Self-Portrait

Pasolini’s less well-studied paintings and drawings, particularly his self-portraits, are the subject of chapter Four. I provide new critical and theoretical perspectives on his visual work and follow its development in parallel with Pasolini’s other creative endeavors, interpreting them as one way of delineating an public authorial performance. I analyze Pasolini’s drawing as wounded self-portrait, that is the graphic manifestation of a torn self-image, produced by the violent clash with society. In Chapter Four, I also look at Pasolini’s relationship to abstract art, focusing on the parallels between his cinema and his experimentation with materials and forms in painting. Challenging the common notion of Pasolini’s hatred for modern art, I argue that in his portraits and self-portraits, he actually used abstraction to deform or disfigure the self, as a result of the pressure of history and society. Finally, in this chapter I consider some of Pasolini’s photographic portraits as a part of his authorial self-fashioning, and as a necessary component of his multimedia practice and his authorial performance during the last phase of his career.