Pier Paolo Pasolini: Performing Authorship by Gian Maria Annovi

Author:Gian Maria Annovi
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Literary Criticism, European, Italian, Lgbt, Poetry, Semiotics & Theory, Performing Arts, Film, History & Criticism, Individual Director
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2017-02-14T00:00:00+00:00

FIGURE 5.2. John Baldessari, Pier 18: Hands Framing New York Harbor (1971). B+W Photographs, Edition of 3, 7 × 10⅛ inches.

Source: Image courtesy of John Baldessari.

Most criticism has interpreted the film’s closing question in light of the sequence in which the painter wakes up in his cot with a start, having dreamed of the Universal Judgment (an evocation of Giotto’s painting Judgment in Padua). This is an important scene that lays out the complex dialectic between diegetic and extradiegetic author and problematizes once again the notion of work. In the painter’s dream, Judgment appears as a complex living fresco, another note for a work to be made. According to the original screenplay, Giotto’s pupil’s fresco should have coincided with his great dream: “the fresco appears in all its divine splendor: with its characters simple and powerful in their adoration of God, who looks down on them from the heavens through the symmetrical haloes of the Saints.”32 The fresco revealed by the painter at the end of The Decameron, however, is completely different, and, most importantly, it is unfinished. It is a more modest triptych, including just two completed parts, apparently inspired by the series Postmortem Miracles of Saint Francis attributed to Giotto’s school and visible in the lower basilica of Assisi (figure 5.3).33 The third part of the triptych is empty, and yet the painter and his assistants celebrate the completion of the work. The spectator might well wonder, Why celebrate, when the fresco is unfinished?

The uncompleted triptych has not attracted much attention from scholars, and it is therefore worth considering a few interpretative hypotheses. The unfinished triptych could be a reference to the film’s original three-part structure, which would have made the film three hours long, too much for the producer; Pasolini cut the film into two individual parts, leaving a third unfinished. In short, the unfinished fresco works as a visual apology for the film’s lack of symmetry. Maurizio Viano has argued that the missing fresco is a sort of announcement of a “sequel,” a reference to the other two parts of the Trilogy to come. Viano reminds us that the last film in the trilogy, Arabian Nights, contains an epigraph that establishes a direct tie with The Decameron: “The truth lies not in one dream, but in many dreams.”34 But the second film in Pasolini’s trilogy, The Canterbury Tales, was still unfinished in 1971, so at that point there weren’t even two complete parts in the triptych.

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