Pier Paolo Pasolini was arguably the most important Italian intellectual of the second half of the twentieth century. Although he achieved international fame as a filmmaker, he began his artistic career in Italy as a poet and novelist before embracing theater, cinema, and cultural criticism. Pasolini epitomized a cross-disciplinary, multimedia creative ideal that resists the modernist search for purity of the medium without succumbing to a superficial, hedonist aestheticism. His poetic of contamination may be viewed not as a direct response to the technical problem of the choice of artistic language but rather enlarged to include broader conceptual and ethical questions such as are raised by his conflation of Catholicism and Marxism, t

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First published 07 November 2009

Citation: Ricciardi, Alessia. "Pier Paolo Pasolini". The Literary Encyclopedia. 7 November 2009.
[http://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=3493, accessed 21 November 2009.]