Archaic Modernism: Queer Poetics in the Cinema of Pier Paolo Pasolini by Daniel Humphrey

Author:Daniel Humphrey [Humphrey, Daniel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ART057000 Art / Film & Video, LIT004160 Literary Criticism / Lgbt, PHI040000 Philosophy / Movements / Critical Theory
Publisher: Wayne State University Press
Published: 2020-11-10T00:00:00+00:00

Osias’s term “camera-beings” is a useful and evocative one, and we might well regret that it has not entered the lexicon. In the context of this film, it perhaps implies anthropologists from the future or another world, extraterrestrial Margaret Meads and Gregory Batesons, filming a primitive culture with their advanced technology.

But perhaps the term “camera-beings” is a bit misleading, in that it does not take into account how the image in question functions according to the logic of Pasolini’s free indirect point of view, in which a film character’s subjectivity is imperfectly implied by the strained attempt of the filmmaker both to honor it (from afar) and to exemplify it (through a sympathetic imagination). The vertiginous shots of Medea in a new and foreboding land reflect both her panicked disequilibrium and her newfound sense of rootlessness (not to mention a barbaric lack of the kind of “professional Hollywood style” that would befit a prestige picture such as this). The shots also signify the class consciousness of the author (Pasolini, the camera-being). Here, the director awkwardly comments on a subaltern’s subjectivity by showing, for instance, the immense sky just when his subject is talking about the lost earth. Through another constructed tension, the spectator is pulled both toward Medea’s subjectivity and away from it toward the filmmaker, both of which signify contrasting queer energies.

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