Acid Messianism: Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Script for ‘San Paolo’

When he died in 1975, Pier Paolo Pasolini left a manuscript entitled ‘Plan for a Film About Saint Paul’, posthumously published as ‘San Paolo’5. This practicebased thesis provides an original interpretation of ‘San Paolo’ as the conceptual hinge between ‘Il vangelo secondo Matteo’6 (1964) and ‘Salò o le 120 giornate di sodoma’7(1975), constituting a previously unacknowledged trilogy in Pasolini’s work. The research operates across art practice and critical theory to question how this new trilogy engenders a concept of ‘entvicklungsfahigkeit’ (that which—remains unsaid within the work but which demands to be unfolded and worked out8)’, ‘acid’ thought, messianic time, and ‘translatability’ to configure a new understanding of Pasolini’s work. The conceptualisation of a new trilogy, allied to these concepts, also produces a methodology of filmmaking in my practice, centred around a ‘muppet’ style puppet of Pasolini.

The theoretical portion of the thesis seeks to employ the sacred force of history drawn from Benjamin and Pasolini as the grounds for critiquing neoliberalism as a late capitalist project which denies any vision of the future outside of its own narrow— and dystopic— ideology. A new understanding of the apocalypse is explicated to frame Pasolini’s cinema and my work as activating futurity beyond neoliberal ideology with revelation and hope at its core.

Within the script for ‘San Paolo’, Pasolini exchanges the sites of St. Paul’s life, based on the New Testament, with cities, countries, and events from Western Europe and North America from the Second World War to the mid-1970s. My practice reworks this procedure of transposition, drawing parallels between St. Paul and Pasolini— implying a spectral link between the two— to explore humour, cultural objects as a repository of memory, and fragmentary notions of time as key to a new understanding of Pasolini’s cinema, messianism, and alternative political futures.