SOURCE: "Re-Reading Pasolini's Essays on Cinema," in Italian Quarterly, Vol. XXI and XXII, No. 82-3, Fall/Winter, 1980–81, pp. 159-66.

In the following essay, de Lauretis asserts that "for Pasolini cinema is precisely writing in images, not to describe (portray) reality or fantasy, but to inscribe them as representations."

That Pier Paolo Pasolini was a man of contradiction, and a figure in excess of its cultural ground, is worth repeating. Time and again the "scandal of contradiction" has been found to mar his politics and his poetics, his personal and public life—though not, ironically, his death. For tragic irony composes and resolves all contradictions, recasting them in the terms of narrativization, of dialectical opposition, of a final coherence of discourse which then allows itself the privilege of excess as an esthetic plus, a something more. Yet, is it not that very scandal, and the possible truth of contradiction...