Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922-1975) — poet, film director, screenwriter and theatre critic, playwright, essayist, journalist, graphic artist, and novelist — was one of the great Italian artistic and intellectual figures of the twentieth century.  Since his mysterious murder in 1975, Pasolini has been reviled; then sanctified. Our goal is to historicize Pasolini. This conference focuses on configurations of the body and gesture that arise in Pasolini’s performative, visual, and poetic practices with respect to the artist image, the ‘popular body’, the Third World, narrative and choreographic movement, Pasolini’s life, and his conceptions of the political and eroticism as they intersect history, culture, and myth.

Thursday

7:30-10 pm – Film Screening: Arabian Nights

Introduction: Peter Limbrick, UCSC

Location: Studio C, Communications Building

Friday

8:30-9:00 – Coffee

9:00-9:30 – Opening Remarks
David Yager, Dean of the Arts,
Mark Franko, Director of the Center for Visual and Performance Studies

9:30-11:30 – Panel: Corporeal Poetics
Tyrus Miller, UCSC
“Transhumanize and Organize: Pasolini’s Crossing of Philology and Biopolitics”

Armando Maggi, U. Chicago
“Norman O. Brown’s Love’s Body and Pasolini’s Calderón”

Colleen Ryan-Scheutz, Indiana U.
“Pasolini’s Final Word(s): From the Divina Mimesis to Petrolio and Salo”

Moderator: Deanna Shemek, UCSC

11:30-1:00 – Lunch

1:00-3:00 – Panel: Visualizing the Body

Gian Maria Annovi, Columbia
“Pasolini’s Cinematographic Body”

Mark Franko, UCSC
“Notes on Pasolini and the ‘Language’ of Dance”

Silvestra Mariniello, U. Montreal
“Myth and the Pace of Life. Pasolini’s Poetics of History”

Moderator: Cathy Soussloff, UBC

3:00-3:30 – Break

3:30-5:30 – Panel: Political Kinesthetics

Staisey Divorski, UCLA
“The Heretical Absence of the Word: Pasolini’s Teorema”

Evan Calder Williams, UCSC
“A Vital Desperation: On Rage and Communist Pessimism”

Wlad Godzich, UCSC
“Body, Narrative, and Politics”

Moderator: Karen Bassi, UCSC

5:30-7:30 – Reception & Film Screening: Notes on an African Orestes

Introduction: Peter Limbrick, UCSC

Location: Studio C, Communications Building

Saturday

10:00-10:30 – Coffee

10:30-1:00 – Panel: Postcolonial Figurations

David Pendleton, Harvard
“Pasolini on the Beach: Semiosis, Erotics and the Politics of the Image”

Derek Duncan, U. Bristol
“Graceless: Pasolini’s Postcolonial Body”

Giovanna Trento, French Center for Ethiopian Studies
“Il corpo popolare according to Pier Paolo Pasolini: body, sexuality, subalternity, reality, resistance, agency and death”

Luca Caminati, Concodria
“Notes on Pasolini’s Third World”

Moderator: Peter Limbrick

Sponsored by UCSC Arts Division, UCSC Arts Research Institute, Istituto Italiano di Cultura di San Francisco,  Cowell College, Theater Arts Department, Literature  Department, Film and Digital Media Department, History of Art and Visual Culture Department,  History of Consciousness Department, Feminist Studies Department, and History Department