The Vernacular and Deculturation

This chapter deals with Pasolini’s interest in reviving old tales. The Trilogy of Life (1971–1974) is consciously vulgar, vernacularly erotic, and clumsy, to make a difference to the well-finished emptiness of the entertainment industry, comedies, and pornography—without forgetting clean-cut highbrow cinema. The trilogy deals with what Pasolini considered to be deculturation, i.e., people losing their roots, and cultures being demolished and overshadowed by a global entertainment culture industry as much as institutions like Western art and the education system. He aimed here as much as in his more clearly societal movies on the Roman poor to give a voice to non-modern and less-privileged voices, increasingly working through less-developed countries, and giving space to cultures where the culture industry was not yet possessive of the local cultural goods (Yemen, India). The distant cultures were not exotic objects of white savior complex, but more developed forms of life, models to look at for Westerners. Pasolini extended the issue of the (poor) “South” in Italy to the Global south. By no means does Pasolini’s work escape some traits of exoticism, but he still opened a new track in European art-house film. It was a conscious attack against the dominant Eurocentric public.