Against the Avant-Garde: Pier Paolo Pasolini, Contemporary Art, and Neocapitalism

Recognized in America chiefly for his films, Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922-1975) in fact reinvented interdisciplinarity in postwar Europe. Pasolini self-confessedly approached the cinematic image through painting, and the numerous allusions to early modern frescoes and altarpieces in his films have been extensively documented. Far less understood, however, is Pasolini’s fraught relationship to the aesthetic experiments of his own age. In Against the Avant-Garde, Ara H. Merjian demonstrates how ...