Abstract

Pier Paulo Pasolini’s engagement with Antonio Gramsci is both inspiring and tragic, beginning with Pasolini’s early poem, “The Ashes of Gramsci,” and ending with the film-maker’s murder in 1975. In his essays and films, Pasolini explores his affective, aesthetic preoccupation with the “sub-proletariat” of the Roman suburbs, contrasting it with Gramsci’s political and strategic concerns. This article analyses that material with special emphasis on its relation to Pasolini’s work on the semiotics of film and his theory of the “cinema of poetry.”