comet and decides to follow it. This comet is the symbol of an ideology, an ideology like any other, partly true and partly false. The fact is that by following this ideology which is in the sky, and which is therefore completely theoretical, abstract, the Magi experiences reality. (…) It is therefore a film which deals with the relationship between ideology and reality.” These comments date from April 1975, in November of the same year the filmmaker was assassinated on the beach at Ostia.
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