nathan’s Reviews > The Silver Book > Status Update

They will say he was a masochist who loved death. They will say he was a sadist who deserved what he got and they will make that kid a hero. Who killed Pasolini? I will tell you. Everyone.

He says: What I mean is, I go down to hell and I discover things that do not bother other people. But be careful. Hell is rising and it’s coming at you. He says: Everybody knows that, as a person, I do pay for what I say. But there are also my books and my films that end up paying for me. Maybe I’m wrong after all, but I keep on thinking that we are all in danger.

He says that he is not interested in the culpability of individuals. He says that it is a total system.

He thinks consumerism is a new fascism because there is so much violence hidden inside it, because it destroys nature and natural behaviour.

He’s listened to Pasolini talk about it, how cinema harvests reality, gathering up what would otherwise decay and die. Film is captured time, time arrested.

The boys Pasolini chases are all the same. They are the same boy, infinitely reproduced. Perhaps there was an original once, up in the hills. Pockmarked, slim-hipped, cunning, poor.

Comme une porte ouverte sur les allées d’un jardin enchanté,

the past is not past, that there is a porosity to time that talk of historic eras, discrete moments succeeding one another, can only imperfectly conceal. This age, that age, the war, the economic miracle. Salò is a new account of time, the perpetual wounding present of I will take.

..Pasolini says, we are demonstrating that facts are immaterial in fascism, that truth is dead, that meaning is on a permanent migration.

Pasolini explains something of his theory of the montage versus the long shot. The montage is subjectivity, provisionality; the long shot is objectivity, clarity, resolution. The montage is the disorder of life; the long shot is the clarity of death. Which is true though? Which best represents reality?