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It is commonly said of someone who is a multitasker that they "wear a lot of different hats," and that's never been truer of any director than it is of Pier Paolo Pasolini. Equal parts filmmaker, journalist, nihilist, and Communist, Pasolini was one of the premiere voices of European cinema during the New Wave era that brought many European directors to prominence. Though his fellow countrymen Fellini and Antonioni became the faces of Italian New Wave, Pasolini was closer in spirit tosomeone like Jaromil Jireš (Valerie and Her Week of Wonders) of the Czech New Wave, a true enfant terrible, provoking and prodding in ways other directors simply weren't.

Pasolini began his film career writing for other directors like Mauro Bolognini and Federico Fellini, helping thelatter craft his screenplays for Nights of Cabiria and La Dolce Vita. Prior to that, he was a poet andaligned himself with the Italian Communist Party in the aftermath of WWII, a decision that would inform his political beliefs and the political content of his films for the rest of his life.

Among his many skinless films, I find The Gospel According to St. Matthew to be his absolute finest film. A masterful telling of the passion play completely divorcedfrom religion, it is the definitive film version of that story thanks to Pasolini's own indifference to the "religious" parts in the life of Christ. If you've never seen it, I highly and hugely recommend it, even for the non-religious. I would also strongly recommend his previous film to that, Mamma Roma, which was released by Criterion some years ago and contains a short film that bridges the gap between Roma and St. Matthew.

Theshort film, La Ricotta, stars Orson Welles as a director attempting to make a film about the passion play. Pasolini is a director who loved the notion of "trilogies" withthe aforementioned Trilogy of Life and his abruptly ended and forever unfinished Trilogy of Death, and I think this unofficial trilogy (Mamma Roma, La Ricotta, and The Gospel... makes up the best of what he had to offer as a filmmaker.Of course fans and scholars of his work alike may disagree with that statement.

Unlike other gay male directors that would follow—one of whom we've covered inTodd Haynes—Pasolini was not interested in telling explicitly "gay" stories on film. Most of the love stories in his films are heterosexual, even in his sexually fluid Trilogy of Life, and he's not especially interested in making statements in his films that are queer positive. The closest he gets to one comes in the final moments of his final film, when two male soldiers, sufficiently numb to the horrors happening around them, embrace one another and waltz.

While sex was omnipresent throughout his early work—his debut film, Accattone, follows several days in the lives ofa pimp and hisprostitutes—nudity didn't enter the picture until his fifth film...

Oedipus Rex

While not quite a tale as old as time, Pasolini's second venture into the world of ancient literature found him adapting the most famous Greek play of all time, Oedipus Rex. The story of a man's rise to power, unaware that in his quest he murders his father and romances his mother, and ultimate fall from said power was the perfect tale for Pasolini to sink his revisionist teeth into.

The very first indication of any potential romance to come become mother and son comes early in the film when Pasolini very lovingly shoots Giocasta (Silvana Mangano) breastfeeding her infant son Edipo...

Bathed in gorgeous color you can only get from having been shot on film in the 1960s, this is one of the most loving shots of breastfeeding since the opening scenes of Clash of the Titans. There's some sexy breastfeeding in that movie as well. Here, however, this is Pasolini being unafraid to take a risk that his contemporaries might not have taken. This is foreshadowing at its finest, establishing a loving relationship between mother and son that will grow into something more later in the film.

Pasolini is also wise to use a pre-war Italy setting for the film's prologue, but then flashing the story back toits BCE roots. This lets the audience know, without having to spell it out for them, that stories are nothing if they're not cyclical. We're doomed to repeat our past if we do not learn from it, and Pasolini would turn more and more pessimistic on this particular point as his career progressed.

Teorema

Billed as only featuring only "923 words spoken" over the course of its running time, 1968's Teorema finds Pasolini injecting some sexual chaos into the lives of a bourgeois family. Terrence Stamp plays a man known only as "The Visitor," who over the course of several days spent with a wealthy family, seduces every single family member before mysteriously disappearing and leaving this family to deal with the decay the visitor has exposed.

Longtime Pasolini collaborator Silvana Mangano stars as the family matriarch while Godard's former muse, Anne Wiazemsky, stars as thedaughter, both of whom fall under Stamp's spell. 37 minutes in, Wiazemsky briefly exposes her breasts for Stamp in a nude scene so fleeting, it can really only be appreciated in this single still...

A SKIN-depth Look at the Bipolar Sexuality of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Films

This film combined with his next film, Porcile, present a complete picture of the moral bankruptcy of the affluent andbourgeois class. It's no wonder he then looked to the distant past once again to guide him toward his celebration of life, love, and the pursuit of sexual satisfaction at all costs...

The Decameron

The first film in Pasolini's fabled Trilogy of Life is an adaptation of ten of the stories from Boccaccio's infamous collection of 100 stories. Moving the setting from Florence to Naples, Pasolinialso insisted that the film be shot in the much more vulgarNeapolitan dialect to mimic the book's use of crass and crude Italian over the more refined and classy Latin. The result is this exuberant film that is bursting at the seams with sex and nudity.

Censorship laws were never all that strict during the first part of Pasolini's career, but with all shackles removed, he is positively beside himself with all the possibility. Following his uncredited role as a priest inOedipus Rex, Pasolini gives himself the very symbolic role of Giotto, a painter who has come to Naples to create a grand mural. The film's first nudity comes during the second section, wherein a peasant pretends to be a deaf mute in order to gain entry into a convent. To his surprise, the nuns are all horndogs, full of pent up sexual energy that explodes whenever he's around. If this particular story sounds familiar, it was adapted into a film recently titled The Little Hours.

Maria Gabriella Maione plays one of the nuns attempting to seduce the peasant by laying on the ground, hiking up her habit, and revealing her hairy bush...

Elisabetta Genovese is one of the few actresses to pop up in all three films in the trilogy, here as a sexy young maiden who hooks up with a guy beneath her social status—don't worry, her parents find them, but end up loving the guy! During a rooftop seduction, she strips off her dress and reveals herself in all her glory...

In segment six, Angela Luce plays a wealthy Sicilian girl who falls in love with one of her father's lowly employees. She bares her beautiful backside in bed whilerubbing the young man's crotch,though hewill sadly soon meet a bloody fate at the hands of her jealous older brothers...

It's no small accident that Pasolini chose to focus this film, and the entire trilogy on The Middle Ages, that often overlooked period in Europe when the Renaissance—civilization, art, culture—was but a distant dream. It was a time that found the greatest economic disparity in history, with the poor overflowing into the streets and dying by the thousands thanks to the scourge of the Black Plague. Only a director with astrongCommunist set of values would romanticize such a time in history when a catastrophic plague was considered a great equalizer. This theme continues into his next film in the trilogy...

The Canterbury Tales

The trilogy continues with this grand adaptation of Geoffrey Chaucer's famous tales of the Middle Ages, tinged with irony, pathos, and not more than a little Catholic guilt. Here again we get a substantially pared down selection of tales—8 of the 24 stories from the book are adapted here—leaving many to wonder if Pasolini ever intended to return to these films had he lived.

In a move of unmistakably cheeky hubris, Pasolini once again gifts himself a prominent role, this time as Chaucer, author of the tome on which his film is based. First up is The Merchant's Tale, which finds an elderly merchant marrying a much younger and substantially more attractive woman (Josephine Chaplin, daughter of Charles and younger sister of Geraldine). It isn't long before the merchant is stricken with blindness and his wife begins sneaking out on him, ending up in the arms of another man...

The goddess Prosperine later takes the human form of Elisabetta Genovese, strolling through a garden and later temporarily granting the merchant his sight back...

A SKIN-depth Look at the Bipolar Sexuality of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Films

The fourth tale, The Miller's Tale, finds South African beauty Jenny Runacre playing Alison, the wife of a carpenter who is seduced by a young student. After the two sleep together, she is summoned to the window by an even younger man who demands a kiss from her lest he tell her husband what he's seen.We see her run to the window naked, and when she invites him up for a kiss, she farts in his face...

There is a playful nature to the nudity in these films that will disappear once the trilogy concludes. It is mostly used for fun and titillation in these three films, and the good times keep rolling into the trilogy closer...

Arabian Nights

For the final film in his Trilogy of Life, Pasolini cuts loose on the fabled Persian anthology "One Thousand and One Nights," which had previously come to the screen in many forms, including as recently as 1969 when Japanese directorEiichi Yamamoto brought them to the screen. Of course, Pasolini's adaptation has the distinction of being the filthiest of the adaptations of these classic tales, sixteen of which make the final cut. It was also Pasolini's most nudity-filled film prior to his next and final film.

The lithe and lovely Ines Pellegrini (who will turn up again in Salò) plays slave girlZumurrud, who goes on a quest to find her love and master. 34 minutes into the film, she strips out of her clothing to reveal that she was not, in fact, a man, but rather a woman in disguise...

At the 66-minute mark, we get one of the most famous nude scenes of the 70s as Luigina Rocchiplays Princess Budur, a young woman caught in a game of wills being waged by three gods. The nude scene finds Rocchi sitting nude on the ground while a golden dildo arrow is shot into her vagina...

24 minutes later Barbara Grandi plays a young woman convicted of stealing, stripped nude, and brought before a priest to be behanded...

Trilogy standby Elisabetta Genovese pops up as Munis, a young girl who bares her boobs and bush while swimming with a boy...

It's Pasolini's longest film and at 125 minutes, the only one of his to crack the two hour mark. It's a pity we can't linger longer in this film, but the first film in Pasolini's proposed Trilogy of Death was looming large for him, and completing the film would eventually lead to his own death...

Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom

Here's where things get difficult to talk about. Salò is nothing if not one of the most infamous films ever made, a Mount Everest for those who love extreme violence and degradation. Today, some 44 years after it was made, it feels as brutally, starkly, and eerily prescient as it ever has, a film crying out from the past begging us not to make the same mistakes. The cold detachment with which Pasolini shoots this tale is part of what makes the film so incredibly effective.He presents a fascist nirvana full of the most depraved acts of sex, violence, and sexual violence imaginable and stares into the abyss with an unblinking eye, aware that looking away is tantamount to condoning the acts on display.

Pasolini takes The Marquis de Sade's work "The 120 Days of Sodom," combines it with Dante's "Divine Comedy," and sets it in the gorgeous Italian countryside smack dab in the final weeks of WWII. Four fascist libertines come together and decide to embark on the only logical conclusion to their acts up until this point: They will give in to whatever base desires they see fit, starting by marrying off their daughters to one another, and then by rounding up young men and women all over the countryside to be the victims of their various urges.

And they set about enacting this plan over the next hour and a half, as we bear witness to the worst of what humanity can do to one another. Pasolini's message is perhaps the only thing muddled about the film. Is this a condemnation of consumerism? A warning on the dangers of how quickly capitalism candevolve into fascism? A sick man rejecting his previous work by turning his back on civilized society? It's kind of all of those things at once, and none in equal enough measure to cohere around a single message.

But the film is chillingly effective when it comes to haunting you forever once you've seen it. It's not a movie that ever leaves your mind, and all of the nudity is completely and totally devoid of any sexual content. Even a quick flash of ass from one of the storytellers (Elsa De Giorgi) does nothing but arouse fear for what's to come...

Renata Moar plays one of the girls brought to the palace, just after her mother was murdered in front of her. She begs for mercy, but instead finds herself at the mercy of the libertines, who laugh at her cries for mercy and eventually sodomize her...

Ennio Morricone's score of mostly upbeat music that takes no small pleasure in cribbing from Wagner is like the disgusting, blood-covered cherry on top of this sundae. Like Alex in A Clockwork Orange, we're forced to squirm in our seats as we watch acts of ultraviolence being perpetrated to some of the most lush and romantic music you've ever heard. The libertines' own daughters (Susanna Radaelli, Tatiana Mogilansky, Liana Acquaviva, Giuliana Orlandi) are made part of the spectacle, serving the libertines and their horny young soldiers at meal time...

Liana Acquaviva finds herself on the receiving end of a kick from one of the soldiers which only precedes an even more disturbing act of violence...

Where sex and nudity were once a cause for celebration, here they become dark and twisted manifestations of the most evil concoctions a group of Fascist Libertines could dream up. This is where the bipolar reaction to sex and nudity comes into play. It's not present throughout all of his work, and certainly the Trilogy of Life is an orgiastic explosion of sex positive nudity, but there is a duality to how he uses nudity to either titillate or repulse, depending upon his overall intent as a director.

Arabian Nights' Ines Pellegrini turns back up as one of the servants in the household, engaging in a sexual relationship with one of the soldiers. The two are killed for their acts of defiance immediately before the film's final explosion of torture and violence...

Basically, every director whom you would think would like and revere this movie—Michael Haneke, Gaspar Noé, Rainer Werner Fassbender, Catherine Breillat, John Waters—has listed it among their favorite movies ever made. It is undeniably powerful as a piece of cinema, and one can only wonder what would have followed had Pasolini not been murdered in the streets just a few weeks before the film was scheduled to be released. His murder remains a subject of serious debate with everything from mafia involvement to a blackmailer holding footage from the film hostage having been considered as potential causes.

It's both a tragedy and wholly appropriate that his greatest provocation was his final one. Pasolini was a filmmaker who loved to have his work debated, and there is endless debate to be had about all of his films, Salò most particularly. One can only marvel at what he gave us and despair over what further masterpieces we were cheated out of when his life came to such a violent end.

Check out the Other Directors in Our Ongoing "SKIN-depth Look" Series

Park Chan-wook

Robert Altman: Act I

Robert Altman: Act II

Adrian Lyne

Martin Scorsese

Jane Campion

Bob Fosse

Dario Argento

Wes Craven

Tobe Hooper

Todd Haynes

Danny Boyle

Stanley Kubrick

Paul Thomas Anderson

David Lynch

Brian De Palma

Paul Schrader

Paul Verhoeven

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Header image via IMDb
Non-nude image from Gospel According to St. Matthewvia IMDb
Non-nude image from Oedipus Rex via IMDb
Non-nude image from Teorema via IMDb
Non-nude image from The Decameron via IMDb
Non-nude image from The Canterbury Tales via IMDb
Non-nude image from Arabian Nightsvia Criterion
Non-nude image from Salò via IMDb