1

Chapter 1: Pasolini’s Lingua X

[Dispute 1: The use of free indirect discourse in cinema:

Communication, non-communication, or the fallibility of subjectivity?]

“What is a gesture? A threatening gesture, for example? It is not a blow that is

interrupted. It is certainly something that is done in order to be arrested and suspended.”

—Jacques Lacan, “What is a Picture”1

The first phrase dispute in the différend that is modern cinema is a phenomenon that
surfaced into cinematic discourses by Pier Paolo Pasolini’s critical look into the role of
subjectivity and objectivity as witnessed by the director and character within a film.
“Free indirect discourse,” “quasi-direct discourse,” “represented speech and thought,”
“free indirect subjective,” “free indirect vision,” are all terms that apply to the
conflation of subjective and objective “point-of-views” between an author (director) and
the characters of a novel or film. As a literary and cinematic technique, it is indeed a
contentious concept for reasons that will hopefully become clear in this essay. I try to
argue that through formulating a cinematic form of “free indirect discourse,” Pasolini
corporates the camera as an apparatus with a subjective “point-of-view,” one that is
divorced from the subjectivity of the authoring hand that uses it.

Pasolini’s formulation of free indirect discourse as a cinematic technique derives its

theoretical underpinnings from literary theory. The publication of Giulio Herczeg’s Lo
Stile Indiretto Libero in Italiano of 1963 inspired Pasolini to write his essay on literature
“Comments on Free Indirect Discourse” the following year. Free indirect discourse, as a
literary technique, is the transcription of reported speech and how that spoken utterance is
stylistically altered into a literary genre. As opposed to direct discourse, which places the
utterance of a speaker within quotations, indirect discourse embeds the utterance as an
indirect representation of speech.

In Pasolini’s (Marxist) reading of free indirect discourse, the technique assumed a form
of a certain linguistic contamination on the part of the writer because of its indirect
nature, the ability for the author to intervene with the character. In order to create and
constitute a character that is removed from an author’s socio-cultural milieu, an author
uses a language that is foreign to him because it is another world that the author must
enter via his characters. In the essay pertaining to literature “Comments on Free Indirect
Discourse,” Pasolini argues:

In the case where, in order to reanimate the thoughts of his character, an

author is compelled to reanimate his words, it means that the words of the
author and those of the character are not the same: the character lives,
then, in another linguistic or psychological, or cultural, or historical world.
 He belongs to another social class. And the author therefore knows the
world of that social class only through the character and his language.2

The literary technique, however, is not as simple as Pasolini makes it out to be in his
writings. Indeed, “free indirect discourse” is a complex literary, stylistic structure, one
that does in fact espouse a certain “contamination” but which, nonetheless, involves more
than just “reanimating thoughts” of a character or the indirect use of “language” inherent
within the character’s social or cultural class. Pasolini’s understanding of free indirect
discourse was flawed, even when transposed into the cinematic realm.

Pasolini’s awkward restructuring of the technique into cinema, however, underscores the
tensions that are inherent in the literary style and its later manifestation in cinema. As I
will try to argue, although Pasolini’s reformulation of free indirect discourse for
cinematic purposes was theoretically imperfect, precisely because of its nascent forms in
the cinema, it nonetheless exposed a technique that the cinema had heretofore
unacknowledged as such.

Transposing free indirect discourse into the cinema required Pasolini to reformulate the
literary construct of the technique and transpose it into cinematic stylistic means. It was a
theoretical stretch, no doubt, but one with implications for modern cinema. In its
cinematic modernity, free indirect discourse as articulated by Pasolini would later be
taken up by Gilles Deleuze in Cinema 2: The Time-Image as a technique that defines new
relations of thought inherent in the cinematic medium’s modernist approach. In Cinema
2, Deleuze discursively posits Jean-Luc Godard as the arbiter of the time-image because
of Godard’s use (or Deleuze’s conception of his use) of free indirect discourse.

Unlike Michelangelo Antonioni or Bernardo Bertolucci, two directors alongside Godard

that Pasolini cites as practitioners of the technique in film, Pasolini argued that Godard’s
use of the medium’s capabilities to transcribe free indirect discourse loses its power to
differentiate between the objects and subjects the cinematic camera captures. Pasolini
focuses on Godard precisely because of the complexities involved in representing free
indirect discourse in the communicative medium that is cinema. I argue that Pasolini
directed his critique specifically against Godard because of the tensions inherent in the
application of representing subjectivity and objectivity in film. Through his theoretical
work on the cinema and its relation to Godard, Pasolini, I believe, shifted tactics in order
to problematize, both technically and rhetorically, the implications that free indirect
discourse had in the cinematic medium.

Deleuze’s creation of the time-image places the cinematic notion of free indirect
discourse as the harbinger of modern cinema, but in its complexity it elicits another layer
to the dispute that is modern cinema. In the discursive formation that surrounds modern
cinema and the relation free indirect discourse has with it in the writings of Pasolini and
Deleuze, Godard is thereby placed as the witness to the différend. By folding Deleuze’s
conception of free indirect discourse and its relation to Godard in light of Pasolini’s
rhetorical problematizations of the latter’s cinematic practice, I hope to explicate on the
untenable nature that modern cinema is precisely because of its discursive formation.
I do this through an examination of Pasolini’s use and later abandonment of free indirect
discourse in his films. As I try to demonstrate, Pasolini abandoned free indirect discourse
in favor of a more lucid encounter with the technical possibilities cinema can capture
between objectivity and subjectivity, concepts so important to free indirect discourse.
While Pasolini’s notion that the “cinema of poetry” elucidated the flaws in the cinematic
use of free indirect discourse, still in its infancy as a style, the problematizations Pasolini
himself had with the technique sheds light on the cinematic camera’s power to
underscore the dynamics between objectivity and subjectivity.

More pointedly, examples from Pasolini’s work in this essay attempt to expand his
critical work in regards to the points of view of both author (director) and character. I
argue that his cinematic work renders these points of views as fallible. Pasolini’s
awkward stance towards the technique of free indirect discourse—and as they manifest in
his works Hawks and Sparrows, La Ricotta, and Il Decamerone—indicates a tension
within the notions of subjectivity and objectivity as witnessed in the cinematic image. In
the medium’s supposed “communicative” aspects, Pasolini’s abandonment of free
indirect discourse strove for a problematization of the cinematic image’s supposed “free,
indirect” subjectivity of a director. In that problematization, I argue that through
Pasolini’s cinematic and theoretical practice the camera is witnessed as possessing its
own subjectivity, one independent of and divorced from the authoring hand of a
cinematic auteur.

The Theoretical Rise of Free Indirect Discourse

1) Direct Discourse/Indirect Discourse/Quasi-Direct Discourse

A discussion of free indirect discourse begins at the literary level. In discussing the early
work of V.N. Voloshinov on the technique, and later arguments as articulated by Ann
Banfield in Unspeakable Sentences: Narration and Representation in the Language of
Fiction, we can begin to understand the complex nature of Pasolini’s use of free indirect
discourse as it manifests itself in the moving image. By following the specific literary and
linguistic trajectory of both Voloshinov and Banfield, I argue that Pasolini’s use of free
indirect discourse in the cinema reaches a stasis by becoming the ultimate limit point of
both trajectories. In discussing Voloshinov and Banfield, I wish to arrive at that limit
point, where the cinematic image freezes subjectivity and objectivity as expressed in
Pasolini’s reading and rejection of free indirect discourse in the cinema.

V.N. Voloshinov’s pioneering work of the 1930s, Marxism and The Philosophy of
Language, traces the emergence of free indirect discourse as it surfaces in literature. A
close associate of Mikhail Bakhtin, Voloshinov, as the title of his book suggests, was
intent on placing the word and the spoken utterance on a social/Marxist level. The word,
for Voloshinov as well as Bakhtin, was reciprocal and dialogical. The word and the
utterance are social constructs that must be contextualized (whether on the social,
historical, physiological, or geographical levels); they are both “heteroglossias” in
Bakhtin’s analysis.3 Being a social construct, words and utterances are derived from the
concrete context of their enunciation—their verbal interaction in the social world. “The
actual reality of language-speech is not the abstract system of linguistic forms, not the
isolated monologic utterance, and not the psychophysiological act of its implementation,
but the social event of verbal interaction implemented in an utterance or utterances.”4

In the active and reciprocal role that language plays within a social context, literature, by
extension, must take into account the active participation of the speaker and the hearer,
the addressor and the addressee. Discourse, then, is an active dialogue, not an internal
monologue. The problems inherent in “reporting speech” as a form of active discourse
into a literary text is therefore what is at issue for Voloshinov and Bakhtin. For if the
word and the utterance are a social/reciprocal phenomenon, how can such discourses
surface within the mute medium of the printed words that comprise a text?

Voloshinov dissects the use of “reported speech” by a writer into three categories: direct
discourse, indirect discourse, and quasi-direct discourse. All three styles report active
speech as an “objective document” of speech reception. These textual discourses are
“objective” precisely because language is transposed from the active and contextual
world from which the word or utterance was delivered and into a represented document.
“Between the reported speech and the reporting [written] context, dynamic relations of
high complexity and tension are in force. A failure to take these into account makes it
impossible to understand any form of reported speech.”5

For Voloshinov, reported speech splinters into two stylistic tendencies that are
interoriented within a text: a linear style which constructs “clear-cut, external contours
for reported speech, whose own internal individuality is minimized”; and a pictorial style
which obliterates “the precise, external contours of reported speech; at the same time, the
reported speech is individualized to a much greater degree—the tangibility of the various
facets of an utterance may be subtly differentiated.”6

The linear style of reported speech demarcates the word or utterance by screening out the
author’s “intonations.” In other words, utterances are bracketed off as directly quoted
speech. For example:

“Let’s make the film,” John said and turned towards the camera.

“Let’s make the film” is what John said at that moment, the author does not weaken the
voice of John; it is direct discourse as such. John’s message is conveyed directly, without
mediation on the writer’s behalf.

The pictorial style, however, is far more complex. In it, the reported speech or message is
weakened by the intercession of a writer. Voloshinov sees a mixing of speech reporting,
where the author intercepts the word or utterance and transcribes the reported speech with
his/her own intonations. As reported speech becomes mixed, it becomes indirect
discourse because the author manipulates the original utterance. “Indirect discourse
‘hears’ a message differently; it actively receives and brings to bear in transmission
different factors, different aspects of the message than do the other patterns [of direct
discourse].”7 The shift from direct to indirect discourse is a matter of altering the form of
the speech act rather than its content. As such, indirect discourse is a matter of style and
grammar. How an author twists the relations of discourse from one level to the next is
dependent on linguistic parameters inherent in conveying that very shift.

For example, consider the following two sentences:

“Let’s make the film,” John said and turned towards the camera.

Let’s make the film, John said and turned towards the camera.

As is evident from the last sentence, it is a change in the form the speech takes, vis-à-vis
the use of quotations, while content remains identical to the previous sentence. However,
in the stylistic and grammatical change, a shift occurs in the intonation of the speech
reported. “Let’s make the film” now becomes past, a past that may or may not have
occurred in actuality since it is represented. Without the quotations, the actuality of the
utterance is weakened—it becomes, in a sense, diluted within the textual.

My examples thus far have remained at the most simple level of reporting direct and
indirect speech. In a sense, I, as the reporter of John’s speech act, did indeed intercept his
phrase “let’s make the film” from direct to indirect representation, but from the examples
cited one cannot intimate my role in that phrase interception. Let us add another character
to the sentence:

John said let’s make the film and turned towards the camera. “Help me,”
Clara said. She realized she did not know where to begin because John
appeared frantic.

The second character’s quoted phrase “help me” qualifies this sentence as direct and in
the present of Clara’s affective nature in regards to John’s appearance as frantic. Since
Clara’s speech is direct discourse, the following description of John’s appearance sustains
the factuality and contemporaneity of the narrative sentence. In other words, the reader
assumes that John is indeed frantic in Clara’s eyes, because the author intervened to
elucidate Clara’s confusion in regards to John’s actions by directly reporting her speech
at the moment she witnessed John as frantic. In this instance, direct and indirect discourse
bounce off each other to create a narrative that sustains the factuality of Clara’s reported
speech “help me.” By the use of quotations the sentence is, in a sense, a fact of the
characters discourse. The character’s hesitation directly involves the confusion on “where
to begin,” the author transcribes that confusion through a mixture of first and third person
narrative.

This sentence obfuscates the direct and indirect discourses of represented speech. The
author uses a quoted first person phrase in order to render the narrative as more dramatic.
The quoted phrase is “made strange,” as Voloshinov describes it, because it suits the
author’s intent in creating a heightened sense of drama, irony or humor. 8 For example,
suppose this sentence is excerpted from a full-length novel with John being a conniving
filmmaker ready to ambush the career of a burgeoning actress. This sentence, then,
allows the author’s attitude to infiltrate the text in that it allows him or her to place
indirect and direct discourses as colorations that heighten the drama, or irony, of the
narrative. The use of indirect and direct discourses creates, as Voloshinov describes it, a
“pictorial” effect on the use of language. It is, in other words, textured to elicit and blur
both a sense of actuality and a sense of individuality on the characters behalf as rendered
by the author.

But let us remove the quotes from the second character’s ambiguous assertion:

John said let’s make the film and turned towards the camera. Help me,
Clara said, realizing she did not know where to begin since John appeared
frantic.

Notice here another stylistic, linguistic shift after the quotes were removed. The past
tense has become an imparfait (imperfect) (“realizing”) rather than a historic
present/aorist (“realized”). The imparfait functions as a tense of contemporaneity with
the past, it is happening within the present of the narrative past. In this respect, the
imparfait allows the reality of the fiction, or the fiction that is reality, to flourish. The
phrases in the sentence are twisted as to elicit a sense of both contemporaneity and
historicity. Contrasted to the previous sentence, where Clara’s speech was still bracketed
into quotes, this sentence elicits even more confusion.

Whereas the use of direct discourse and indirect discourse relied on the “reporting”
mechanisms of the utterance, this sentence without quotes allows the author to “act out”
the role of the characters by having a dialogue with him or her. This is possible through
the removal of quoted, direct speech, and also the verb tense of the imparfait. Rather than
actions being held in the past, the imparfait allows the author to live in the present
moment of a characters past action and thought. In this respect, an author can extrapolate
on Clara’s condition unconditionally, coloring the narrative text with subjective feelings
and descriptions that move beyond being mere “reported speech.” Rather than being an
interior monologue of that character’s thoughts, it is a dialogue between character and
author. For example:

John said let’s make the film and turned towards the camera. Help me,
Clara said, realizing she did not know where to begin since John appeared
frantic. Her lips began to quiver. Can he see them? At any rate, why was
he running around the set throwing props everywhere? Why? Did he not
have enough coffee? Is John bipolar? Did he forget his medication? That
must be it, what a brute John is.

For Voloshinov, this is an instance of speech interference—a special strain inherent in the
literary context of the novel that Voloshinov titles as “quasi-direct discourse” (in German
erlebte Rede, in French style indirect libre, and in English free indirect discourse). In its
“interference,” quasi-direct discourse is what matches most closely to Pasolini’s
conception of free indirect discourse in the cinema. As opposed to the mixing of both
direct and indirect speech, in this sentence the author inserts him or her self directly in
order to interfere in the context of the fiction of the printed text or discourse.

With quasi-direct discourse, “reported speech will begin to sound as if it were in a play
where there is no embracing context and where the character’s lines confront other lines
by other characters without any grammatical concatenation. Thus relations between
reported speech and authorial context, via absolute acting out, take a shape analogous to
the relations between alternating lines in dialogue. Thereby the author is put on a level
with his character, and their relationship is dialogized.”9

In this regard, for Voloshinov, this sentence qualifies as a new form of rendering reported
speech, a new style: quasi-direct discourse—in opposition to indirect, or direct, discourse.
As Voloshinov reads it, quasi-direct discourse is “not a simple mechanical mixture or
arithmetical sum of two forms [direct and indirect discourse] but a completely new,
positive tendency in active reception of another person’s utterance, a special direction in
which the dynamics of the interrelationship between reporting and reported speech
moves.”10

In its use of the imparfait, quasi-direct discourse, as Voloshinov would read it, creates an
emotive atmosphere that is “permeated with fantasy.”11 One must ask, however, how this
is so? The sentence, in its shift to the imparfait, creates an interesting juxtaposition of
both a present-ness of the character (“not knowing”) and an awkward temporality with
the past of her emotive feeling (“appeared”). In this bind, the author qua narrator has
immersed him/her self into a “fantasy.”12 It is a temporality that beats its own rhythm
within the fictive ambiance of the narrative. The sentence does not seek to conflate the
notion of whether the sentence specifies the author or character; it is a matter of
interference between the author and character.

As an example, who is that understands John as a “brute”? Is it Clara that is thinking this
way? Alternatively, is the author representing her thoughts through the dialogue he/she
has with Clara? The affirmation that John is a “brute” is ambiguous, the reader, in this
case, can mistake this description to be attributed either to the character Clara or to the
author. Furthermore, following Voloshinov’s argument, this indefiniteness is the dialogic
interference that quasi-direct discourse operates on. Both the author and character think
that John is a brute through the dialogue that emerges from the use of quasi-direct
discourse in the text. In this respect, the technique is not a “passive impression” that the
author transcribes of a narrative scene, it expresses an “active orientation, and not one
that merely amounts to a shift of person from first to third, but one that imposes upon the
reported utterance its own accents, which collide and interfere with the accents in the
reported utterance.”13

Likewise, who is asking of the quivering lips, “Can he see them?” Indeed, we can prefix
that question with either: “She wondered” or “I wondered.” The author is in a dialogue
with the character Clara, extracting thoughts from her through the author’s fantasy of the
text. Notice here that it is either a third or first person narrative, not a second person
narrative. Because quasi-direct discourse (or free indirect discourse) is a fantasy, the
second person “you” would shatter the stronghold of the narrative ambiance. If a “you” is
placed (“You wondered”), the fictive ambiance of the text would collapse, the dialogue
between author and character dissolve, and the narrative fantasy would disintegrate.
Voloshinov reiterates this line of thought consistently, “fantasy recreates the living
past.”14

Indeed, for an artist in process of creation, the figures of his fantasies are
the realest of realities; he not only sees them, he hears them, as well. He
does not make them speak (as in direct discourse), he hears them speaking
[notice here the imparfait]. And this living impression of voices heard as if
in a dream can be directly expressed only in the form of quasi-indirect
discourse.15

As Voloshinov highlights, quasi-direct discourse is not a “masked” discourse, it is not an

author/narrator that is disguising as a certain character, it is the character him/her self that
is speaking with the author—it is, in other words, dialogic. Quasi-direct discourse is
“fantasy’s own form.”16 The artist who uses quasi-direct discourse “addresses himself
only to the reader’s fantasy. It is not his [sic, the author’s] aim to communicate facts or
the content of thought with its help; he desires only to convey his impressions directly, to
arouse in the reader’s mind living figures and representations.”17 In its “double-faced”
representation (like “Janus” Voloshinov reminds us), quasi-direct discourse takes for
granted the notion that speech is represented as a duality, a dialogue between author and
character.18 In other words, it is already established by the reader that authorial
interferences are inherent within whatever text the reader is engaged in.

But what is this text that a reader may engage in when it comes to quasi-direct discourse?
It is the novel as it surfaced in mid-nineteenth century France. Citing Flaubert and La
Fontaine, Voloshinov argues that the stylistic structure of the novel, in terms of grammar
and syntax, encourages the reader to apprehend quasi-direct discourse because of the
“silent act” in which the medium of the novel (“prose genres”) must be apprehended. As
in our example, the apperceptive encounter the reader would have when reading “John
what a brute he is” cannot be understood if communicated verbally. In other words, the
dialogue that quasi-direct discourse initiates between the author and character cannot be
removed from the text of the novel.

Quasi-direct discourse is, in its syntactical and grammatical function, enmeshed within
the structure of the sentences that comprise the structure of the narrative act. Quasi-direct
discourse must be read in order for it to effectuate its technical and stylistic resonance,
that of speech interference. Voloshinov reiterates: “Only this ‘silencing’ [from silent
reading] of prose could have made possible the multileveledness and voice-defying
complexity of intonational structures that are so characteristic for modern literature.”19
The complexity of quasi-direct discourse is entrenched in the representation of speech
itself as represented in a novel, and, as such, such discourses are “unproducible if read
aloud.”20 The discourse that furls out of the novel is, therefore, one that remains in the
novel for the reader to decipher “silently.”
2) Represented Speech and Thought

In Unspeakable Sentences, Ann Banfield also locates the rise of quasi-direct discourse
(free indirect discourse) in the mid-nineteenth century French novel. Working within a
Chomskyan analysis of generative-transformative grammar, Banfield takes the use of the
technique and analyzes the syntactic function of the sentences that comprise a novel’s
text. For Banfield, however, quasi-direct discourse/free indirect discourse are both
misnomers—the technique, according to Banfield, is non-communicative. Unlike
Voloshinov’s reading of quasi-direct discourse, Banfield argues that there is no
reciprocity between author and character—no dialogue that sustains the function of the
literary technique. In this respect, Banfield shifts the technique’s title to “represented
speech and thought.”

The question of “Who Speaks?” in a novel is what is at issue in regards to the use of free
indirect discourse/quasi-direct discourse/represented speech and thought. For Voloshinov
the “who” was both the author and character, which assumes that the author guides the
“voice” of the text. Therefore, the “point-of-view” of the narrated text in quasi-direct
discourse assumes that there is a point of subjectivity. This, for Banfield, is untenable.
“Subjectivity is not dependent on the communicative act [i.e. discourse], even if it is
shown through language. And if it is not subordinated to the communicative function,
then language can contain speakerless sentences.”21

Banfield goes at length to separate the linguistic act of discourse from the written act of
its representation. Unlike Voloshinov, from whom she extrapolates and resituates many
theoretical/linguistic concepts, Banfield does not concur that reported speech or
discourse, as it surfaces in the text of the novel, engages in a dialogic encounter between
author and character. Rather, for Banfield, the novel, in its syntactic and grammatical
function, shapes its own language divorced from speech or dialogue—“speech is not
language but linguistic performance.”22

In order to argue that sentences that comprise the narration of a novel are non-
communicative, Banfield traces the “actual distribution” of syntactic arrangements in the
medium to differentiate between forms of speech that elicit a non-dialogical relation to
the narrative. Through the dissection of syntax in the written medium of the novel (verb
tenses, noun phrases, deictics, parenthetical sentences, and pronouns), Banfield sifts
through sentences of fiction in order to locate the verb tense aorist (simple past) as that
which does not speak—that is, a tense that is not used in “linguistic performance” or
dialogue.

The use of the tense as a function of fiction coincides with its fall as an outmoded use in
speech, a historical shift that coincided with the rise of the novel. Utilized in works by
Flaubert and Zola, and with an increasing degree of usage in the early twentieth century
(Henry James, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Jean-Paul Sartre are examples Banfield
employs), Banfield argues that the aorist is only literary, not spoken. In French, the
aorist is still the tense of fiction, not a tense of discourse. In a sense, Banfield takes up
Voloshinov’s notion of the “silencing” of prose by heightening that silence—not
discourse but a representation of discourse: “represented speech and thought.”

The aorist, in Banfield’s reading, is a “literary tense” precisely because it does not speak
when someone speaks in actuality—it is used only in the language of fiction, as a
linguistic tense of the fictive. Banfield gives the following simple example to illustrate
the difference between the aorist and the imparfait:

Elle vit la lune. (aorist)

[She saw the moon.]

Elle voyait la lune. (imparfait)

[She saw the moon.]23

Distinct from Voloshinov’s reading of the imparfait as the tense that functions within
quasi-direct discourse, Banfield finds the aorist to be the tense that structures the rise of
the novel as unique. The difference between the aorist and the imparfait as a function of
the novel is a matter of temporality. While the imparfait connotes a representation of a
moment that is “happening” in the past (“turning, “rolling,” saying”), the aorist stitches
that utterance to a distanced past (“turned,” “rolled,” “said”). The imparfait, as a narrative
function, allows the “now” of discourse to foreground itself without a “present”—that is,
a representation without a locatable “present”—it is represented as “happening” in the
past without knowing exactly when that past is. The aorist, however, is a representation
in the novel that is given without a “now” or “present”—it “happened” as such. The
aorist is, in other words, the absence of subjectivity because it is un-localizable as a
discreet temporal entity.

Consider Banfield’s example from Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway:

No crime; love; he repeated, fumbling for his card and pencil, when a
Skye terrier snuffed his trousers and he started in an agony of fear. It was
turning into a man! He could not watch it happen! It was horrible, terrible
to see a dog become a man! At once the dog trotted away…. 24

For Banfield it is the aorist, or simple past, of this passage (“he repeated,” “snuffed,”
“started,” “trotted”) that signals a shift in the perception of the representation of speech in
a novel rather than the imparfait, or imperfect (“fumbling,” “turning”). In this shift from
Voloshinov, Banfield contends that the novel, as a syntactic and grammatical function,
renders the text “speechless.” It is a matter of grammar that subtracts subjectivity, not the
intervention of the author who writes it. In this respect, Woolf is not re-living the
moments of the characters “fumbling,” she is representing the thought or consciousness
of that expression in a past of a character that is removed from her. The subject of that
narration lives in a past that is its own and represented by Woolf. In other words, Woolf
does not discourse with the text.
 All parts of the text [of the novel] are composed by the author, but their
relation to their creator is different from their textual relation to any
fictional subject of consciousness or speaker. The text speaks, not the
author in it. He has written it, which […] is a very different act from
speaking. The author, unlike either narrator or character, is not ordinarily
represented in the text; his ordering hand is perhaps “betrayed” in it, but
not in the form of a fictional person and can only be reconstructed by the
form of argumentation called “interpretation.”25

This exact shift is what prompts Banfield to banish the notion of subjectivity from
sentences of narration—it is “speechless” because speech in the novel is represented not
performed. This in turn leads Banfield to argue that, “The process of reading a narrative
text involves determining the status of each sentence—is its force object and fiction-
creating or must it be interpreted with the caution due any subjective statement?”26

The distanciation the aorist makes allows Banfield to formulate that very distance as the
mechanism that subtracts the subjectivity of the author. In other words, there is no
dialogue between the “writing hand” and the words “written.” Rather, because of the
literary use of the aorist, there is a temporal abyss that separates the two. In this regard,
there is no second person narrative with “represented speech and thought.” A “you”
would cut the time gulf between the fictive universe of the novel and the present-ness of
contemporaneity in regards to the character’s fictive milieu. In this sense, the novel is its
own whirlpool of sentences as represented speech and thought that are attached to
characters that remain within the novel at a distance. Narration, then, assumes a
disembodied form since it does not speak to anyone, but only itself.

Unlike, yet extending, Voloshinov’s notion of the “fantasy” inherent in the relationship
between author/character in quasi-direct discourse, Banfield’s analysis retains the
fantastical element of the fiction, but locates it within the narrative itself as a distanced
grammatical function that, as such, excludes the author as a subject within a text. In the
use of the aorist, the author, then, is distanced too. All is fiction, in part due to the
grammatical function of fiction: its rise as a distinct literary style from the aorist.

In arguing that “represented speech and thought,” as articulated in the novel, is non-
communicative, Banfield’s problematizes the concepts of objectivity and subjectivity.
This distancing, in Banfield’s argument, is what wrests authorial subjectivity, or the
authoring hand in the guise of a “narrator” that sustains a narrative, from the text—hence
making the novel a “non-communicative” and “speak-less” act.

Since the language of narration is not “speech” as such, for Banfield it excludes
subjective intonations or accents. For the sentences that comprise a narrative are not a
form of dialogue or speech, they are representations of them. Therefore, Banfield’s
reallocation of discourse into non-discourse within the medium of the novel assumes a
standardization of representation. For what does happen when, for instance, a dialect or
an idiomatic expression (skaz, or speech forms, a term Banfield borrows from the
Russian Formalists) surfaces within a text?
In this instance, dialects can only be represented as direct discourse. Since the novel is
not dialogue but a representation of dialogue, in order to sustain its mechanism as a
coherent form of representation, vis-à-vis a narrative text, it must exclude what it cannot
plainly represent in a written format—accents or stratifications of language. The novel,
then, assumes that the representation of language is a transparent fact. For if the sentences
that comprise the novel are non-communicative, those sentences must be rendered
comprehensible as transparent. Accents, therefore, cannot be re-presented, they must be
presented in order for them to be understood as such through direct (i.e. quoted)
discourse. The sentences of narration are therefore accentless.

Only in the form of direct discourse, or speech fragments that are quoted, can dialects or
linguistic stratifications occur. Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights is an example of this,
where the Yorkshire dialect of Nelly and Joseph must be directly quoted in order for it to
be presented. When it is re-presented by Mr. Lockwood as “represented speech,” it must
be rendered as accentless, in a standardized (i.e. grammatically coherent) “written” form,
to be understood in the narrative. The narrative must assume a level of linguistic
transparency in order for its language to be understood as representation. Dialogue and
discourse therefore cut the fabric of the fiction that is the novel by making “speech” not
representation but verbal interaction—a performance that is at odds with the silent-ness
of the medium that is the novel. In this respect, the sentences of narration are not speech,
they are representations of discourses that “silence” the speaker.

The subjectivity of the author qua writer is what is at issue for Banfield. In formulating a
theoretical shift from free indirect discourse/quasi-direct discourse to “represented speech
and thought,” Banfield creates a new perception of how subjectivity and objectivity
become problematized within the novel through the written representation of language. In
doing so, she disrupts the assumption that behind a “narrator” lies an actual subject in the
guise of an author—a “point-of-view” located within the text that is imbued with
subjectivity. This assumption underplays the thrust of the novel as medium, which,
according to Banfield, is “unspeakable” and non-dialogical.

A writer may leave his signature in his writing—it may even contribute a
major proportion of what is valued in it—but this is not what his writing
creates, but only a byproduct of it. It is writing, by making possible the
sentence of narration and the sentence of representing consciousness,
which allows the literary work to take on an objective life independent of
its author. 27

In her discussion of “represented speech and thought,” Banfield locates the technique
strictly with the eradication of the verb tense aorist within “linguistic” performance and
its shift as a literary tense with the medium of the novel. As she makes clear, the
technique’s “analogy with visual perspective will not allow the formal argumentation
required, for there is nothing immediately comparable to the relation between these two
terms [“point-of-view” and “speaking voice”] in the visual arts. The solution lies rather in
a theory of subjectivity in language.”28 While Banfield’s argument is strictly focused on
the medium of the novel, her final paragraph slightly extends her reading to encompass
the cinema, but only as an ambiguous afterthought.

In his Orphée, Cocteau, by an ingenious technical solution, was able to

photograph a mirror without reflecting the camera—what would have
violated the illusion of fiction. The mirror held up to nature by the artist
deflects in reflecting. But what may have been a trick at the level of
technique was perfectly legitimate and necessary for the creation of a
fiction construct. For the writer, however, language has already solved the
technical problem of silencing the speaker and his authority.29

While Banfield’s assertion that represented speech and thought/free indirect discourse
remains at a literary level, her final examination of Cocteau’s’ film Orphée as an example
of that technique in the visual arts leaves her reading ambiguous to the fact that it does
indeed broaden into other mediums—specifically the cinematic.

These two trajectories present distinct extremes on how the function of free indirect
discourse performs in a novel. For Voloshinov, quasi-direct discourse is dialogic,
functioning as a mechanism of the novel that elicits its own discourse. For Banfield,
represented speech and thought cannot be discourse because it is “speech-less”— the
technique represents speech, it does not enact it. Both arguments extend the technique to
its outer confines, its extremity. Pasolini’s work on free indirect discourse, as it acts itself
out in the cinema, takes the technique to another limit—the image not the word.

In retrospect, in shifting the technique to the cinema, Pasolini places the moving image as
the medium that reflects the extreme limit point of both Voloshinov and Banfield’s
arguments of the literary technique. It is the cinematic image that seizes both discourse
and non-discourse into a stasis of both concepts. For if the cinematic image is a form of
technological reproducibility, its imaging mechanism renders its production of
reproducibility, vis-à-vis the objects and subjects it transcribes, as silenced. But it
achieves this through visual communication itself, a visual discourse that must, by force,
communicate coherently (i.e. syntactically) its represented meaning to an audience.
Exasperating both notions of discourse and non-discourse in the technique of free indirect
discourse, I argue that Pasolini’s notion of the technique in the cinema embosses that
divide.

But how does the cinema transcribe subjectivity through free indirect discourse since the
cinema is not a medium of written language? To argue this, Pasolini structured reality as
a language, and the cinema as the “written language of reality.” For if a film can be
understood as a syntactic arrangement, it, too, can be read like a language. But it still
begs the question of how reality is a language, and how cinema can write that very
language itself.

Reality as a Written Language/ Free Indirect Subjectivity

In “The Cinema: Language or Language System?” Christian Metz asserts that the cinema
“is not a language system, because it contradicts three important characteristics of the
linguistic fact: a language is a system of signs used for intercommunication.”30 For
Pasolini, who wrote a rebuttal against Metz, the cinema was not a language system
founded on purely “written” texts as signs, but a language system based on bodily actions
and gestures of reality as intercommunication.31 This “written” language was not strictly
relegated within the semiotic pantheon, but a system that was acted as if it was written
through human action—that is, through the body.32

Along with Pasolini, Félix Guattari would also manipulate the semiotic stronghold of the
text to incorporate the body as another intensity with the use of “semiotization.” “What I
call semiotization is what happens with perception, with movement in space, with
singing, dancing, mimicry, caressing, contact, everything that concerns the body. All
these modes of semiotization are being reduced to the dominant language, the language
of power which coordinates its syntactic regulation with speech production in totality.”33

As Pasolini argues in the essay “The ‘Cinema of Poetry’”:

Semiotics confronts sign systems without differentiating among them: it

speaks of ‘systems of linguistic signs,’ for example, because they exist,
but this does not exclude at all the theoretical possibility that there may be
other systems of signs—for example, systems of gestural signs. As a
matter of fact, in the real world it is actually necessary to invoke a system
of gestural signs to complement the spoken language.34

While cinematic semiosis remained focused on textual references within the cinema by
relegating the medium under a strict semiotic discourse (i.e. moneme, phoneme, double
articulation), Pasolini slightly veered in another direction towards a textuality of gestures
that were constituted in reality. According to Pasolini, the language systems of film that
semiotics studied were fallaciously separating the body and the object, or the body as an
object, from the word. He thought that both are reciprocal in language as a whole, where
the body enacts a meaning by gestures, glances, and poses. As Giuliana Bruno suggests—

Suffering from a physical inhibition, semiotics could not touch the realm
of the body. To this blockage Pasolini responded with an attempt to found
a semiotics that would treat the “reality” of the body, grasp its semiotic
interplay, and explore the relation of the body of the viewer to the world
of narrative signs, to the fiction of the real, to that fiction that is real.35

Pasolini’s notion of films as a “written language” calls for an intertextualization of how

those bodies are used and read as a social phenomenon within a given historical context.
This Pasolinian notion was based on a language created by the body that films
subsequently wrote. For Pasolini, human action is, as Giorgio Agamben formulates it
under the rubric of gesture, an ethos.36 The body, in a sense, “writes” itself as a language
—one that needs to be assessed as a socio-political ethic, for better or worse, of our
contemporary time.37
Pasolini’s understanding of the body as symbol was used to offer, as Pasquale Verdicchio
argues, “a code of being that demystifies the ideal body of bourgeois representation and
proposes (sub) alternatives to it.”38 The body, as visually conceived within his films,
offers new prospects for drastically different modes of action and expression. Pasolini
believed that his films captured life as it was—either on the street or in the Roman
borgate. Such corporal manifestations of everyday culture are what constitutes the
“general semiology of reality,” “a philosophy which interprets reality as a language.”39

From such a formulation, Pasolini would then inscribe the cinema as “the written
language of reality.” And as Christopher Wagstaff succinctly phrases it, “[c]inema, by
recording the language of reality, carries out an operation similar to ‘writing,’ which
records the spoken language. Hence we have a further parallel: the written word is to
speech what the cinema is to the language of reality. Cinema is, therefore, ‘la lingua
scritta della realtà.’”40

In this respect, the relationship between the director, actor, and spectator collide with a
film as always already before its inscription. These relations cannot be known, but are in
the process of becoming before a film is even made—“a fiction of the real, fiction as the
real.” As Pasolini argues, the cinema is a “complex nexus of significant images—whether
mimetic or ambient that supplies the linsigns of either memory or dreams—that pre-
figures and pre-supposes cinematic communication itself as an ‘instrumental’
foundation.”41

Human action, of either the director, the actor or the spectator as subject, pre-writes itself
without the camera or film, it inscribes itself in this world. And it is this world, one that is
a language of affective human action, which a film transcribes. In other words, Pasolini’s
cinematic practice is one in which the viewer is already the unknown quotient in the
process of making history—whether within the theatre or outside of it. This is done
through the “written language of reality.” A film’s technology, vis-à-vis camera shots and
montage, will have uttered its own meaning before the spectator views it. The cinematic
camera and its techniques, therefore, are their own forms of agency, authority and
author.

The cinema, then, “writes” the language of reality, the body’s reality, through film. This
transcription is written by the camera, the lens its writing mechanism, and objects,
including the body, its language. Film transcribes the “written language of reality”
through two phenomenon that Pasolini theoretically constructed in order to argue that
free indirect discourse is also a technique marked by the moving image: the im-segno
(image-sign) and cinèmi. The im-segno is a sign that is constituted by images not culled
from a finite verbal dictionary, but from an infinite warehouse of images that are pre-
figured by dreams and memory. Cinèmi, on the other hand, are an infinite amount of
objects at a cinematic author’s disposal to place within a camera frame or mise en scène.

These two phenomenon are what comprise the crux of free indirect discourse within the
cinema. In Pasolini’s essay “The ‘Cinema of Poetry,’” he hypothesizes a cinema that
reflects the use of the technique. The literary technique of “free indirect discourse”
translates into a cinematic technique in much the same way as in the novel, but not on a
linguistic level. Rather, the “cinema of poetry,” and the cinema in general, exceeds the
literary function of language, it is translinguistic because of its visuality. Pasolini
therefore argues that the director’s “activity cannot be linguistic; it must, instead, be
stylistic.”42

According to Pasolini’s conception of the “cinema of poetry,” the im-segni and cinèmi
that compose a films visual language have a double nature. First, as signs that are
signified, they are objects that are pre-grammatical because they are culled from an
irrational, oneiric archetype that have arbitrary signifiers. In this respect, these objects as
images are subjectively signified for each individual. In other words, each spectator
hollows out individual meanings that cannot be universally codified within the articulable
world of the cinematic image as a certain definition. The first nature of im-segni
establishes the image as a “communication with ourselves.” 43

Second, these im-segni have another archetype which function as signals. In other words,
the translinguistic nature of cinema establishes a mode of communication that makes the
images of objects reproduced within a film understandable on a vast scale. Unlike the
first nature of the im-segno, where meaning is derived from an individual and localized
world of memory and dreams, the second nature displays objects as “brutally objective.”
Being as such, the second nature of the im-segno is functional, it establishes
“communication with others.”44

As a consequence, the spectator’s “gaze” that focuses on a film, as Pasolini explains,

cannot be codified. Every spectator “embraces another type of reality” than any other, it
is an affective induction that cannot be codified universally but is traversed by a local
form of subjectivity that is grounded by discourses formed through knowledge. 45 In
Lacanian terms, this gaze that Pasolini speaks of “not only terminates the movement, it
freezes it.”46

In other words, it is a double bind: on one string lies a relation between objects that hold
a meaning prior to their manifestation on film for a subject (“communication with
ourselves”) and, on another string, those very objects also acquire another layer of
meaning when they become subjects within a film in their own right (“communication
with others”).

The director as cinematic author is caught between the knot of both strings and “finds
himself in the complete impossibility of effecting any naturalistic mimesis of this
language, of this hypothetical ‘gaze’ at reality by others.”47 Here we have the two limit
points of the cinematic technique of free indirect discourse as articulated by Pasolini.
One, the silent, subjective reading of the image that a spectator encounters in relation to
his or her own subjective view point; two, the use of objects at the director’s qua author’s
disposal in order to make a coherent, syntactic and transparent arrangement of images for
a film to be understood. Within the extent of these two limit points, “free indirect
discourse” allows the director to meander against this transparency of a film in order to
add his or her own (subjective) notion of the film within the very syntactic relations of
images.

According to Pasolini, this dual characteristic of the cinema allows a director to engage in
his or her own temptation to create “another film” within the structure of the film. The
use of free indirect discourse yokes techniques of the camera to cinema’s narrative
function. It is an immersion of the two, a narrative cinema burdened by subjectivity. This
is the knot, then, of free indirect discourse—a knot that we already discussed in regards
to the arguments set forth by Voloshinov and Banfield.

By connecting the literary technique to film, Pasolini envisioned a new form of cinema
and therefore a new way of articulating its audio-visual language. It is here that Pasolini’s
ambiguity in regards to the technique sets in. Once “free indirect discourse” is utilized in
cinema, the director has moved towards a new aesthetic style, the “cinema of poetry.”
But why is it that Pasolini aligns the cinema with “poetry” rather than the prose genre of
the “novel”? This, I believe, is a criticism on Pasolini’s behalf.

For the “cinema of poetry,” as we shall see, was not a cinematic ideal, but a critique on
cinema’s very own modernism as articulated by Antonioni, Bertolucci and Godard. This
is why Pasolini shifts the title of “free indirect discourse” into “free indirect subjectivity.”
Free indirect subjectivity renders the cinema as territorialized by a cinematic auteur. It is
not “discourse,” per se, but infused with the auteur’s subjective significance. It is the
director’s poetry, not the cinema’s, which is its own authorial agency because of the
camera.

Modern cinema, the cinema of “poetry,” inaugurated “free indirect subjectivity” by

stylistically aligning the camera with the director, and the director as expressing him or
herself in a subjectively indirect manner. In this regard, the cinema of poetry was
aesthetic, in as much as it projected filmed objects, including characters, within a highly
constructed mise-en-scène. It was a style that used the film medium itself to create a fluid
polarization between the director, the character, and the free indirect discourse or
subjectivity that the cinematic artist is trying to achieve.

Pasolini cites several directors and their films as cornerstones of this new “aesthetic,”
namely, Antonioni’s The Red Desert, Bertolucci’s Before the Revolution, and Jean-Luc
Godard. Antonioni’s “obsessive framing” and Bertolucci’s “insistent pauses,” and the
pan-poetic technique of “allowing the camera to be felt,” are stylistic choices that
Pasolini terms as “free indirect point-of-view-shots” that describe the directors aesthetic
need to create the poetic notion of “free indirect discourse” or “subjectivity.”

The camera is made to be “felt” by a director to render his or her hand in a film. Over the
shoulder shots, unstable camera movements, shot-reverse-shot, sequence shots, point-of
view-shots, these techniques, according to Pasolini, highlight the stylistic means possible
for the director to express himself in the cinema.48 The use of stylistic camera techniques
allowed the director’s authoring hand to enter into the fold of the narrative. In effect, he
or she de-stabilizes the narrative by inserting a dialogical “point-of-view.”
In this regard, objects used within the frame, such as the “violet flowers” in Antonioni’s
The Red Desert that Pasolini focuses on, can also be layered with other meanings through
formal techniques of the camera. These objects become a speaking subject for a director.
Pasolini explains two techniques for making the object a subject. For instance, a
juxtaposition of point-of-view shots imprinted by the camera of the same object taken
from various vantage points (“obsessive framing”) gives a specific object another
subjective meaning.

Furthermore, creating the film frame as a picture, where the mise-en-scène becomes its
own singular entity as a subject through the interactions characters have with it as they
enter and exit the diegesis (“immobility of the frame”). In Antonioni’s The Red Desert ,
the director goes one step further and uses Monica Vitti’s character as a subject position
to immerse himself within as his own free and indirect speaking position. As a form of
speech interference rendered through the image of Vitti’s body, her character becomes
the locus of Antonioni’s indirect speech.

In Bertolucci’s Before the Revolution, Pasolini sees an “immobility of the frame” where
images of this world (“this piece of reality”), such as rivers and streets, testify “to the
elegance of a deep and uncertain love, precisely for that piece of reality.” 49 In
Bertolucci’s film, the immobile camera renders the landscape as his own love of that
“piece of reality” indirectly. The cinematic image, because it is a re-presentation of
objects and subjects, renders those very objects as a presentation of a director’s
subjectivity. Objects in both Antonioni and Bertolucci are therefore infused with this
awkward double bind. On one hand, they are there for themselves as pure object, on the
other they become vested as a particular signified associated with the author’s
subjectivity.

The tension that underlines the cinematic technique of Antonioni and Bertolucci are
therefore “free indirect subjective”—they adhere to what is represented in the cinematic
image, yet at the same time infuse that image with a free and indirect aspect of their
subjectivity. In other words, both directors remain within the level of Voloshinov’s quasi-
direct discourse as speech interference, a dialogue with the image.

Godard’s work, on the other hand, remains an anomaly for Pasolini. In Godard’s films,
the image is “not confronted by an insistence on a given individual object which exceeds
all bearable limits. In him there is neither the cult of the object as form (as in Antonioni),
nor the cult of the object as symbol of a lost world (as in Bertolucci). Godard has no cult,
and he puts everything on the same level, head on.”50 Pasolini’s criticism against Godard
is the harshest of the three directors he analyzes within the essay.

His [Godard’s] pretextual ‘free indirect discourse’ is a confrontational

arrangement which does not differentiate between the thousand details of
the world, without a break in their continuity, edited with the cold and
almost self-satisfied obsession (typical of his amoral protagonist) of a
disintegration reconstituted into unity through that inarticulate language.51
Pasolini is taking issue with Godard’s use of montage, his “cold” and “obsessive” editing,
which renders his films an “inarticulate language.” The distinction of Godard’s cinema as
an “inarticulate language” is qualified by his inability to “differentiate” between objects
and subjects that make up the “details of the world.” In other words, Pasolini is opposing
the use of objects and how they manifest themselves as a subject within Godard’s oeuvre.

The issue, then, is how subjectivity enters Godard’s cinematic image via the objects he
uses within his films. This is not an easy task for Pasolini, since in the essay “The
‘Cinema of Poetry’” he doesn’t provide any example of how “free indirect discourse” or
“subjectivity” acts itself out in a single film of his, although he claims that free indirect
discourse is “inherit” in all his films.52 Pasolini’s essay seems to indicate that, unlike
Antonioni or Bertolucci, Godard’s subjectivity does not interfere with the image directly.
In Pasolini’s words, there is something “detached” in Godard’s films, something
“obsessive” which does not interfere with the image.

Do Pasolini’s trepidations presuppose that Godard’s films are therefore non-

communicative in Banfield’s sense? Distanced, speaker-less, and detached images that
render the cinematic image without subjectivity? I believe that Pasolini was arguing
otherwise. In Pasolini’s reading, Godard’s films are coded with subjectivity entirely, his
modernist approach of the cinema renders them territorialized by his own hand. Rather
than grapple with the cinema as an entity all its own, Godard’s films presuppose that the
cinema is communicative only through directorial agency—that is, through the authoring
hand of the cinematic director. In this respect, Godard’s films cannot be non-
communicative, for they entirely communicate his subjective position indirectly through
“free indirect discourse” or “subjectivity.”

Free Indirect Subjective in Deleuze’s Time-Image

By silencing examples from Godard’s work in his essay “The ‘Cinema of Poetry,’”
Pasolini underscores Godard’s complex relation to “free indirect subjective” and how it
acts itself out in the moving image. In Cinema 2, Deleuze takes up Pasolini’s
awkwardness in regards to “free indirect subjectivity” in Godard’s work and theoretically
posits Pasolini’s examinations on the technique as the harbinger of modern cinema, the
time-image. Deleuze’s philosophical construction of the cinema as time-image is
complex—traversing, cutting, and absorbing many formal, theoretical, and philosophical
facets. Yet in order to relate our discussion of Deleuze’s time-image back to Pasolini, it is
best to focus on the use of “free indirect subjective” as conceptualized by both authors in
their respective arguments.

According to Deleuze, the time-image breaks with the classical notion of the movement-
image where movement was derived from time. The trauma of the post-war period
allowed for a re-examination of the image and its relation to time. In the time-image, time
itself finally appears as a form of its own duration and ceases to be derived from
movement—“time is out of joint.” The classical notion of cinema that gave birth to the
movement-image centered its reliance on an advancement of sensory-motor schemes—
movement indicated time as passing the body or narrative forward or backwards in the
form of flashbacks. For instance, the mise-en-scène of shot A, including its relations from
outside the film frame, will connect to shot B of the next cut through montage.

Visual and aural manifestations within a film dependent on movement-images always

meet each other as natural functions rather than exceeding their proper limits as
autonomous entities. The time-image, however, breaks with these sensory-motor
functions and displays optical and sound situations for themselves as distinct entities—
what Deleuze refers to as opsigns and sonsigns. It is a cinema of seeing rather than
acting, objects (human or otherwise, visual or sound) become their own diffused and
singular entities disembodied from any direct relation to their grounded function within a
film.

As such, there is an indecipherability and a disjunction between what is seen on the

screen as an image and what is said in the diegesis or narrative of a film. With the time-
image, the audio-visual nature of the cinema reaches its limit. Both sound and sight are
two heteronomous poles that exceed each other as two autonomous entities in conflict
with one another—they become a heautonomy. “Nevertheless, the image, having become
audio-visual does not burst into pieces; on the contrary, it gains a new consistency which
depends on a more complex link between the visual image and the sound image.”53

Their free and indirect relation with one another causes a slippage between what is seen
and what is said within and without the diegesis. As autonomous entities, both spheres
open up a gap that amounts to a non-totalizable relation. Therefore, they must be
encountered within their disjunctured interstice as a point of non-relation.54

What constitutes the audio-visual image is a disjunction, a dissociation of

the visual and the sound, each heautonomous, but at the same time an
incommensurable or “irrational” relation which connects them to each
other, without forming a whole, without offering the least whole. It is a
resistance stemming from the collapse of the sensory-motor schema, and
which separates the visual and sound image, but puts them all the more
into a non-totalizable relation.55

Each visual and aural entity becomes its own independent manifestation of itself. There
is, in other words, a “fusion of the tear” between the audio and visual.56 “There are no
more harmonics of the image, but only ‘unlinked’ tones forming the series.”57

For Deleuze, a modern director, the most exemplary being Godard, that uses “unlinked”
images and sounds as a series establishes a free and indirect relation with them.

With Godard, the “unlinked’’ image (this was Artaud’s term) becomes
serial and atonal, in a precise sense. The problem of the relation between
images is no longer knowing if it works or it does not work [si ça va ou si
ça va pas], according to the requirements of the harmonics or of the
resolved tunings, but of knowing How it’s going [Comment ça va].58
This indecipherability of a series of images, in Deleuze’s philosophy, is “free indirect
subjective.” For Deleuze, these un-linked images are “the way in which the author
expresses himself indirectly in a sequence of images attributable to another, or,
conversely, the way in which something or someone is expressed indirectly in the vision
of the author considered as other.”59

Whereas in the classical notion of the movement-image, where the mise-en-scène within
and without the diegesis of shot A directly corroborated with the following shot B, the
use of montage in the time-image opens up a new space between the two cuts of shot A
and B. This is expressed through irrational cuts and false continuities by montage.

The cut, or interstice, between two series of images no longer forms part
of either of the two series: it is the equivalent of an irrational cut, which
determines the non-commensurable relations between images. It is thus no
longer a lacuna that the associated images would be assumed to cross; the
images are certainly not abandoned to chance, but there are only
relinkages subject to the cut, instead of cuts subject to the linkage. …
There is thus no longer association through metaphor or metonymy, but
relinkage on the literal image: there is no longer linkage of associated
images, but only relinkages of independent images. Instead of one image
after the other, there is one image plus another, and each shot is deframed
in relation to the frameing of the following shot.60

Since each visual and aural entity has its own relation, the disjuncture that opens in the
fissure of the cut opens up a new world between them.61 This world, according to
Deleuze, is what constitutes the power of the outside which enables a deframing of
thought as un-thought, as jarring a priori ideas of sensory-motor relations in regards to
films which calls into question the film image.

This, according to Deleuze, is when “montage comes into is own.” The irrational cut
arrests thought as a confrontation of its own stability. The time-image that cuts sensory-
motor links and destabilizes temporal decipherability within a film is what inaugurates
the power of the outside. It is the de-stabilization, or rather de-subjectivization, of a
subject that must confront the a priori formations of truth that establish visual and aural
codifications.

By re-linking a vast phenomenon of dislocated and autonomous images within a film, a

director such as Godard re-creates the interstice that opens up a reflection towards a
radical interrogation of how one thinks of the modern moving image.62 Moreover, this
process of re-linking pre-existing images to induce a form of reflection also allows the
director as author to indirectly express him or herself. Through the deliberate choice of a
series or of categories within the whirlpool of dissonant images and sounds that is the
time-image, a director can become “another.” As Deleuze explains in relation to
Godard’s work:
 In any case, there is no longer the unity of the author, the characters and
the world such as was guaranteed by the internal monologue. There is
formation of “free indirect discourse,” of a free indirect vision, which goes
from one to the other, so that either the author expresses himself through
the intercession of an autonomous, independent character other than the
author or any role fixed by the author, or the character acts and speaks
himself as if his own gestures and his own words were already reported by
a third party.63

In so doing, the director blurs the boundaries between subjective and objective, thereby
becoming “another”—“I is another.” Notice in the above quote that Deleuze shifts free
indirect discourse to vision.64 The time-image for Deleuze is about the “seer” not the
“actor,” the character/author is therefore paralyzed by these images and sounds and must
therefore reflect on them rather than act.

In becoming “another,” Deleuze refers to Godard’s work as not a filmic narrative, but a
novel—“novelesque.”65 Deleuze’s explicit connection of the novel in Godard’s work is
quite interesting in our reading, for it cuts to the heart of dialogic/non-dialogic relations
as argued by Voloshinov and Banfield respectively. In Deleuze’s conception of Godard’s
work as “novelesque,” he places the explicit language, i.e. quoted/direct language of the
novel, as that which is foregrounded in Godard’s work.

It is the accented nature, or “plurilingualism,” of Godard’s work that renders “free

indirect subjective” or “vision” as that which creates new relations, of becoming
“another.” Godard’s work cites, quotes, expresses, in short, it speaks in order to become
another between the subjectivity of director and character—a “semi-subjectivity”
between their relations. It is the blurring of fiction, a story-telling that free indirect
discourse initiates. In its function as “novelesque,” Godard’s work is positioned as a
cinematic fact that is underwritten by an authorial, subjective point-of-view.

For Deleuze, the cinematic image is thus rendered with an objective and subjective
identity. The camera that transcribes the character in a film as “seen” is understood as
“objective,” while what the character “sees” (“free-indirect point-of-view shots”) is
subjective.66 In this respect, Deleuze does indeed acknowledge Pasolini’s work in
formulating a new mode of perceiving subjectivity in the cinema:

[…] Pasolini discovered how to go beyond the two elements of the

traditional story [in cinema], the objective indirect story from the camera’s
point of view and the subject direct story from the character’s point of
view, to achieve the very special form of a “free indirect discourse,” of a
“free, indirect subjective.” A contamination of the two kinds of image was
established, so that bizarre visions of the camera (alternation of different
lenses, zoom, extraordinary angles, abnormal movements, halts…)
expressed the singular visions of the character, and the latter were
expressed in the former, but by bringing the whole to the power of the
false. […] Objective and subjective images lose their distinction, but also
 their identification, in favour of a new circuit where they are wholly
replaced, or contaminate each other, or are decompsed and recompsed.67

As is evident in the last sentence of the preceding excerpt, Deleuze wishes to move
beyond the obvious construction of objectivity and subjectivity in cinema. In order to do
so, Deleuze argues that in using the technique of “free indirect vision” a director or
his/her character becomes “another” entirely.

Much like what Pasolini referred to as making “another film,” a director and his/her
character, and vice-versa, contaminate and replace each other as others themselves in
order to foreground the notion of “another” in film. “What cinema must grasp is not the
identity of a character [or film-maker],68 whether real or fictional, through his objective
and subjective aspects. It is the becoming of the real character [or film-maker] when he
himself starts to ‘make fiction’ …”69

In Deleuze’s reading of “free indirect vision” the fictive and the real are blurred as it was
in Voloshinov’s quasi-direct discourse—as a dialogic encounter. Unlike Banfield's
reading that “free indirect discourse,” or in her terms “represented speech and thought,”
remains within the fictive milieu of the narrative, Deleuze assumes that when the cinema
“grasps” the technique for being other than an identity of the “real or fictional” the
character/film-maker both become another “without ever being fictional.”70 Deleuze
qualifies film as “fiction,” therefore enabling the cinematic author to “interpose” him or
herself as a non-fiction, as a reality that undermines the fiction of the film itself.
Subjectivity, then, renders the film as a fiction because an interposed authorial, subjective
point-of-view is supposedly “real.”

Deleuze’s argument, therefore, rests on the notion that the camera can be subjective
through the use of “free indirect subjective” techniques, which presupposes that the
cinematic camera is structurally neutral as an entity in cinema. That is, a mechanism
without authority or an authorial vision itself until a cinematic director renders it with
subjectivity. This, I believe, is what Pasolini was problematizing exactly. What is at issue
is that the cinematic camera is a neutral entity that can, or indeed must, be imbued by an
authoring hand. For Pasolini, this was not the case, the cinematic camera itself is an
epistemological entity, creating discursive formations for itself through the “written
language of reality.”

Only when the camera is rendered as “neutral” can subjectivity and objectivity become a
priori pivot points that indicate a centripetal authorial perspective that are defined as
“real.” Deleuze’s notion, and for the most part the accepted notion, that subjectivity and
objectivity separate the real from the fictive in a film through the use of cinematic
techniques is therefore, in Pasolini’s reading of it, a fallacious enterprise. In order to
expose that separation as fallible, I argue that Pasolini sought to lacerate the relationship
between the authoring hand and the camera apparatus—subjectivity must differentiate
itself in order for the camera to expose itself as a subjective point-of-view all its own.
How the camera is interpreted as subjectively defined, however, is another question. The
interpretive process of “who” in fact the camera subjectively defines is the aporia of
interpretation, a relenting (and relentless) question that cannot be defined or answered. In
its aporia, the camera will always represent something, depending, that is, on who in fact
is in the process of interpreting.

For if the camera is subjective itself, how does a director de-subjectivize it rather than
indirectly or directly represent him or herself through it as an interference of vision? If
the cinematic image can be subjective, what are the implications of that very subjectivity?
In other words, how can the relation between subjectivity and objectivity be rendered
fallible in order to reflect on the nature of subjectivity itself in the cinematic image? In
using techniques that tried to bifurcate and emboss the relations between how subjectivity
and objectivity are imaged in the cinema, Pasolini problematizes the notion of rendering
subjectivity through the moving image.

Problematizing Subjectivity

—Band of Outsiders and Hawks and Sparrows

We should pause here and reflect on two examples by both directors: Godard’s Bande à
part (Band of Outsiders) and Pasolini’s Uccellacci e Uccellini (Hawks and Sparrows).
Both films have their characters as subjects engage in a dance sequence. In discussing the
following two sequences, I argue that Pasolini’s early cinematic work Hawks and
Sparrows begins a path that subsequently leads to his abandonment of free indirect
discourse after its use in La Ricotta.

In Band of Outsiders, the main characters Odile, Franz, and Arthur all perform the
“Madison” inside an unmarked Parisian café. In Hawks and Sparrows, Ninetto performs
a dance he does not know outside of “Bar Las Vegas” in the outskirts of Rome. In
Godard’s film, the characters enter the café during the day, the mise-en-scène therefore
remains relatively desolate. The dance number is a long sequence shot that is not cut by
montage, giving it a quality that seems natural. Because of such a long take, the
characters’ actions are not interrupted and their whole bodies are seen. Each character is
in perfect step while performing the Madison, a non-partner dance number appropriated
into French culture during the American twist phenomenon. They perform without a
flaw, all three of them fully absorbed and in synchronization with each other.

As the mise-en-scène informs us, their diversion is not out of the ordinary. There are a
few inconspicuous on-lookers in the back, but they do not confront the characters as if
their actions were unheard of. At the end of the sequence, and as Franz and Arthur lose
interest in the dance, they leave the mise-en-scène—except for Odile who remains
engaged. At this point, a waiter walks right past Odile, as if her dancing did not puncture
the ambiance of the café. The music, which begins at the same moment as their inspired
number, cuts off each time the omniscient narrator digresses to “describe our heroes’
feelings.” Who is speaking as the narrator? The use of a sequence shot, as I argue,
renders the narrator “describing our heroes’ feelings” as Godard.
In Pasolini’s film, the dance sequence is filmed quite differently. Ninetto and Totò have
just begun their journey, and an extreme long shot establishes their arrival at “Bar Las
Vegas.” As they advance towards the bar, the music swells as if from out of nowhere.
The men seated in front leave their table, which then cuts to an extreme close up of
several of their faces already in dance. Ninetto and Totò enter the bar to order a drink,
and the former then proceeds to leave the interior to join the men outside. As he exits, a
wide shot of the exterior with approximately ten boys are already engaged in dance.
Ninetto does not know the dance number, and begins to be instructed by another fellow.

The sequence then cuts back into the interior, and after a strange close-up of a perplexed
Totò, the bartender dashes outside and begins to instruct Ninetto as well. “Count your
steps, otherwise you can’t learn,” the bartender informs Ninetto and soon thereafter
leaves the scene. Another long shot shows all the men dancing, many of them out of step
with each other. None of them match each other’s beat, some are hesitant and others are
not familiar with the dance. Towards the end of the dance sequence, one of the boys runs
from the group of dancers and begins to watch the group while waiting for the bus. As the
bus arrives, all the men leave the bar and run after it on the road, the music then fades. In
Pasolini’s dance scene, extended sequence shots are minimal (only one very short one
when the boy leaves the dance line and begins to watch the group, and the other as the
boys run after the bus). The dance number is combined by the use of close-ups, at times
extreme, medium shots and two truncated long shots.

There is quite the difference between each respective dance sequence. Godard allows his
characters center stage; their actions unravel without interruption. Their bodies are shown
dancing the Madison without fault, giving their gestures a determined feel. They are in
control of the dance; they know its every move (or does the dance know their every move
?). Pasolini, on the other hand, fragments the dance number. The characters as subjects
are undermined by the dance routine; they are not in control of its rules. Regardless, they
also undermine the actual dance by dancing all the same—improvising and deviating
from the established steps.

The use of the sequence shot in Godard’s film is lacking in Pasolini’s. Indeed, Pasolini
was adamant about his disdain for the technique.

My fetishistic love of the ‘things’ of the world makes it impossible for me

to consider them natural. Either it consecrates them or it desecrates them
violently, one by one; it does not bind them in a correct flow, it does not
accept this flow. But it isolates them and adores them, more or less
intensely, one by one.71

Pasolini avoids the use of the sequence shot precisely because of his fetishistic love of
“things.” The sequence shot, according to Pasolini, is a “naturalistic sequence” and
therefore too “natural.”72 It binds objects and subjects within a film through a “correct
flow” rather than questioning that very naturalness. Speaking of the seeming natural-ness
that the sequence shot conveyed in “fiction films,” such as the “avant-garde cinema”
shown in “the basements of the New York of the New Cinema” (no doubt referring to
Andy Warhol’s Sleep), Pasolini would reply: “But is being natural? No, I don’t think so;
on the contrary, it seems to me miraculous, mysterious, and—if anything—unnatural.”73

The sequence shot is associated with Italian Neo-Realism where directors, such as
Roberto Rossellini and Vittorio Di Sica, would place the camera in front of pro-filmic
objects and have them unfold themselves to the camera within a continuous and
sequential spatio-temporal continuum. In Neo-Realist films, the camera served as an
inconspicuous witness to the unraveling of life as it was in the reality of the fiction.

In Roma Città Aperta, Rossellini captures the city of Rome and the characters that
constitute the film’s unfolding narrative with the aid of a camera that does not cut time as
it progresses. It follows Anna Magnani’s character Pina in the present war-torn and
dilapidated city as an invisible witness. Likewise, in Di Sica’s Umberto D., the camera
films the unfolding of events without interruption. Quotidian nuances are therefore
captured without supposed interference, in a spatio-temporal continuum that records the
“present” as that which is happening. In the film, Umberto D’s habits, gestures, and
actions are all documented explicitly—(his going in and out of bed, peering out the
window, talking with his dog, etc.)

In Neo-Realist films, sequence shots function as unmitigated replicas of movement, time,

character development, and environments, the camera displays that which is supposedly
direct to perception. For this reason, the theoretical underpinning attached to the use of
the sequence shot signaled “present time” for Pasolini because it is an instantaneous
capture of reality based on a continuous shot created by a singular subject possessing a
camera. Pasolini bases his argument by using Abraham Zapruder’s 8mm film of John F.
Kennedy’s assassination as an example. Zapruder, as a single subject at a specific place
and time in the present of life’s unfolding, imprints his own subjective point-of-view of
the “present” through his camera. It is not anyone else’s point-of-view; it is entirely
Zapruder’s subjective viewpoint in a certain place and at a certain time.

As a result, in Pasolini’s theories, the sequence shot becomes “subjective” and marks
time as “present.” Rather than being a simple apparatus that records human activity, the
camera, and films by extension, is our de-anthropomorphized other that cannot be
separated from our own subjectivity. Therefore, Pasolini argues:

[The] cinema (or more accurately, the audiovisual technique) is in essence

an infinite sequence shot, precisely as reality is to our eyes and ears, for all
the time during which we are able to see or to hear (an infinite subjective
sequence shot that finishes with the end of our life); and this sequence
shot, then is nothing more than the reproduction (as I have repeatedly
stated) of the language of reality; in other words, it is the reproduction of
the present.74

Formulating the sequence shot under such a rubric, Pasolini would then inscribe the
process of montage as that “something else” which destroys, cuts, and literally
dismembers the present in a multiplicity of viewpoints in opposition to the singular point-
of-view the sequence shot signifies. Montage captures the death of the present and the
end of a singular, subjective viewpoint.75 When editing enters cinema’s visual narrative,
“the present becomes past (that is, coordinations among the various living languages have
taken place); a past that, for reasons immanent in the cinematographic medium, and not
because of an aesthetic choice, always has the qualities of the present (it is, in other
words, a historical present).”76

This “historical” present that the processes of editing inaugurate is that of death—it is a
present of the passing moment as lived. As we view films, we become aware of the
historical present because it has obliterated a subjective and present point-of-view.
Montage displays the present as something that is already a historical past for the viewer,
while the viewer simultaneously lives it. It is, in other words, the death of the present that
is simultaneously lived in the present with a past. As a film is projected, it is viewed by a
living subject imbricated in a present that is being viewed as if it is historical, hence
“dead.”

Each individual film interrupts and rearranges this infinite sequence-shot

[of cinema] and thus creates meaning, which is what happens to us when
we die. It is only at our moment of death that our life, to that point
undecipherable, ambiguous, suspended, acquires a meaning. Montage thus
plays the same role in cinema as death does in life. 77

Since the sequence shot mirrors reality with all its ambiguity and subjectivity, a
meaningless void that has no context, montage “interrupts and rearranges” the
undecipherable flow of reality with one that “acquires a meaning.” As Mary Ann Doane
suggests, the present moment of the sequence shot for Pasolini, “is imbued with
contingency and, hence, meaninglessness. In the long take, the cinema incarnates the
meaninglessness of a lived reality.”78 “The cut,” Doane argues, “stabilizes the image.”79

Despite its supposed “stability,” montage also signals the constitution of something far
more radical. It is not merely a stabilization of subjective/objective viewpoints, but rather
the point of scrutiny between objectivity and subjectivity. It is, in other words, the
moment in which both concepts are rendered fallible. For montage is not a single
subjectivity, but a multiplicity of subjectivities that are rendered by the camera and cut by
editing technologies—both of which have their own subjectivity.

In this respect, for Pasolini, the use of montage documents the complexity of objectivity
and subjectivity—a complexity so layered with mediated meaning that it could only be
understood from a drastic remove as if one were dead. This, I believe, is the distance that
creates the possibility of rendering the cinematic image as non-communicative while at
the same time being communicative. The limit point of discourse and non-discourse
combined within a medium.

In this light, the sequence shot in Band of Outsiders allows Godard’s subjectivity as a
director to infuse with the characters, thereby becoming enmeshed into the mise-en-
scène. As the dance scene unfolds, Godard’s presence becomes naturalized into the
setting. The other patrons and waiters all regard the threesome as part of the café, and one
can assume that Godard’s presence is also felt there. For a short while, Arthur, Franz,
Odile, and Godard become embedded fixtures within the ambiance. Whether or not they
“accept” the flow of their surroundings, they still are unified into it by the sequence shot
as a “correct flow.” The omniscient narrator, then, functions as the man with the movie
camera, the director speaking quasi-directly with his characters—a dialogic encounter
rendered possible through the sequence shot.

In Hawks and Sparrows, the severe montage creates an irreconcilable atmosphere in the
relationship between subject and object. The presence of the dancers alongside the music
unsettles the mise-en-scène. The waiter becomes agitated because of the dancers, making
him abandon his routine and join in. Unlike Band of Outsiders, the waiter in Pasolini’s
film cannot avoid the characters as subjects or objects. It is as if the fiction of the story’s
reality, the surreal and very homoerotic quality of random boys dancing outside a
desolate bar, was too much to bear for the character himself (i.e. not Pasolini) in the
fiction of the film.

The whole sequence is to a degree contrived, blatantly fictionalized. In its fiction, one
cannot enter its atmosphere, it is too indebted to its own invention through the use of
unsettling editing techniques that render the atmosphere locked within its own narrative.
The editing hand that is Pasolini’s is betrayed by the cuts that comprise the sequence, it is
at a distance—removed from the fictive ambiance.

Compared to Godard’s sequence, Pasolini’s is not naturalized by the use of a sequence

shot. The subjects as objects in Hawks and Sparrows contaminate the narrative of the
film by unsettling the narrative itself, and in this way disjuncture the seemingly organic
mise-en-scène. Unlike Band of Outsiders, where the sequence shot allowed for a fluidity
between director and character(s), in Hawks and Sparrows the severe editing disengages
the ability to infiltrate the narrative with a subjective view point.

It is here that the Pasolinian notion of “contamination” begins to play a major factor since
it is directly linked to his conception of free indirect discourse. Although the term is not
used frequently in his cinematic theories (perhaps because he had used it extensively for
those pertaining to literature), contamination can be seen as a function of free indirect
discourse in films as well. To contaminate, in a literary sense, is to take language of
various sectors—from the highest language (language of poetry or a hermetic language
from the “ivory towers”), a high language (language of the everyday that is “rejected” by
an “ordinary” and nationally codified written language), and a low language (language of
dialect)—and then mixing each element in order to contrast their use within a text.80

Contamination is a creative combination of such languages, provoking “an action of one

element on another with which it finds itself associated.”81 Contamination does not meld
these appropriated styles, but marks them out as anomalies acting and rubbing against
each other within the frame of a text or, in this case, of a film. By associating these
elements within a given context of a work, an author places them in a fruitful friction in
order expose their mutual contagion.
It seems that, for Pasolini, Godard’s films stylistically allowed the director himself to
infiltrate the objects and subjects within the film frame rather than having them act
against each other. In Band of Outsiders, Godard seeps with and into the very ambiance
of Odile, Franz, and Arthur’s point-of-view, rather than distance or conflict himself with
it. None of them, including Godard, tear themselves from their cinematic surrounding,
they naturalize it. Opposed to this, if we follow Pasolini’s thought, Hawks and Sparrows
seeks to mark the subjects and objects as distanced and punctured from their relation to
the mise-en-scène and to Pasolini himself.

Instead of being “eclectic”—as Pasolini would define his film practice—and by not
confronting the processes of contamination, Godard’s films were stylistic.82 As he would
explain to Jean Duflot:

I would say that my style is eclectic; that it is a complex of elements, of

borrowed material from different sectors of culture: borrowed from
dialects, popular poems, popular or classical music, references to pictorial
art, architecture…from the human sciences… I do not have the pretension
of creating or imposing a style. What creates the stylistic magma with me
is a sort of fervor, a passion that makes me cite all materials, of all forms
that I think are necessary to the economy of a film.83

A “subjective” stylization rather than a distancing contamination of the objects and

subjects used in a film is what characterized the “cinema of poetry.” But what is more
intense for Pasolini, is that these formalist manifestations within the cinema forge for
themselves a new technical and stylistic tradition that expands into a codified and
“catalogued” “cinematographic expression.”84

In a striking rhetorical sting that punctures the last five paragraphs of “The ‘Cinema of
Poetry,’” Pasolini delivers a scathing critique about this very “cinematographic
expression.” For Pasolini, the language of poetry initiated by film “may be posited as
revealing a strong general renewal of formalism as the average, typical production of the
cultural development of neocapitalism.”85 Pasolini ends his essay with the following
ambiguous affirmation:

All of this [the cinema of poetry] is part of the general attempt on the part
of bourgeois culture to recover the ground lost in the battle with Marxism
and its possible revolution. And it insinuates itself into that in some ways
grandiose movement of what we might call the anthropological evolution
of capitalism; that is, the neocapitalism that discusses and modifies its own
structures and that, in the case in point, once again, ascribes to poets a late
humanistic function: the myth and the technical consciousness of form.86

Pasolini, as a practicing filmmaker in his own right, is carrying out a very interesting
program here. Perhaps in writing the essay Pasolini intended to rhetorically differentiate
himself from these directors. Or perhaps he wanted to disassociate his own oeuvre, from
script to camera technique, from those of the bourgeoisie that his fellow directors
captured onto film.87

While Pasolini as a critic and director was delineating a style burgeoning in the cinema
through “free indirect discourse,” he was also trying to purge himself from it.
Interestingly, in writing “The ‘Cinema of Poetry’” Pasolini was highlighting a technique
that he did not want to confer upon himself. One could argue that Pasolini’s cinematic
world was not so much that of “poetry” as it was of “reality,” one which was based on the
sub-proletariat of Italian society; a world unrecognized and unarticulated within the
cinema.

But we must remain cautious. For although Pasolini’s aesthetic is “markedly different”
than that of Antonioni, Bertolucci, and Godard, it still resonates as an aesthetic
nonetheless. In other words, Pasolini is consciously disavowing a style that he thought
was anthropologically evolving capitalism itself, but it is a style that he was somewhat
associated with.

The delayed release in 1963 of RoGoPaG (Laviamoci il cervello), due to the controversy
surrounding Pasolini’s contribution to the film, can attest to Pasolini’s very own vicinity
to Godard’s aesthetic. The work is comprised of four short films by Roberto Rossellini
(Illibatezza), Godard (Il nuovo mondo), Pasolini (La Ricotta), and Ugo Gregoretti (Il
pollo ruspante). Although the films were produced and selected by Alfredo Bini,
Pasolini’s inclusion into the film’s fold explains an affinity to the “cinema of poetry” he
so desperately tried to disassociate himself from.88 What heightens the ambiguity of
Pasolini’s remarks in the 1965 essay “The Cinema of Poetry,” is the fact that his
contribution to Bini’s production, La Ricotta (which was actually filmed in 1962), used
“free indirect discourse” or “subjective” at its finest only three years earlier.

Literally, indirectly, direct: La Ricotta

La Ricotta unfolds as a film about a film in the process of being produced. The structure
of La Ricotta is divided into two narratives: the story of a film crew in the midst of
filming the Passion of Christ and the story of Stracci—an impoverished Roman sub-
proletariat working as an extra constantly struggling to find some food to appease his
hunger. We as viewers are caught within the split of these two films: the film we are in
the process of viewing and the “film-within-a-film” which is in the process of being
made. The film’s diegesis is therefore split by two recurring visual motifs: the first is the
“film-within-the-film” that shows the Passion of Christ in the process of being created by
the film crew within the diegesis—these moments are highly structured and brightly
colored tableaux vivants mimicking Renaissance masterpieces by Pontormo and Rosso
Fiorentino. The second visual motif is cut from the “film-within-the-film” by a
contrasting black and white, which narrates the making of the film of Christ’s passion as
it is in reality— the bourgeois actors, who portray “holy” characters, are plainly ignorant
about the working class travails of Stracci.
The poverty stricken and famished Stracci makes repeated attempts to obtain food from
the set for himself and his family (who remain geographically displaced outside of the
location shoot). Throughout the film, the workers and actors filming the “film-within-a-
film” toy with Stracci’s state of hunger: none of them takes his condition seriously,
neither his poverty nor his famished state. The director of the film, played by Orson
Welles, remains voluntarily detached from the events that unfold between the relations of
the “real life” characters and their development as subjects who work on his set. He
remains impotent in the face of the everyday tragedy of the film’s working class anti-hero
Stracci.

Although locked into his artistic hermeticism, the director is possibly and ironically the
only “character” within La Ricotta that can understand and establish a link between the
bourgeois actors and the proletariat Stracci. But this realization comes “too late,” for the
director only realizes the repercussions of Stracci’s life at the exact moment of his
symbolic death right at the end of the film. That is, when Stracci dies on the cross as an
extra playing the “Bad Thief.” Only when Stracci is dead does Welles announce: “Poor
Stracci. He had to die to remind us that he too was alive.”89

La Ricotta is an enigmatic film that underscores many of the tensions Pasolini faced as an
artist and political thinker. The “crisis of representation” between the Mannerist
depictions of Christ’s Passion juxtaposed with the arduous process of their very depiction
is one such enigma.90 Another is a crisis between the ethical, representative, and aesthetic
regimes of art, especially in regards to the free-indirect relation between Welles and
Pasolini as “cynical” artists in the grip of a “doubtful self-consciousness.”91 The
dichotomy that plays out between an aesthetic hermeticism on behalf of Welles and the
everyday working plight of Stracci, signals a crisis on the political efficacy of the visual
image that is filtered by Pasolini’s own position as a Marxist thinker. As Maurizio Viano
elaborates:

Clearly reminiscent of how Pasolini saw himself as a leftist and bourgeois

intellectual, the director of La Ricotta can understand the wretched of the
earth because of a structural homology between his and their sociocultural
position. Caught between his real position in the relations of production—
qua established author, he enjoys bourgeois privileges—and his no-less-
real ideological beliefs, the director has the doubtful gift of self-
consciousness, which, in his case, results in cynicism. … The director’s
cynicism, through a rigorous exercise in self-awareness, does not really
abdicate the faith in reason but generates a critique of conventional modes
of reasoning.92

But, in retrospect, one can also add to the list of crises that abound in La Ricotta that of
“free indirect discourse.” Using the internationally well-known celebrity maudit Welles
as the indirect interlocutor of his anxiety with the aesthetization of political issues,
Pasolini is directly evoking his presence through the actor’s signified body. In one
instance that literalizes and comically jabs at the use of free indirect discourse, Welles
begins reciting a Pasolinian poem published in the screenplay to his (Pasolini’s) previous
film (Mamma Roma) to a journalist visiting the set of the film (The Passion of Christ)
within the film (La Ricotta)—(as you can already guess, we are falling into Pasolini’s
meta-theoretical hall of mirrors).

After beginning the poem as if from memory, Welles, it seems, must rely on the text
directly, which presupposes that Pasolini’s own voice is literally indirect.93 Welles
therefore must raise the actual book within the frame exposing the cover to the camera
with the author’s name, obviously Pasolini, and the title Mamma Roma bursting into the
diegesis. Welles, speaking in free indirect discourse, becomes Pasolini’s indirect mirror
image within the film. It is an indirect discourse that is not metaphorical, but literally,
indirectly direct.

But to confuse matters even more, Pasolini denies that Welles was a representation of
himself in La Ricotta.

In other words, Welles, as a director [in La Ricotta] that has surpassed

antiquated conventions and therefore become a cynic, is also an aesthete—
cynicism and aestheticism, for an intellectual, are almost synonyms—and
he thinks that his religious film is clear, concise, aestheticized, formalized,
through the exquisite reconstructions of some paintings. This, in my
opinion, is completely unproductive and fundamentally insincere for a
representation of The Gospel According to St. Matthew [Pasolini’s next
major cinematic endeavor]. Therefore, Welles does not represent me. He’s
probably a certain caricature of myself that has surpassed certain limits
and seen as if, by a process of a dried interiorization, he had become an
ex-communist…this explains his caustic and cynical responses that attack
the world on every side.

But the contained reality of the film is not the position of the director. The
contained reality is Stracci, the subproleteriat seen this time no longer as if
he is closed within himself, as if the rest of the world did not exist.94

This statement, which came two years after La Ricotta’s filming in 1964, foreshadows
Pasolini’s more strident measures taken against free indirect discourse in the essay “The
Cinema of Poetry.” After La Ricotta, something with the technique had gone terribly
wrong in Pasolini’s oeuvre. With the use of international actors such as Terence Stamp in
Teorema (1968), Maria Callas in Medea (1969), and Totò in Uccellacci e Uccellini
(1966), La Terra Vista Dalla Luna (1967), and Che Cose Sono Le Nuvole (1968),
Pasolini would refrain from directly using such actors within his films to implement free
indirect discourse as literally as Welles in La Ricotta. Furthermore, when he did form a
critique of his own subject position as a cultural figure or director, Pasolini would use his
own body rather than another—such as in Edipo Re (1967), Appunti Per Un Film
Sull’India (1968), Appunti Per Un’Orestiade Africana (1970), Il Decamerone (1971),
and I Racconti di Canterbury (1972).
What happened to free indirect discourse in Pasolini’s films? Why and how did the
technique go wrong? What was it that made him as a director curtail its use? If we
examine the use of his own body rather than another’s in one of his films, perhaps a
distinction will become clear—namely, the bifurcation between how subjectivity and
objectivity are rendered on the cinematic screen. This bifurcation is a problematization on
the nature of the cinematic camera’s ability to render subjectivity itself. In Pasolini’s
problematization of how subjectivity is rendered vis-à-vis the cinematic image, the
dialogic/non-dialogic character of a director’s subjectivity is rendered fallible.

Pasolini’s direct use of free indirect discourse in La Ricotta rendered cinematic “free
indirect subjective” as a technique that was too indirect. La Ricotta, in other words, used
the technique in a manner that did not trouble the notion of how the dichotomy between
fiction and reality in the cinema is captured on the screen. In its closeness to Godard’s
work in this arena, the “free indirect subjective” sequence in Pasolini’s film did not
distance subjectivity from the author or character, it sealed the relationship between
author/character.

In moving against this cauterization in Il Decamerone, Pasolini bifurcated the use of “free
indirect subjective” and used himself instead of another in order to distance the relation
an auteur has within his own films. In so doing, the notion of how subjectivity is
rendered through the camera by “free indirect subjective” is problematized in order to
expose the subjectivity of the camera itself.

Bifurcation of the object/subject: Il Decamerone

The above-mentioned conflict between a passion towards aesthetic hermeticism and a

Marxist ideology that went unabated in Pasolini’s oeuvre is made visually manifest in Il
Decamerone. Pasolini dramatically shifts the scene from Florence to that of Naples,
clearly jarring the original context of the text so as to audio-visually represent another
linguistic dialect. In so doing, Pasolini contaminates the traditional novel with an “alien”
dialect, thereby countering it against the dominant and nationalized Tuscan variant. The
transparency of the original Tuscan text, therefore, shifts into a fictionalized transparency
that is the films Neapolitan milieu. In this shift, the film distances the familiarity of
Boccaccio’s original setting, making the novel turn on itself as a construct that must be
critiqued.

More importantly in our discussion, however, is Pasolini’s use of himself as a disciple of

Giotto. Rather than portraying Giotto, who makes an appearance in Boccaccio’s original
work, Pasolini decided to shift the status of the character into one of his disciples. This is
another detachment from Boccaccio’s text that fractures the original material. Pasolini’s
revisions of the original material perhaps presuppose the director’s authoring hand in the
adaptation of Il Decamerone. I argue, however, that rather than acting out as a catalyst of
“free indirect subjective,” Pasolini’s work in Il Decamerone functions as a freezing of
subjectivity—a calling into question the role of an author in a film.
In Boccaccio’s original text, Giotto is brutally ugly and awkward in appearance. 95 This
description comes as a surprise, since in the same passage Boccaccio also praises Giotto
as one of the most extraordinary painters.96 In my reading of the film, Pasolini can be
seen as placing himself in the shadow of Giotto because of this exact divide between an
aesthetic passion and a political ideology. Within Boccaccio’s text, Giotto is cited for his
mastery in mimetically replicating “nature.” Pasolini, on the other hand, dialectically
turns this execution of “realism” within art and reinscribes it with further political
implications.

Context is key here. Why, of all artists, would the disciple of the northern master be in
Naples in the first place? In a sense, dominant culture, in the guise of a northern Italian
artist like Giotto’s disciple, is in the process of usurping indigenous cultural practices in
southern Italy. Or, in another reading of the film, Giotto’s disciple is avoiding the
“plague” that infests the industrialized north and is therefore fleeing its constraints in the
south. After all, the taletellers of Boccaccio’s original work are secluding themselves on
the hills of Fiesole to withdraw from the disasters of plague-ridden Florence.

In either reading, however, Pasolini uses himself as a construct of a cultural relation.

Namely, the loss of regional culture and dialect within the heterogeneous areas of Italy
due to industrialization. For instance, speaking as the character within the film, Pasolini
recites the following phrase: "Why make a work of art when it is so much nicer just to
dream about it?"97 Indeed, what is being realized is not the creation of a fresco within the
film, as much as a relational element of arts reception. What use is making an artwork
with all its preconceived associations and connotations with politics, industry, and
colonialism, when it is “so much nicer” to “dream about it”?

Seen in this light, Pasolini may be dialectically embodying the repulsiveness of capitalist
homologization, one that he detested “passionately,” by marking himself within and as
the shadow of the “ugly”—as the contagion that infests the narrative. Pasolini portraying
himself as an artist while at the same time being the artist qua auteur of Il Decamerone
inscribes his own free, indirect subjectivity as obvious. In its obviousness, it does indeed
blur the lines between fiction and reality, a dichotomy so important to “free indirect
subjective.” It does so, however, to undermine it. It is the transparency of that
obviousness, the literal inscription of Pasolini as an authorial/artistic subject, that renders
his own use instead of another as obviously transparent, that which goes without saying
—speechless. Not indirect or direct, but imbricated in the fiction of the film, the reality of
the cinematic narrative.

In its transparency, it renders the fiction of the film as even more plausible—as being
what it is, a fiction in the film. But because of Pasolini’s own obvious and literal
subjective identity of being both the artistic subject within the film as a disciple of Giotto,
and without the fictive narrative of the film as the actual director, the relation between
fiction and reality is left unspoken because of its very obviousness. The relation is
therefore literal, one that does “not speak” for it speaks for itself within the fiction in its
own right. The subject as object that is Pasolini as Giotto’s disciple is therefore outlined
as an uncanny element that is foregrounded into the present of the fiction. The tear or
bifurcation between subject (Pasolini the director) and object (Giotto’s disciple) is
therefore placed into stark relief. What transpires is not a blurring of reality and/or
fiction, but the embossed relation of how reality itself is a fiction.

In Pasolini’s unmitigated approach to the use of subjectivity in Il Decamerone, the film

undermines his own subjectivity. In one particular instance in the film, Giotto’s disciple
goes into the public streets of Naples to capture the essence of the city as inspiration for
his work for the fresco he is creating within the film. In one point-of-view shot, the
character looks through a framing device created by his fingers, the gesture eerily
resembles that of a cinematic director capturing the aspect ratio of the film lens without
the camera. Pasolini is indeed both the director and character at once, and, as such, his
subjectivity as the character, and the character’s subjectivity as Pasolini, are both
subjective point-of-views that are literalized and heightened only to collapse. In being
“literally, indirectly, direct,” Pasolini and the character “Giotto’s disciple” are both
excluded from being the subjective view point of that camera frame because of their
actual presence in front of the camera being literalized (not metamorphosed as indirect or
direct). For if it is not “Pasolini the director,” or “Giotto’s disciple” in Naples, who could
it be? I argue that it is the camera, caught and captured as having its own point-of-view.

It is in this scene where the literalization of subjectivity is captured as fallible, precisely

because it is obvious that the camera is itself a subject that is silenced. The gesture of the
frame device used by the fingers is both Pasolini’s and Giotto’s disciple, the view point
witnessed is the cameras, the silenced benefactor of that very vision. For film, with the
camera lens as its writing mechanism, acts on its own behalf in this scene, transcribing its
own form of subjectivity and objectivity while betraying the “writing” hand of the
director and character. One does not need to speak on the relation between Giotto’s
disciple and that of Pasolini’s “point-of-view,” it merely functions as part of the fiction
which has its own point-of-view in the film.

In eschewing an indirect relation to the film, Pasolini negates the possibility of

communicating with the image while at the same instance remaining within it. In this
respect, he becomes a representation within the fictive milieu of Il Decamerone. As a
representation, it problematizes the rendering of subjectivity through a direct and indirect
representation—the limit point between cinema’s communicative and non-
communicative aspects. In exasperating both functions, the cinematic image turns on
itself as an act of ambiguous representation to become an authoring mechanism.

Unlike Godard’s opaque, omniscient character in Band of Outsiders (or even Welles as
Pasolini in La Ricotta), the direct literalness of Giotto’s disciple as Pasolini (and Pasolini
as Giotto’s disciple) is caught within the film’s fiction while exposing its obvious
fallibility in the reality of Pasolini’s body. In Il Decamerone, therefore, a split occurs
where subjectivity is captured as a point of mutual exclusivity between the fiction the
camera transcribes and the reality of the director’s body as a character.

In this process, the camera becomes its own subjective point of departure that carries its
own point-of-view that is detached and disembodied from the director. It is a mechanism
that is itself, and that carries with it its own form of vision within fiction. This, then, is
how a film is uttered, how a camera is subjective without an authoring hand, and how a
camera that transcribes a film cannot speak on the directors behalf, for in its transcription
it silences all subjectivity for its own. The cinematic camera is everywhere in the fiction,
willing to speak even without an authoring hand, it is its own subjective presence waiting
to capture its own subjective point of view. The director is merely the camera’s
apparatus, not vice-versa, he or she is “betrayed” in it. For a camera that records a film
speaks its own reality, the “written language of reality,” that is cinema.

Pasolini’s Il Decamerone works as its own epistemology—as a fiction that writes itself
with its own subjectivity and reality. As Andrea Miconi points out, Pasolini’s films are
“no longer signified by reality, but are a product of the modality of living, a language of
social experience and of its phantasmatic transfiguration; a symbolic place of living and
of collective narratives.”98 In other words, Pasolini emphasizes the fiction of reality rather
than the process of reality becoming a fiction within a film. 99 Instead of blurring fact and
fiction, Pasolini’s Il Decamerone sought to underscore the fiction that is real by freezing
the fiction as real.

In so doing, Pasolini underscores the cinematic camera’s potential in rendering itself as a

point-of-view, as that which is not neutral, but a mechanism that elicits its own subject
position. It transcribes reality as fiction, for fiction is reality. “Free indirect subjective”
and the “cinema of poetry” elide the subject position a cinematic camera possess by
understanding it only in terms of a subjectivity that is captured by an authoring hand of a
director. Both concepts stylize the mechanism in order to disavow its centrality in
rendering itself an epistemology, a subject in its own right that forms its own vision and
discursive formations.

Lingua X and the Process of Becoming

Perhaps Deleuze mistook Pasolini’s writings on the “cinema of poetry” when he wrote
the following: “Poetry is what Pasolini held up against prose, but which can be found in
the place that he did not look for it, in the domain of a cinema presented as direct.” 100 For
poetry was not what Pasolini was holding up, in fact he was problematizing its very
notion. If anything, he was engaging in a problematic that he saw was homogenizing the
effects of a direct and powerful cinema that was undermining its own potential.

Pasolini’s rhetorical thrust in highlighting the split between subjectivity and objectivity in
the use of “free indirect subjective” in the “cinema of poetry” was to underscore a tension
that he deemed to important to gloss over—a gloss that Deleuze tries to philosophically
circumvent in Cinema 2. Namely, the unavoidable position of a director who subjectively
territorializes the meaning of a visual language in toto without conceiving that the image
itself is written by another subject—the camera.

This modern cinema that Deleuze sees as being initiated by Godard is a conception that
furnishes the possible conditions of creating “new relations with thought.” 101 Yet, for
Pasolini, this cinematic conception had become, already by the mid-1960s, another
tenacious and stylistic code that was a hegemonic relation rather than a new one.
Pasolini’s conception of the “cinema of poetry” marked cinema as medium that had
generated a new perceptive encounter with the moving image. In that transformation,
however, came a lack of scrutiny in its wake. The use of “free indirect subjective,” in
other words, was creating a style that equated subjectivity with the camera as fact, as a
style that did not reflect on how the camera is itself a writing mechanism.

Godard’s work and style, then, is “inarticulate” in Pasolini’s assumption precisely

because it was rapidly absorbed by other directors at face value without critiquing it as
such. The camera, in the meanwhile, is neglected, posited as a non-entity that transfers
style rather than a mechanism that demands recognition of its own subjectivity. It is this
stylistic code, one without reflection on the camera’s affect, that propelled the hegemonic
relation of Godard’s work internationally.

In writing “The Cinema of Poetry,” one senses that Pasolini was arguing towards the
recognition of this code. A code that rendered the cinematic camera as only an apparatus,
rather than an inhuman witness, for better or worse, with a point-of-view that creates its
own fiction—whether in narrative or in reality. In so doing, Pasolini sought to understand
these new a priori significations that were surfacing in the discourses surrounding the
visual system of films.

As such, the essay can be seen as an alarm call to grasp the subsequent implications that
the particular style of “free indirect discourse” would have as another “self-evident” truth
in the formation of future cinematic discourses. Pasolini’s thoughts are also not without
their prophetic justifications. For it was less than a decade later that the French New
Wave, that avant-garde phenomenon par excellence, became immersed into and absorbed
by the governing language of Hollywood, making it possible for Steve Neale to declare
its influence in the “New Hollywood Cinema” of the 1970s.102

For Pasolini, the “self-evident” truth of the “cinema of poetry” had already become a
language of the homo technologicus. The practitioners of the avant-garde were too secure
in thinking that their stylistic and technological advancement was a lingua B that had
transcended the traditional lingua A of a visual/textual language. But, for Pasolini, lingua
B had not yet existed, the avant-garde had erred.

The real problem is a language X, which is no other than the language A

in the act of really becoming language B. In other words it is our own
language in evolution, through phases which are dramatic and difficult to
analyze; and that, being in an acute moment of its evolution, is in chaotic
movement and therefore escapes every possible observation, therewith
being the perfect metaphor of a society that is evolving at a velocity never
known until now, not even in moments of the most difficult transitions or
crises.103

In a sense, what Pasolini is underlining in his attack against “free indirect subjective” and
the “cinema of poetry” is the lack of reflection of its own becoming. It cannot be poetic
without understanding its poietic function—that is, “the experience of pro-duction into
presence, the fact that something passed from nonbeing to being, from concealment into
the full light of the work.”104

Without such a reflection and self-reflexivity, subjectivity is rendered as mimetic through

the camera, one which presupposed that technology is “subjective” only through the
authoring hand of a cinematic auteur. For Pasolini, this was a weak assumption, for the
camera and montage are also “subjects” that write the “language of reality.” In other
words, cinematic technology breeds its own subjective presuppositions, and in order to
explicate on that “subjectivity” a director had to render the fiction as real. Not to “blur”
the two—as if the “real” was the arbiter of the “fictive” or the “fictive” as the shadow of
the “real”—but to understand the cinematic fictive as that which permeates the
subjective: the cinema as an epistemology that propagates its own subjective, discursive
formations.

1 Jacques Lacan, “What is a Picture?” in The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-

Analysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W.W. Norton &
Co., 1981) 116.

2 Pier Paolo Pasolini, “Comments on Free Indirect Discourse,” in Heretical Empiricism,

trans. Ben Lawton and Louise K. Barnett (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988)
87.

3 See Mikhail Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel,” in The Dialogic Imagination: Four
Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin:
University of Texas Press, 1981) 250-422.

4 V.N. Voloshinov, Marxism and The Philosophy of Language, trans. Ladislav Matejka
and I.R. Titunik (New York: Seminar Press, 1973) 94.

5 Ibid., 119.

6 Ibid., 120-121.

7 Ibid., 129.

8 Ibid., 131.

9 Ibid., 157.

10 Ibid., 142; original emphasis.

11 Ibid., 149.

12 Ibid., 148.
13 Ibid., 154.

14 Ibid., 149.

15 Ibid., 148.

16 Ibid.

17 Ibid.

18 Ibid., 144.

19 Ibid., 156.

20 Ibid., 136.

21 Ann Banfield, Unspeakable Sentences: Narration and representation in the language

of fiction (Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982) 70.

22 Ibid., 243.

23 Ibid., 157.

24 Cited in Banfield, 262.

25 Ibid., 211; emphasis added.

26 Ibid., 262.

27 Ibid., 253.

28 Ibid., 70.

29 Ibid., 274.

30 Christian Metz, “The Cinema: Language or Language System?” in Film Language: A

Semiotics of Cinema, trans. Michael Taylor (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974)
75. See Umberto Eco, La struttura assente (Milan: Bompiani, 1968) 154, for another
argument against Pasolini’s semiotic postulations.

31 Pasolini, “The Written Language of Reality,” in Heretical Empiricism, 197-222.

32 See, Ibid., 198-199. “Human action in reality, in other words, as first and foremost
language of mankind. For example, the linguistic remains of pre-historic man are
modifications of reality due to the actions of necessity: it is in such actions that man
expressed himself. Modifications of social structures, with their cultural consequences,
etc., are the language with which revolutionaries express themselves. Lenin, in a way, has
left a great poem of action in writing. The written-spoken languages are nothing more
than an integration of this first language: I obtain my first information concerning a man
from the language of his physiognomy, of his behavior, of his apparel, of his rituals, of
his body language, of his actions, and also, finally, from his written-spoken language. It
is in this way that, in the final analysis, reality is reproduced in cinema.”

33 Félix Guattari, “Molecular Revolutions,” in Soft Subversions, ed. Sylvère Lotringer

(New York: Semiotext(e), 1996) 11.

34 Pasolini, “The ‘Cinema of Poetry,’” in Heretical Empiricism, 167.

35 Giuliana Bruno, “The Body of Pasolini’s Semiotics: A Sequel Twenty Years Later,”
in Pier Paolo Pasolini: Contemporary Perspectives, ed. Patrick Rumble and Bart Testa
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994) 98.

36 See Giorgio Agamben, “Notes on Gesture,” in Means Without End, trans. Vincenzo
Binetti and Cesare Casarino (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000) 57.
“What characterizes gesture is that in it nothing is being produced or acted, but rather
something is being endured and supported. The gesture, in other words, opens the sphere
of ethos as the more proper sphere of that which is human.”

37 In the 1979 publication of Stars, Richard Dyer attempted to systematically decode the
use of an actors or actresses body as a social text. See Dyer’s reading of Jane Fonda in
this respect in the chapter “Stars as Specific Image—A Specific Image: Jane Fonda,” in
Stars (London: British Film Institute, 1979) 60-85.

38 Pasquale Verdicchio, “Colonialism as a ‘Structure That Wants to Be Another

Structure,’” in The Savage Father, trans. Pasquale Verdicchio (Toronto: Guernica
Editions Inc., 1999) 53.

39 Pasolini, “Code of Codes,” in Heretical Empiricism, 278.

40 Christopher Wagstaff, “Pasolini’s Film Theory,” in Pasolini Old and New, ed.
Zygmunt G. Baranski (Dublin, Ireland: Four Courts Press, 1999) 208. It should be noted
that Wagstaff is highly critical of Pasolini’s formulation of the “written language of
reality.” I use this quote in order to re-situate Pasolini’s theories in a positive light. For an
affirmative re-reading of Pasolini’s theories on the cinema and their historical (mis)
readings, see Maurizio Viano, “Extravagantly Interdisciplinary,” in A Certain Realism:
Making Use of Pasolini’s Film Theory and Practice (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1993) 18-46.

41 Pasolini, “Il ‘Cinema di Poesia,’” in Empirismo Eretico (Milan: Garzanti Editore,

1995) 168; my translation.

42 Pasolini, “The Cinema of Poetry,” in Heretical Empiricism, 178; original emphasis.

43 See Ibid., 173.

44 Ibid.

45 See Angelo Restivo, The Cinema of Economic Miracles: Visuality and Modernization
in the Italian Art Film (Durham; London: Duke University Press, 2002) 100-101. “For
Pasolini, what was missed in the attempt to understand the cinematic image as
fundamentally coded was the fact that the cinematic image, unlike the linguistic
utterance, by necessity must be forged through a process of poesis, a creative act in which
the ‘sign’ is constructed through the material of the world but charged with what Pasolini
called the oneiric—traces of memory and dream. Thus, for Pasolini, one needn’t see ‘the
code’ as the only possible site for ideology to come into the text. For both the object
world and the memory traces of the subject are always, already traversed by ideology.”

46 Lacan, “What is a Picture?” 117.

47 Pasolini, “The Cinema of Poetry,” in Heretical Empiricism, 178. In Movement-image,

Deleuze disapproves yet underscores the importance of Pasolini’s rhetorical use of the
word mimesis within his theoretical construction of free indirect discourse within film. In
order to wrest the division between objectivity and subjectivity within a film, Deleuze
does not want to confer an anthropocentric anchor to the visual image. That is, any notion
of mimesis is out of the question when it inevitably leads back to a certain subject or
subjectivity. As such, for Deleuze, Pasolini’s object/subject distinction remains locked as
a conception of a poetic consciousness that adheres to a mystical or sacred thread. In so
arguing, Deleuze shifts Pasolini’s distinctions into a “semi-subjectivity” that “does not
indicate anything variable or uncertain. It no longer marks an oscillation between two
poles, but an immobilization according to a higher aesthetic form.” See Deleuze, Cinema
1: Movement Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1986) 76.

48 For a detailed account on how “subjectivity” is developed directly and indirectly for a
character in cinema, see Edward Branigan, Narrative Comprehension and Film (New
York: Routledge, 1992) 90-126.

49Pasolini, “The Cinema of Poetry,” in Heretical Empiricism, 180.

50 Ibid., 181.

51 Ibid., 181-182.

52See Ibid.

53 Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989) 252.
54 Ibid., 261. “The visual image and the sound image are in a special relationship, a free
indirect relationship.” In 1971, Pasolini already delineates the importance of montage or
“the splice” in regards to the interstice that lapses between the audio-visual in a film. See
“The Theory of Splices” and “The Rheme” in Heretical Empiricism, 284-287 and 288-
291.

55 Deleuze, Cinema 2, 256.

56 Ibid., 268.

57 Ibid., 182.

58 Ibid., 183.

59 Ibid.

60 Ibid., 213-214.

61 Ibid., 181. “But, when the whole becomes the power of the outside which passes into
the interstice, then it is the direct presentation of time, or the continuity which is
reconciled with the sequence of irrational points, according to non-chronological time
relationships.”

62 Deleuze, Cinema 2, 184-186.

63 Ibid., 183.

64 This is an intriguing distinction Deleuze is making. However, it ends up being a word

game when one compares it to Pasolini’s shifting of free indirect discourse from literature
to film. In such a shift, free indirect discourse, when used in literature, is a “language,”
when transcribed as a technique into film it becomes a “style” of seeing. For Pasolini,
however, it is a style of seeing or vision that is witnessed not by the director/character,
but by the camera itself.

65 Ibid., 187.

66 Ibid., 148.

67 Ibid., 148-149.

68 See Ibid., 152.

69 Ibid., 150.

70 Ibid.; emphasis added.

71 Pasolini, “Quips On The Cinema,” in Heretical Empiricism, 227.

72 Ibid., 227. See also, “Observations on the Sequence Shot,” in Heretical Empiricism,
233-237. For a reading of how the technique haunts neorealism as a “stain,” see Restivo,
“Neorealism and the Stain,” in Economic Miracles, 22-42.

73 Pasolini, “Is Being Natural?” in Heretical Empiricism, 240.

Michael Chanan’s intriguing article from 1970, with the appropriate title of “Pasolini and
Warhol—The Calculating and the Nonchalant,” compares and contrasts the working
methods of both directors under the lens of each respective term. See Chanan, “Pasolini
and Warhol,” in Art International 14, no. 4 (April 1970): 25-27.

“The ‘constructed filming, the camera’s sanctity, the crucial role of timing in the montage
—in short, what Pasolini calls his hatred of naturalness, are just those characteristics
which Warhol wants to avoid. For they are the instruments of the author, and they
subjugate the people in the film to him. But there’s a paradox here: in Warhol the camera
is more obtrusive than these two Pasolini films [Teorema and Porcile]. The reason is that
Warhol wants to place you among his people, whereas Pasolini wants to establish a
distance between you and his characters. Warhol wants to minimize his own presence,
Pasolini wants to establish his presence in the space between you and the actors. Warhol,
although his camera is more obtrusive than Pasolini’s, must nevertheless avoid ‘clever’
camerawork of any kind, must avoid the dramatic and dynamic use of the camera, for this
would show that the camera was not passive. Consequently the types of wonder and
irrational camera movements Warhol indulges in, or indeed, the tendency of the camera
not to move at all even when the action moves outside the frame, are yet further
contributing factors to the general impression of carelessness [non-chalance].”

74 See Pasolini, “Observations On The Sequence Shot,” in Heretical Empiricism, 235-

236.

75 See Ibid., 234. “This multiplication of presents [that is obtained by montage] in reality
abolishes the present; it renders it useless, each of those presents postulating the relativity
of the other, its unreliability, its lack of precision, its ambiguity.”

76 Ibid., 236; emphasis added.

77 Pasolini, "Ora tutto è chiaro, voluto, non imposto dal destino", Cineforum 68 (1967):
609.

78 Mary Ann Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time (Cambridge, Massachusetts:

Harvard University Press, 2002) 105.

79 Ibid.

80 See Pasolini, “New Linguistic Questions,” in Heretical Empiricism, 5.

81 See Barnett and Lawton’s “Introduction” in Heretical Empiricism, xviii.

82 See Naomi Greene, Pier Paolo Pasolini: Cinema as Heresy (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1990) 47-48.

83 Jean Duflot, Entretiens Avec Pier Paolo Pasolini (Paris: Éditions Pierre Belfond,
1970) 119; my translation. Cited in Greene, Cinema as Heresy, 48.

84 Pasolini, “The Cinema of Poetry,” in Heretical Empiricism, 183.

85 Ibid., 185.

86 Ibid.

87 Greene outlines Pasolini’s insistence on such a stylistic demarcation between his own
practice as a director and those he cites in his essay.

“By defining this cinema [the cinema of poetry] as one where a mimesis of vision occurs
between the director and neurotic members of the bourgeoisie, Pasolini could thereby
distance his own films from a phenomenon he deemed reactionary, from a cinema whose
involuted and narcissistic world view typified the bourgeoisie he despised. After all, in
terms of characters, his cinema is markedly different from that of the three directors he
analyzes.” See Greene, Cinema as Heresy, 121-122.

88 See Pasolini’s relatively annoyed answer to Oswald Stack’s question of RoGoPaG’s

organization in Stack, Pasolini on Pasolini (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1969) 59. “Unfortunately, Bini organized the film his own way. I’d had the idea of doing
La Ricotta before, with another producer who died. But they had mucked it about because
they were afraid; they thought it was too violent. Anyway, I hadn’t managed to get the
film off the ground and so I found myself with a script ready when Bini asked me if I’d
do the film for him. But he’d already decided to make an episode film. So that was that. I
didn’t have any contact with Rossellini or the others at all, I just knew they were doing
episodes as well.”

89 Interestingly, this line is not in the treatment for the screenplay that was published by
Pasolini in Alì Degli Occhi Azurri (Milan: Garzanti Editore, 1965). After Stracci’s death
is announced, the director is not accounted for as a possible interpreter or interlocutor of
the meaning of his death. Instead, Pasolini’s screenplay keeps all characters at a remove
from the action, and inscribes the final scene in a narrative form—inevitably evoking a
sense of detachment for the viewer from the mise-en-scène and the characters who
inhabit it. “The circle of visitors, the ladies and gentlemen, the producers, with their noses
stretched high, deluded, seen as if from the crosses, that wrench their lips as if realizing
for themselves, that with this strike, Stracci existed. And Stracci’s head dangling from the
cross, filled with patience.” Pasolini, Alì, 487; my translation.
On another interesting note, Pasolini was placed on trial by the Roman magistrate for
“vilifying the religion of the State” for his portrayal of the Passion of Christ within the
film as a film. After many debates within the tribunal, Arco films was allowed to re-
distribute RoGoPaG with certain amendments to Pasolini’s episode. This final line
uttered by Welles is therefore not the original statement. Pasolini intended the film to
conclude with the following line: “Poor Stracci, dying was his only way of making a
revolution.” See Le Regole di Un’ Illusione: I film, il cinema, eds. Laura Betti and
Michele Gulinucci (Rome: Associazione «Fondo Pier Paolo Pasolini» 1991) 69; my
translation.

90 See Greene, Cinema as Heresy, 65. “But how, the film seems to ask, can an artist
create authentic culture in a consumer society that renders everything profane and
grotesque—a society where, as Luigi Faccini suggests, ‘religious values can be
recuperated only through cultural images?”

91 See Maurizio Viano, A Certain Realism: Making Use of Pasolini’s Film Theory and
Practice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993) 105-108. I borrow the
distinctions of “ethical, representative, and aesthetic regimes of art” from Jacques
Rancière. See Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (London; New
York: Continuum Press, 2004) 20-30.

92 Viano, A Certain Realism, 105.

93 The poem read by Welles and written by Pasolini is titled “Poesie Mondane” and was
later published in the collection Poesia in Forma di Rosa (Milan: Garzanti Editore, 1964)
22.

94 Pasolini, Una discussione del ’64, cited in Le Regole, 60; my translation.

95 Giovanni Boccaccio, Il Decamerone, trans. Frances Winwar (New York: Random

House, 1955) 366. “However, although his [Giotto’s] genius was phenomenal, he was no
better off in personal attractiveness than Messer Forese.” Messer Forese, in Boccaccio’s
description, is “dwarfed” and a “misshapen man” and has a face that is “flat” and
“doggish.”

96 Ibid., 365-66. “… Giotto, was so extraordinary a genius, that there was nothing
Nature, the mother of all things, displays to us by the eternal revolution of the heavens,
that he could not recreate with pencil, pen or brush so faithfully, that it hardly seemed a
copy, but rather the thing itself. Indeed, mortal sight was often puzzled, face to face with
his creations, and took the painted thing for the actual object.”

97 Cited in Pasolini, La Forma dello Sguardo, ed. Emanuala Belloni (Milan: Charta,
1993) 103. Originally in the screenplay “Il Decamerone,” in Trilogia della Vita, ed. G.
Gattei (Bologna: Cappelli, 1975) 48.
98 Andrea Miconi, Pier Paolo Pasolini: La Poesia, Il Corpo, Il Linguaggio (Milan:
Costa & Nolan, 1998) 116-117; my translation.

99 See Ibid., 112-114, especially 115. “Therefore, if cinema is reality, it is precisely

because reality—together with its languages, events, and architectures—is already
cinema.”

100 Deleuze, Cinema 2, 153.

101 Ibid., 187.

102 Steve Neale, “New Hollywood Cinema,” Screen 17, no. 2 (1976): 117-122.

Contemporary films are also tackling with the issue. Michael Haneke’s film, Code
Inconnu (Code Unknown, 2000), is one example. In each narrative vignette, the camera is
caught as its own witness through the use of extended sequence shots that are abruptly
cut by editing techniques. The camera as a subjective view point is also captured during
the vignette involving the audition of aspiring film actress Anne Laurent, played by
Juliette Binoche. In the vignette, Laurent auditions for a horror film and the camera is
caught within conflicting view points—the directors of the horror film itself and
Haneke’s own. This obvious double bind pushes the camera into its own view point, as
witnessing Laurent’s rehearsal, and of being her hearer in the fiction.

103 Pasolini, “Comments On Free Indirect Discourse,” in Heretical Empiricism, 98. I am

aware that Pasolini is discussing literary techniques in this essay, but his arguments in it
also registers closely with his theories on cinema.

104 Giorgio Agamben, The Man Without Content, trans. Georgia Albert (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1999) 68-69.