Pasolini, The Cinema of Poetry

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Pasolini, "The Cinema of PoetryPier Paolo Pasolini, "The Cinema of Poetry.In Movies and Methods. Vol. 1. Ed. Bill Nichols. Berkeley: University ofCalifornia Press, 1976. 542-558.[This text was read in Italian by Pier Paolo Pasolini in June 1965 at thefirst New Cinema Festival at Pesaro. The present version is from the Frenchtranslation by Marianne de Vettimo and Jacques Bontemps which appeared inCahiers du Cinma No. 171, October 1965.]

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[543]I think that henceforth it is no longer possible to begin a discourse on cinemaas language without taking into account at least the terminology of semiotics.Indeed the problem, if one wishes to set it forth briefly, appears in thefollowing way: whereas literary languages found their poetic inventions on theinstitutional basis of an instrumental language, quite common to all who speak,cinematic languages seem not to be founded on anything like this. For their realbasis, they do not have a language whose primary objective is communication.Thus literary languages appear immediately as distinct, in their practice, fromthe pure and simple instrument which serves to communicate; while communicationby means of cinema would seem arbitrary and devious, without such aninstrumental basis used normally at all.Men communicate with words, not with images; this is why a specific language ofimages would appear as a pure and artificial abstraction.If this reasoning were correct, as it seems to be, cinema could not materiallyexist; or at the very least it would be only a monstrosity, a series ofinsignificant signs, Semiotics envisages sign-systems indifferently: it speaks,for example, of "systems of linguistic sign," because these exist, but in factthis in no way[544]excludes the theoretical possibility of other sign-systems, for example a systemof signs by gestures, the more so as a complement to the spoken language.Indeed, a word (lin-segno, i.e. linguistic sign) pronounced with a certainfacial expression takes a certain meaning, pronounced with another expression ittakes another, perhaps even the opposite (especially if the speaker is fromNaples). A word followed by a gesture has one meaning, followed by anothergesture it has another, etc.This system of signs by gestures which, in practice, accompanies the system oflinguistic signs as its complement, can be isolated as an autonomous system andbecome the object of a study.One can even suppose, by abstract hypothesis, the existence of a unique systemof signs by gestures as unique instrument of communication for man (in sum: deafand dumb Neapolitans): it is from such a hypothetical system of visual signsthat language derives the foundation of its existence and the possibility ofallowing the formation of a series of naturally communicative archetypes.Of course, this would still not amount to much. But we must immediately add theintended recipient of the cinematic product is equally accustomed to visually"read" reality, that is to keep up a dialogue with the reality which surroundshim and which is used as the environment of a collectivity which can be felteven in the pure and simple manifestation of its acts, of its habits. The factof walking alone in the street, even with our ears stopped up, constitutes a

continual dialog between ourselves and an environment which expresses itself bythe mediation of the images which compose it: the physiognomy of the passersby,their gestures, their signs, their actions, their silences, their expressions,their collective reactions (people waiting at red lights, a crowd around astreet-accident or around a monument), besides, traffic signs, indicators,counterclockwise rotaries are in sum objects charged with meanings and whichutter a brute "speech" by their very presence.But there is more: in man, an entire world is expressed by means of significantimages shall we therefore propose, by analogy, the term "im-signs" (imsegni,i.e. image-signs). This is the world of memory and of dreams.Every attempt at memorization is a series of im-signs, that is primarily acinema sequence. ("Where have I seen this person? Wait... I think it was atZagora"--image of Zagora with its green palms against the pink soil-- ...walking with Abd Kader... --image of Abd El Kader and of the person in questionwalking past the encampment of the French outposts--, etc). And thus, all dreamsare a series of im-signs which have all the characteristics of the cinematicsequence: close-ups, long shots, etc.In sum, there is a whole complex world of significant images--formed as much ofgestures and of all sorts of signs coming from the environment, as of memoriesor of dreams which is proposed as the "instrumental" foundation of cinematiccommunication, and prefigures it.Here, we must immediately make a marginal observation: whereas the instrumentsof poetic or philosophical communication are already extremely per-[545]fected, truly form a historically complex system which has reached its maturity,those of the visual communication which is at the basis of cinematic languageare altogether brute, instinctive. Indeed, gestures, the surrounding reality, asmuch as dreams and the mechanisms of memory, are of a virtually pre-human order,or at least at the limit of humanity in any case pre-grammatical and evenpremorphological (dreams are unconscious phenomena, as are mnemonic mechanisms;the gesture is an altogether elementary sign, etc.).The linguistic instrument on which cinema is founded is thus of an irrationaltype. This explains the profoundly oniric nature of cinema, as also itsabsolutely and inevitably concrete nature, let us say its objective status.Every language is recorded in a dictionary, incomplete but perfect, of thesign-system of his surroundings and of his country. The work of the writerconsists in taking, from this dictionary, words, like objects arranged in adrawer, and in making a particular use of them particular insofar as it is afunction both of the writer's historical situation and of the history of thesewords. The result is an increase of historicity for the word, that is a growthof meaning. If this writer passes into posterity, his "particular use of theword" will figure in future dictionaries, as another possible use of the word.The expression, the invention of the writer adds, thus, to the historicity, thatis to the reality, of the language: he makes use of the language and serves itboth as a linguistic system and as a cultural tradition. But this act,toponymically described, is one: it is a new elaboration of the meaning of asign which was found classified in the dictionary, ready for use.In return, the act of the filmmaker, although fundamentally similar, is

nonetheless much more complex.A dictionary of images does not exist. There are no images classified and readyfor use. If by chance we wanted to imagine a dictionary of images, we would haveto imagine an infinite dictionary, just as the dictionary of possible wordsremains infinite.The cinema author has no dictionary but infinite possibilities. He does not takehis signs, his im-signs, from some drawer or from some bag, but from chaos,where an automatic or oniric communication is only found in the state ofpossibility, of shadow. Thus, toponymically described, the act of the filmmakeris not one but double. He must first draw the im-sign from chaos, make itpossible and consider it as classified in a dictionary of im-signs (gestures,environment, dreams, memory); he must then accomplish the very work of thewriter, that is, enrich this purely morphological im-sign with his personalexpression. While the writer's work is esthetic invention, that of the filmmakeris first linguistic invention, then esthetic.It is true that after some fifty years of cinema,, a sort of cinematicdictionary has been established, or rather a convention, which has thiscuriosity it is stylistic before being grammatical.Let us take the image of train wheels rolling amid clouds of steam. This is nota syntagma, but a styleme. [Styleme = a unit of style. Tr.] This allows us tosuppose that, from all evidence, cinema will never attain a true grammatical[546]normativity which would be proper to it, but rather, so to speak, a stylisticgrammar each time a filmmaker makes a film, he has to repeat the doubleoperation of which I spoke and, as a rule, be content with a certain quantity ofuncounted means of expression, which, born as stylemes, have become syntagmas.In compensation, the filmmaker does not have to deal with a centuries-oldstylistic tradition, but only with a decades-old one: he has practically noconventions to be contradicted at the risk of an excessive scandal. His"historical contribution" to the im-sign is brought to a quite short-livedim-sign.Hence, perhaps, the feeling of a certain fragility of cinema: its grammaticalsigns are part of a world each time chronologically exhausted. The clothes ofthe '30s, the cars of the '40s, etc., are so many "things" without etymology, orat least whose etymology exists only in the corresponding system of words.The meaning of words fits the evolution which presides over the creative fashionof clothes or of the lines of cars. Objects, in return, are impenetrable to it:they do not allow modification and say by themselves only what they are at thatmoment. The imaginary dictionary in which the filmmaker classifies them in thecourse of the primary stage of his work is not sufficient to give them ahistorical background, significant for all, now and forever. One thus notes acertain determinism in the object which becomes a cinematic image. It is naturalthat this should be so, for the word (linguistic sign) used by the writer isrich with a whole cultural, popular and grammatical history, whereas thefilmmaker who is using an im-sign has just isolated it, at that very moment,from the mute chaos of things by referring to the hypothetical dictionary of acommunity which communicates by means of images.More precisely: if the images or im-signs are not classified in a dictionary and

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