Gestures of Refusal: Abel Ferrara, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and the Ethos of Authenticity

This chapter explores the philosophical, aesthetic, and ethical kinship between Pier Paolo Pasolini and Abel Ferrara, focusing on Ferrara’s 2014 film Pasolini. Through a close reading of the film and its intertextual references—including re-enactments of Pasolini’s interviews and fragments from his unfinished works—Zappe argues that both artists formulate an ethos of authenticity as a form of resistance to the alienating forces of capitalist modernity. Rather than approaching morality through conventional or religious frameworks, both filmmakers present an a-moral ethical vision centred on subjective authenticity, desire, and refusal. The chapter draws on the philosophies of Lionel Trilling, Joel Marks and Charles Taylor to position this cinematic and ideological alignment as a gesture of cultural and ethical subversion. Ferrara’s Pasolini becomes not only a tribute but a continuation of Pasolini’s project: an urgent, affective interrogation of whether it is still possible to live—and create—authentically in an inauthentic world.