“Cardboard Man” Pier Paolo Pasolini, Accattone, 1961

Philippe-Alain Michaud

For (you may rest assured) he is neither a giant nor a king, nor even a strong man. He is a crucified wretch, naked, covered in disgrace and wounds, without splendor, greatness, or beauty; he is lame, offended, exposed, beaten; he is poor, scorned, tormented, repulsive to behold; he is miserable, bound, hanging naked from the tree; his sides lacerated, his head brutalized, covered in spit; his feet pierced and his hands tied. Evidently, he is no god.

—Jacob of Serugh, Homily on the Fall of the Idols

Contamination

Pasolini often drew on stories from the Gospels for his movies—allegorically (in Teorema), literally (in The Gospel According to St. Matthew), parodically (in La ricotta), or syncretically, as is the case with Accattone—in obeisance to Erich Auerbach’s principle of magmatic writing.1 He brought evangelical anecdotes into the contemporary suburbs of Rome, and with a further narrative shift he endowed them with the appearance of early Renaissance urban landscapes. Interviewed by Jon Halliday in 1968, Pasolini declared, “Stylistically I am a pasticheur: I use the most disparate stylistic material—dialect poetry, decadent poetry, certain attempts at socialist poetry; there is always a stylistic contamination in my writings, I don’t have a completely invented personal style of my own, though my style is recognizable. If you read a page of mine you can recognize it’s mine fairly easily. I am not recognizable as an inventor of a stylistic formula, but for the degree of intensity to which I bring the contamination and mixture of the various styles.”2 Auerbach, whom Pasolini read very attentively, explained that the hierarchic separation of styles and content operated by the Greeks and Latins (elevated style vs modest style) could not have endured in a Christian environment, as from its very origins the Christian message forsook this hierarchic view: Christ became man, debasing and humbling