SOURCE: "Not Forgetting the Artist," in Times Literary Supplement, No. 3673, July 21, 1972, p. 833.

In the following review, the critic states that Pasolini's "Empirismo eretico is the record of the intellectual activity of an individual struggling with a protean culture which changed form just as he seemed to be about to comprehend it."

Pier Paolo Pasolini is best known internationally as a film director, but he is also a novelist and poet of considerable talent and a notorious publicist and intellectual provocateur. Much of his non-fictional writing is devoted to the task of explaining and theorizing his artistic activity proper. Thus he has written at length about the language question, still a live issue in Italy, about literature and about the semiology of the cinema.

But there is in this and in his other writing a secondary aspect also, not simply a justification by the author for doing what he...