SOURCE: "Reading Pasolini Today," in Quarterly Review of Film Studies, Vol. 9, No. 2, Spring, 1984, pp. 143-8.

In the following essay, Greene discusses Enzo Siciliano's Pasolini: A Biography, Paul Willeman's Pier Paolo Pasolini, Beverly Allen's Pier Paolo Pasolini: The Poetics of Heresy, and Pasolini's Poems translated by Norman MacAfee.

Poet, novelist, critic, essayist, political polemicist, Pasolini was virtually unique among contemporary filmmakers in the variety of his activities. Fortunately, the publication of these recent volumes begins to give the English-speaking world a glimpse into the range of his interests and a context within which to place his films. At first, the very disparate approaches represented here (critical articles by and about him, a biography, translations of his poems) would seem to preclude any general remarks. And then, one begins to sense that to some extent at least, and of course with certain exceptions, the approaches correspond to national preoccupations. Most...