Category: Art

We first heard about Pasolini at university. I was going to Purchase, less than an hour from the city, and living in the country north of there. This was when you couldn’t dial up a movie on your laptop. Information was word of mouth and mysteries were rampant. You could only see movies like Pasolini’s at the Regency or the Thalia in Manhattan, or at one of the colleges with a film program. New York had plenty of them, but most were all the way the fuck up in Siberiaesque places like Binghamton or Rochester or worse. I forget which one Accattone was rumored to be playing at, but a bunch of us jammed in a VW Bug to go. We didn’t get far. Snow was falling, and between a funky heater and bald tires we had to turn back, dejected. But Harry was not to be denied. He said, “I got to see this movie.” He left with a baggie of cheap pot and a jug of even cheaper red wine stuffed in his shoulder bag. We watched through the windows as he walked into a blizzard toward the highway to hitch a ride hundreds of miles north.

I met Harry when we were teenagers. He lived nearby but went to a Catholic school, so it was the summers that I got the full dose. He had crazy long black hair and a scraggly, not-quite-there beard, and always wore cutoff jeans with combat boots, even in the winter. No one looked anything like him. He was also a chick magnet. They adored this maniac and he taught us why. He would preach the importance of buying flowers and presents, worshipping their birthdays, listening closely when they spoke.

A week later he showed up back at the house. He had made it there too late for the Accattone screening, but he tracked down the projectionist, asleep in his dorm room, and in exchange for the weed and the wine the guy took him back to the theater and ran the movie for him.

Harry acted out the whole film for us as we passed around joints and watched him impersonate Franco Citti and the rest of the young Roman street thugs. My passion for this person named Pier Paolo Pasolini was ignited, and when The Decameron, his latest film, came to 59th and Third Ave we raced down and got to see the master in action. Being Italian American is one thing, to see the real ones in their natural habitat was mind-blowing. The filmmaking loose, free-form, easy, the great Tonino Delli Colli’s miraculous mix of natural light with his own instruments catapulted you to another world. How the fuck do you do this? When we realized later on it was Pasolini himself playing Giotto’s pupil, that clinched it for me. Godard was my man, but now it was all things Pasolini. We devoured everything we could find about him, even met someone at film school who had assisted him for a summer who we tortured for information. Then, in 1975, he got killed. If he was a god before, he now entered another dimension of coolness. James Dean crashing his sports car, Morrison, Janis, and Hendrix all doping out was one thing, but getting run over by your own trick on some overgrown strip of beach past the Rome airport, that wins the prize.

When asked his occupation for a visa or other official documents he would just put down “Writer.” Writer, director, journalist, poet, political activist, that was the message. Directing films is only a part of it, not all of it.

The research for our movie brought me in touch with his most intimate friends and family. My screenwriter Maurizio Braucci and I heard the message over and over. Pasolini was a man of compassion and commitment, full of love. On the set he treated everyone with kindness, down to the youngest assistants.

Salò, his last feature, is so far outside the box it’s from another galaxy. We were at the American premiere up on 57th Street. It was a long movie so we came with wine and bread and cheese. There were fifteen people in the theater and when it ended there were eight. To this day I am still in contact with two of them because of that shared experience. We stood under the marquee and just looked at each other, no one saying a word. It was night now and it had begun to snow, but who cared, I didn’t even know what city I was in.

From Abel Ferrara’s 2025 memoir Scene.