Pasolini's Bodies and Places

Book excerpt: Around 1980 in Rome, a small cooperative around film critics Michele Mancini and Giuseppe Perrella produced a mysterious, elaborate and yet seemingly effortless 600-page book of b&w photographs, Pier Paolo Pasolini: Corpi e Luoghi (1981). In the multifaceted cultural and political environment of the era, the publication was acclaimed an indispensable tool for future Pasolini (1922-1975) research. Although long since forgotten and out of print, Corpi e Luoghi, to this day, it remains what one reviewer called the most Pasolinian book to date. With its relentless and yet playful classification of some 2,000 film stills arranged under the categories of bodies and places, Mancini and Perrella stage an ever-shifting archival space. Some of the pictures recurring under various subcategories. With a hidden reference to Walter Benjamin and a correspondingly revolutionary attitude, quotation here is understood as a form of appropriation, as a practical application of specific material.