On 2 November 1975, Pier Paolo Pasolini’s mutilated body was found near a beach in Ostia, on a piece of wasteland. His death in this isolated place, on the outskirts of the city where Jean-André shot his film, Pasolini l’enragé, in 1966, resonates with his life as a civil poet, a lively agitator and exceptional film-maker. Throughout his meteor-like life, he passionately defended those who did not have a voice, those who were on the fringe. In his first novels (The Ragazzi and A Violent Life) and in his Roman film trilogy (Accattone, Mamma Roma, La Ricotta), Pasolini gave the outskirts of Rome and their various borgate (areas where the residents built their houses themselves because they could find no other place to live) great importance. In these suburban zones live the poorest of the poor, the underclass that were banished from the noble centre of the city. As Pasolini explained in an interview:

In his book, Hervé Joubert-Laurencin wrote: ‘the other quality that immediately makes Pasolini a great director, in his first trilogy, is his choice of always shooting in real and astonishing settings, in half-deserted places, on the outskirts of cities’. And he adds right away, referring in part to the masterful integration of the site of Mount Testaccio in Accattone: ‘truly, he possesses a genius of places’.

From Utopia to Anachronism

The banlieue, for Pier Paolo Pasolini, is a nervous universe, where words, gestures and shouts signify the extreme poverty of a community washed up on the outskirts of the city. The banlieue is an edge, yet it is separate from the centre, from the historic heart out of which radiate the power and domination of the bourgeoisie, where the most fortunate bask in their privileges.