Pier Paolo Pasolini

Passions

Vocation

Notable

Traits

Italian actor and director of radical films, best known for controversial films about people in conflict with the mainstream society. A virtual Renaissance man who was "poet, novelist, scholar, film critic and theorist, reforming zealot and creator of large scaled visual spectaculars," he wrote and produced "Boys," and "Sebastian." Poetic and literate, a Marxist yet bourgeois in his efforts to be socially correct, he died under circumstances as perverted as those seen in some of his films. The son of an army officer, Pasolini was a published poet by the age of 19 while a student at the University of Bologna. By the time he entered films as a screenwriter in 1954, he was an established novelist and essayist. His first feature film, "Accatone," 1951, was based on one of his own novels, "A Violent Life." He created an immediate impact with the sordid story. His early feature films are "Mamma Roma," 1962, "Theorem," 1968, "Medea," 1970 and "Salo, or the 120 days of Sodom," 1975. His unorthodox views led to his arrest in 1962 on charges of insulting the church in his film "Rogopag." He clashed frequently with Italian authorities over the content of his films, which held liberal doses of sex, violence and blasphemy, at times being declared obscene. His own death could have been scripted into one of his features. Pasolini was bludgeoned to death by a 17-year-old youth who claimed that he had made homosexual advances, 1 November 1975, 11:30 PM, Civitavecchia, Italy. The boy then ran him over with Pasolini's own Alfa Romeo. Link to Wikipedia biography