Haunting Authorship: Pasolini’s Murder in Glauber Rocha’s A Idade da Terra and Aoulad-Syad’s Fi Intidar Pasolini

ABSTRACT Pier Paolo Pasolini’s death has been the subject of numerous works in media from cinema to graphic novels. Most focus on Pasolini’s assassination, its murky political implications, and the events surrounding the last hours of his life. Although this copious material was generated in an effort to bring justice to his death, in most cases it has ended up underplaying the multilayered approach to death and authorship present in Pasolini’s works. Here, I ask whether it is possible to consider Pasolini’s death through lenses other than that of the events surrounding his murder. I consider two films: Glauber Rocha’s last film, A Idade da Terra (The Age of the Earth, Brazil, 1980), and Fi Intidar Pasolini (Waiting for Pasolini, Morocco, 2007) realized by Daoud Aoulad-Syad. These Global South directors not only depart from a journalistic approach to Pasolini’s death, they also reinvent, translate, and, to a certain extent, ‘provincialize’ it.

On 2 November 1975, Pier Paolo Pasolini was found murdered in the Ostia Idroscalo on the outskirts of Rome.The brutality of the murder, together with its murky political implications, heightened its traumatic and symbolic effect.As a counter-effect of the short-circuiting between life and art that Pasolini had consciously performed, he quickly became a ghostly figure that haunted his posterity, 'a specter' who wanders 'through the ruins of a present unrecognizable to him or to us'. 1 The impact of his death is even more striking when one considers the symbolic implications that it assumed.As French movie critic Serge Daney suggests, Pasolini's death can be seen as a point of no return for a certain kind of cinema, perceived as a free, poetic exploration of the unknown. 2 Most of the work dealing with this event, however, focuses almost exclusively on the biographical aspects surrounding the crime. 3As a result, Pasolini's death became an opportunity for others to move away from his work by turning him into a monument, in a process comparable to that for other public figures.This approach is particularly limiting given that the Italian director considered death from a much broader perspective than purely biographical.Much more than the end of life, death for him was a liminal condition from which to address and challenge the present.
In this article, I ask whether it is possible to consider Pasolini's death through different lenses than the events surrounding his murder.I consider two films: Glauber Rocha's last film, A Idade da Terra (The Age of the Earth, Brazil, 1980), and Fi Intidar Pasolini (Waiting for Pasolini, Morroco, 2007), realized by Daoud Aoulad-Syad.These Global South 4 directors not only depart from a journalistic approach to Pasolini's death, they also reinvent, translate, and, to a certain extent, 'provincialize' 5 it.As Pasolini becomes the symbol of an authorial and politically engaged (even when Eurocentric) cinema, his death opens up a space for enquiring about the future of political cinema in the Global South.In different ways, both directors tackle the limits of European film d'auteur by stressing the situated, non-Western nature of their work and advocating for a choral, disseminating plurality of voices.At the same time, their confrontation of Pasolini's cinema and his public figure raises new contradictions and issues that need to be addressed.Ultimately, for both Rocha and Aoulad-Syad, Pasolini's death becomes both a target and a stimulus.While they aim to dispel certain aspects of his authorial presence, his spectre haunts the two films and transfigures them into a quest for justice to come, opening up a horizon that exceeds the historical and geographical borders of Pasolini's life.

'On the Firing Line': Pasolini and the Scandal of Death
Given the many appearances of death in Pasolini's work, a feeling of premonition magnified the shock of his murder.Take, for instance, his discussion of Abraham Zapruder's 8 mm footage of John F. Kennedy's assassination in 'Observation on the Sequence Plan': 'By dying Kennedy expressed himself with his last action', writes Pasolini. 6However, the continuous present of the inadvertently filmed material and its lack of authorial intervention render Kennedy's death incomprehensible.At this point, the first person suddenly emerges when Pasolini writes, 'Until I die, no one can ever be guaranteed to really know me, that is, to be able to give a meaning to my action'. 7asolini's authorial web shifts from the death of Kennedy to the death of the one who is writing.In this as in many other cases, 8 Pasolini provocatively uses his own death to place the reader in the uncomfortable position of being incapable of distinguishing between private and public, personal biography and 'abstract' theory.
Pasolini uses a similar strategy in 'Unpopular Cinema', arguing that the author 'can only be a foreigner in a hostile land' who 'inhabits death rather than life'. 9In contrast to the common opinion that sees the preservation of life as a central focus of society, Pasolini opposes the publicness of death because it abandons the private sphere in order to transgressively exhibit the author's not-belonging.There is a necessary public element in the author's self-immolation as well as a perverse pleasure in it, he argues, since it is 'one thing […] to [be ]martyred in private' but something altogether different 'to be martyred in the public square, in a "spectacular death"'. 10ltimately, the radical otherness of death allows the author not only to frustrate expectations but also to transform the audience into 'another author' who has the same 'freedom to diethat is, to immolate himself on the mixture of the pleasure and pain which the transgression against the self-preserving normality consists [of]'. 11Once more, Pasolini consciously blurs the line between spheres.If the freedom to die and the pleasure and pain of generating scandal are easily interpreted in biographical terms, he constantly underplays this interpretation by reminding readers that his essay is about the aesthetic of cinema.He criticizes the avant-garde for going beyond the front lines of transgression, comparing it to a suicidal position.Instead, he argues that the author should stand on the 'firing line' between death and life.
Pasolini's positioning of death at the liminal point of the authorial presence complicates the criticism of the anti-authorial essays of the 1960s and 1970s, best exemplified in Roland Barthes's essay-manifesto 'The Death of the Author'. 12Based on Pasolini's own words, I suggest viewing the relation between 'author' and 'death' from a different perspective and ask whether the irreplaceable experience of death can trigger new forms of encounter and negotiation.After all, it was Barthes who, in his 1973 The Pleasure of the Text, made the surprising statement that 'as an institution, the author is dead […] but in the text, in a certain way, I desire the author: I need his figure'. 13Constantly walking the thin line between private and public, self-destruction and self-preservation, and ultimately life and death, the author-Pasolini becomes a spectral figure not only within his own works but in the works of others.
Such a 'haunting effect' becomes even more persistent when it overcomes the boundaries of fiction.We do not have footage of Pasolini's assassination, but many newspaper articles, essays, and films deal with it.Photographs of his body offered a temporary exposition to a curious audience.Much of the copious material about Pasolini's assassination was generated in an effort to bring justice to his death, yet in most cases it ended up underplaying the multilayered approach to death and authorship present in Pasolini's own works.The authors neglected, for instance, the interpretation of death as the condition that transforms the audience into 'another author' who should question, transgress, and transform the original work of art.Similarly, these works do not consider Pasolini's view of death as the only position from which one can shatter any preconceived, naturalist approach to reality.Once reduced to the borders of one's biography, death loses its scandalous, disseminating force.
Beyond the 'Christ-Oedipus': Glauber Rocha with and against Pasolini The Brazilian director Glauber Rocha suggests such an heretical approach to Pasolini's murder in A Idade da Terra, his last and most complex film.At a crucial moment in the film, we hear Rocha's voiceover explaining its inspirational sources: On the day when Pasolini, the great Italian poet, was murdered, I thought about filming the life of Christ in the Third World.Pasolini filmed the life of Christ in the same period that Pope John XXIII broke the ideological immobilism of the Catholic church in relation to the problems of the underdeveloped peoples of the Third World.It was a rebirthing: the resurrection of a Christ that was not adored on the cross, but a Christ that was worshipped, revived, revolutionized in an ecstasy of resurrection.
Rocha takes inspiration from Pasolini's murder, but suddenly he moves in a different direction.The event serves him not only as a cause of grief but also as an occasion to radically reimagine one of Pasolini's most renowned films, The Gospel According to St. Matthew (Il Vangelo Secondo San Matteo, 1964).Leaving aside all aspects of Pasolini's biography, Rocha makes him the intercessor in order to resuscitate the utopian and revolutionary cinema of the 1960s that was in crisis by the end of the 1970s.
A Idade da Terra, in fact, splits the figure of Christ into four subjects: an Indian Christ, a Black Christ, a military Christ, and a revolutionary Christ.They are portrayed in three different cities: Bahia (the Indian Christ), Brasilia (the Black Christ), and Rio de Janeiro (the military and the revolutionary Christ).Instead of the traditional Christ that is part of a trinity (Father, Son, and Holy Ghost), Rocha plays with the number four, as in the four knights of the apocalypse and the four evangelists.Against the four Christs of Brazilian history, Rocha sets the fake blond anti-Christ, Brahms, who is both a devil and a cheap copy of a North American.The film posits Brazil at the centre of a complex allegory of the transnational, hybrid Global South, asserting the 'positive force of Brazilian syncretism against the violence embedded in its history'. 14The Christs incorporate the multiracial history of Brazil that has resulted from the interaction of three racial groups: the indigenous community, the descendants of African slaves, and the Portuguese colonizers. 15he four Christs are not just symbols of an ahistorical savior; they are historically embedded in the social context of Latin American in general and of Brazilian history in particular. 16For this reason, they are not simply utopian and disembodied figures but express different degrees of ambivalence.This is especially the case of the military and revolutionary Christ, who is in various ways implicated with Brahms.The military Christ alludes to Brazil's military dictatorship, which began with a 1964 coup, supported by the United States, that overthrew President Joâo Goulart.The worsening of censorship measures led Rocha to leave Brazil in 1971, but he returned only five years later.Along with the regime based on repression and censorship, this period was also characterized by a period of economic growth known as the 'Brazilian miracle', which did not solve the problem of inequality. 17Rocha does not directly attack the regime but portrays the military Christ as a mediator between the anti-Christ, the Americophile Brahms, and the Brazilian people.At the beginning of the film, both Brahms and the military Christ take part in the carnival in Rio.While Brahms is a grotesque figure, at odds with his surroundings, the military Christ is more at ease in this context.Rocha lingers on a close-up of Christ's smiling lips, which seem to become the gravitational pole for all around him.The revolutionary Christ is even more ambivalent as a figure.Different from the military Christ, he moves in the favelas of Rio.At the same time, he is connected with the military regimeand it should be noted that the 1964 coup was called a revoluçao ('revolution') 18 and is also presented as the legitimate son of Brahms.The link between revolution and capitalism may indicate that the former can succeed only from the ruins of capitalism (Brahms suffers from cancer).At the same time, the revolutionary Christ seems incapable of ending his Oedipal complex.
The hybrid fusion of history and utopia transforms Rocha's Christs into both regenerating forces in Brazilian history and the persistence of wounds and the contradictions of Brazilian society.This tension mirrors Rocha's complex, deep confrontation with Pasolini both as the author of The Gospel According to St. Matthew and as an engaged intellectual who was brutally assassinated in 1975. 19From one side, the Brazilian director recognized in The Gospel a model for future films.In an article entitled 'The Morality of the New Christ', he praised the violent, vehement sermons of Pasolini's Christ, 'who preaches violence over complacency, and who revolts against the Father'.He defines him as a true revolutionary, a stigma against that alienation 'which characterizes the developing man, or rather, the colonized man'. 20However, he soon begins to attack the film for being too entangled with the patriarchal system and incapable of imagining a radically alternative condition.It is Pasolini's death that forces Rocha to address an impasse that involved not only Pasolini but also the very possibility of a political cinema in the changing society of the late 1970s.
The deep effect of this event keeps coming back to Rocha, as is demonstrated in one of his last interviews, conducted in 1981the year of his deathwith Cahiers du Cinema titled 'The Christ-Oedipus'.Naomi Green stresses how Rocha, like many others, hastily connected Pasolini's death with his work, particularly his last film, Salò. 21Certainly, Rocha attacks Pasolini more harshly in this interview than in any other text, accusing him of replacing subversion with perversion.Yet even as he made this association, Rocha questioned Pasolini at a deeper level.For instance, he challenged the Italian director in terms of the forms of desire represented in his films, identifying the author with the figure of the 'Christ-Oedipus' or, as he writes it after adopting the native Tupi people's spelling, Kryztedipo.Both Christ and Oedipus, whom Pasolini had transposed in two famous films, represent for Rocha the limits of a desire that cannot see anything outside the patriarchal, fascist desire of Salò.In light of Pasolini's murder, Pasolini's The Gospel bears the traces of this impasse.Christ on the cross asking the Father, 'Why have you forsaken me?', a scene from The Gospel that Rocha had previously praised for its political power, becomes in this interview an example of a patriarchal, oedipal desire.Using quasi-Lacanian vocabulary, Rocha describes Pasolini's Christ as crucified 'on the phallus of the (non-existent) father'.'This fusion between Christ and Oedipus', continues Rocha, 'leads to despair, derision and permanent sorrow'. 22Thus, Rocha ends by commenting on his own A Idade, a film 'for and against' Pasolini that was intended to be the 'real version of a Christ from the Third World' because 'Pasolini was looking in the Third World for an alibi for his perversion'. 23s noted, in A Idade it is the revolutionary Christ who clearly bears the traces of this Oedipal impasse.In a long scene that plays with the Oedipal triangle, Christ is seduced by his mother, who asks 'Do you love me?' and, when he answers affirmatively -'I love, love, love, love'she replies, 'If you do love me, why don't you kill Brahms?'When Brahms enters the scene, he is not shocked but is instead aroused by the possibility of being killed by his son -'Bed is the true theater of power.Orgy!' he exclaims.In this contest, Rocha includes the dialogue from The Gospel that he found so problematic in Pasolini when he makes the revolutionary Christ say, 'Ah, Brahms, my father, my father […].Why did you set me apart?'.This scene casts an ironic shadow on the 'perversion' of Pasolini's Christ.At the same time, however, Rocha uses it as an apotropaic gesture, a way to dispel the patriarchy from future revolutions.
But if the Brazilian director interprets Pasolini's work and personal life as symbolizing a social and political impasse, the role of the Italian director does not end at this point.In 'Christ-Oedipus' he seems more worried about the transformation of Pasolini into a myth and martyrhe is a 'myth who makes film', 24 he writesand the loss of the heretical potential of his films.The monologue from A Idade shows the extent to which Rocha aims to turn upside down the Christian-Oedipal desire by coming back to the motives of resurrection and regeneration already present in The Gospel.The Brazilian director thus gives an unexpected twist to Barthes's sentence 'the author is dead but I desire the author, I need his figure'.Behind Pasolini as Christ-Oedipus there is, in other words, 'another' Pasolini that Rocha wants to conjure up.It is the director that combines archaic, barbaric forms of life with a utopian imagination, even when he is desperate.Rocha continues his voiceover in A Idade with these words: Over Pasolini's dead body, I thought that the Christ was a new, primitive phenomenon, in a new, very new civilization.
[…] All this ideology of love would be concentrated in Christianity, which is a beautiful religion of the African, Asian, Latin-American peoples, of the total peoples, a Christianity that doesn't happen solely inside the Catholic Church but in all religions.
'Death can be beaten', says Rocha at the end of this complex, somehow 'lysergic'as he himself puts itmonologue, and one cannot but think that everything started with Pasolini's murder.In November 1975, right after Pasolini's death, Rocha wrote an article in which he was much more entangled with a loving identification with the Italian director, entitled 'Amor de Macho' (Macho Love). 25In the opposite direction from the interview with Cahiers, Rocha hears in Pasolini's cinema the screams of the people of the Global South as a force capable of overcoming the language of men.Once again, the target of Rocha's antagonism is 'macho' love, which, based on violence and repression, had condemned Pasolini to death.This text suggests that by confronting Pasolini, Rocha progressively understands the importance of overcoming patriarchal, Oedipal love by way of a utopian love.
Certainly, A Idade does not contain scenes with a crucifixion.At the same time, the film does not solve the friction between the utopian Christ who professes a different love and the capitalist, patriarchal love of Brahms for his Christ-Oedipus.The contrast between these two types of love mirrors Rocha's contradictory relationship with Pasolini.His confrontation with the Italian director touched Rocha so deeply that Joubert-Laurencin calls it a form of 'Pasolinization'. 26The Italian director became, in other words, the mediator for addressing Rocha's difficult position as the last author of the cinema novo.

Poetry and Fragmentation of the Free Indirect Subjective in A Idade
Rocha's position in relation to Pasolini can be traced back to certain central aesthetic choices he made in A Idade.He defines the film as a 'free verse poem' in which he tried to capture a struggle between history and the 'furnace of the unconscious'. 27In this passage, one cannot but think of Pasolini's essay 'The Cinema of Poetry', 28 which Rocha knew and discussed on several occasions.From the other side, Pasolini included Rocha among those authors who made a cinema of poetry.The Brazilian proved to be less interested in Pasolini's taxonomies and more fascinated by the idea of a cinema freed from narrative restraints.In particular, when Rocha comments that the 'cinema ceases to be prose and becomes poetry', when 'the camera is no longer a simple narrator of facts but an instrument of analysis and capable of creation', 29 it is possible to hear an allusion to Pasolini's definition of the cinema of poetry as 'allowing the camera to be felt'. 30imilarly, the two directors agree that the director expresses the 'oneiric, barbaric, irregular, aggressive, visionary quality of the cinema', in this way dispelling any naturalistic imitation of reality performed by narrative, middle-class cinema. 31rom this perspective, A Idade is an example of Rocha's transgressive and poetic camera work, from the extreme use of the handheld camera and the zoom lens 32 and what Pasolini would have called an 'obsessive attachment to a detail or a gesture' 33 which decentres the actors, to the luz estourada, a well-known trait of the Cinema Novo that accentuated the contrast between figures through the use of natural lights.More difficult to trace is the presence of the 'free indirect subjective', a technique central in Pasolini's vision of the cinema of poetry that is noted in other films by Rocha. 34This stylistic strategy does not coincide with the optical 'point of view shot', which imitates the character's gaze on the world and therefore erases the presence of the medium.At the same time, it cannot overlap entirely with literary free indirect discourse.
Different from literature, where the language can be directly imitated, Pasolini argues that the director 'finds himself in the complete impossibility of effecting any naturalistic mimesis of this [the character's] language, of this hypothetical "gaze" at reality by others'. 35The result is a 'mutual contamination' between the worldview of the character and that of the author.This is why the free indirect subjective can be described as a strategy for both maintaining the centrality of the author while at the same time claiming a certain freedom of the represented reality.
A Idade pushes this immersion of the director in his characters' subjective position to a breaking point.Ismail Xavier criticized the film as suffering 'from the uncontrolled interaction between abstraction and sensuality'.The extensive use of a handheld camera, which exposes Rocha's desire to 'include all the relevant aspects of the body experience', clashes with the movement towards abstraction, 'provoking in the audience the sense of being surpassed by the events'. 36This 'explosion' of the free indirect subjective is performed intentionally by Rocha, who wants to put the audience in front of a world that transcends the author.Rocha uses particular self-reflective strategies to create friction between himself as an author who is still trying to claim control over his work and the world.
The long monologue in A Idade in which Rocha mentions Pasolini, almost his Sermon on the Mount, is an example of the 'didactic' message of the voiceover being progressively undermined.Rocha's voiceover happens while the black Christ and a black woman are walking on the edge of Lake Paranoá in Brasilia, holding up a painting of a white Christ on the cross.At the beginning of the monologue, the characters are silenced.The Brazilian director speaks in a vacuum, providing a message to the film from an outside realm.But he interrupts his monologue with pauses as if he were fighting not to lose his train of thought.Progressively, the voice of the black Christ overlaps with Rocha's, with the latter becoming increasingly hard to hear.
In the following scene, we hear Rocha again, but this time he is not outside the film but only out of the frame.He is giving instructions to the actors, trying to impose his vision on their performance.In this passage, however, the director has lost his godlike control over the film as his efforts to have the actors listen to him seem to be constantly frustrated.There is, in other words, a passage from voiceover to voice-off as Rocha loses the central position and becomes part of the scene.In other scenes, we see actors apologizing to Rocha for mistakesas in the case of the actor Maurício do Vallehim (Brahms), who hurt himself during the shootingwhile on other occasions Rocha appears only for a brief moment, almost like an extra who merges with the multitude of people around him.These moments increase the progressive abdication of the director's 'perverse' desire to control the scene. 37The result is a 'multiplication' and 'fragmentation' of the free indirect subjective into an open-ended collectivity.A similar friction continues even through the editing choices; Rocha famously refused to include conventional opening credits and 'The End' while suggesting that projectionists show the film's sixteen reels in random order.These self-reflective elements not only displace Rocha as the only author, plunging him into the mosaic he wants to portray, but also gesture towards an outside of the film, towards a 'missing people', 38 which can be only hinted at through the incompleteness of the film.

A Love Supreme: Rocha and Pasolini's Global South Poems
The displacement of the author in A Idade can be interpreted as a declaration of Rocha's failure to find a coherent structure for the film.I suggest, however, that it should be interpreted as a radical way to address the authorial 'sadistic' desire of control in the name of a new kind of love that Rocha's film should incorporate.In fact, the free indirect subjective in Pasolini's cinema has also been interpreted in terms of an encounter between desires.Paolo Desogus points out that it surfaces in particular when the author shows himself to be 'desiring the Other's desire'.This creates a lively dialectic interweaving the author's and characters' desires into a tight knot.In most of Pasolini's films the free indirect subjective is a sign of a multivocal desire, but it can also become a form of imposing voyeurism, as happens in several scenes of Salò.In Salò, the scenes that exhibit a similar interplay between the subjective point of view and the authorial gaze are the most difficult to bear.At the end of the film, the three Fascist officials watch from a window, through what look like opera glasses, as people are tortured.Through this meta-cinematic device, the officials zoom in on the bodies and out to an overview of the torture camps.The opera glasses enhance the officials' subjective desire in a way that recalls free indirect discourse. 39However, argues Desogus, these scenes express no dialectic between subjective desire, physical presence, and authorial position.Everything is fixed through the binocular machinea perverse, phallic supplement of desire.
In light of Rocha's attacks on this kind of perverted desire, A Idade can be interpreted not only as embracing the real utopian potential of Pasolini's The Gospel but also as offering a counterargument to Salò.As much as the latter relies on the inescapability of the patriarchal gaze, Rocha's film breaks this knot between the director and the characters and aims at a love that can transcend the male gaze.This idea of subversive love is particularly expressed through collective celebrations often centred around feminine figures captured in ecstatic moments: Afro-Brazilian festivals, the carnival in Rio, Umbanda rituals and the feast of Iemanjá, and Christian celebrations.The importance of these feminine figures paradoxically puts the four Christs into an ancillary position.Take, for example, the celebration of Iemanjá, the goddess of the seas in the Yoruba religion.Rocha ends Black God, White Devil with Manoel and Rosa running towards the sea, alluding to the utopian transformation of the land (sertao) into the sea.In response to criticism of his decision to make the woman fall down before reaching the sea, Rocha stated that 'women have to fall in the desert, they have to run like men and reach Heaven together'. 40As the last sequence of A Idade, the celebration of Iemanjá offers a collective ending that corrects the male-centred vision of Black God, White Devil.Furthermore, the shaky handheld camera images shot from a boat transform the multitude gathered to celebrate on the shore into an abstract expressionist painting.The collectivity becomes pure potential, a fusion of changing colours.
Such a movement beyond patriarchal desire, which aims at controlling the other's body, is what Lacan 41 would have called a 'path of love'.Seminar XX: Encore ('once more, again'), which Lacan sometimes modifies to en corps ('in the body'), stresses that the demand of love is an infinite, open request that accepts the radical incompleteness of our knowledge of the body.Feminine enjoyment thus represents a demand of love that is not-All, challenging the fantasy of completeness.It is an experience of a love that escapes assimilation and can be found among mystics and those subjects that 'can never be fully united with themselves or with the Other'. 42Not far from this position, in 'An Aesthetic of Dreams' Rocha defines mysticism as the only 'language that transcends oppression's rational structure', which defies logic by reimagining a 'community founded on a sense of limitless love among mankind'. 43Since '[t]he People' is the myth of the bourgeoisie', 44 Rocha argues, a revolutionary cinema needs to dismantle this very bourgeois logic and reinvent new forms of being together.This is why A Idade looks like a collective ritual, a series of ecstatic moments that disallows any aggregating point of view.Rocha even includes direct references to a syncretic vision of Christian mysticism, most notably in a long sequence that opens with the Amazon Queenthe Indian Christ's wifetaking her place among a group of nuns as they exit to the street, dancing with a red cloth that symbolizes the passion of Christ.Rocha uses double exposure to stress the effect of mystic ecstasy, yet unlike more obvious uses of this technique, he double exposes the same sequence from two different perspectives shot at a temporal proximity.The nuns exiting the gate of the church appear at the same time as they are dancing in the street.The effect is a split between two points of viewand between the two deferred temporalities. 45Not only time but also space are subjected to this 'mystical' approach.Thanks to the double exposure, the camera can linger on a close-up of the Amazon Queen's ecstatic expression and, at the same time, on a wide shot of the people dancing in the street (see Figure 1).There is not a rational or hierarchical separation between private and collective enjoyment since the audience embraces the two moments in a single vision.A similar challenge to logical distinction happens at the level of the sound.As the Amazon Queen begins screaming, we are left in doubt as to whether we are hearing a scream of pleasure or of pain, a corporeal reaction or the beginning of a song.When she finally articulates, she says 'Freedom'.This scene that translates the passion of Christ though the lens of a mystical, feminine enjoyment shows that such a freedom from patriarchal constraints is not only private but also collective.
It is impossible to understand Rocha's reinterpretation of Pasolini's 'cinema of poetry' without considering his challenge to and reinvention of the tight knot between director and characters into these moments of ecstatic rapture that spatially and temporally deconstruct the subjective point of view.The film's fragmented and open structure embodies the encounter between Rocha's utopian vision and a form of desire that challenges the closedness of post-capitalist desire.
Through a complicated play of mirrors, A Idade becomes ultimately a love letter to the Global South and to Pasolinior, better, to Pasolini's Global South, not just to Pasolini 'the myth who makes films' but also to his political and aesthetic mission and his authorial presence.For this reason, A Idade is also in dialogue with Pasolini's most ambitious project: Notes for a Poem on the Third World.The Italian director imagined this project as a series of films to be shot in India, Africa, the Arab countries, Latin America, and the black ghettoes of the United States.Each of these episodes is based on the premise of Pasolini coming to these areas looking for characters, locations, and ideas for a 'film to be made'.Consequently, the author becomes part of the representation, what Deleuze would call a 'mediator' of the process of collective utterance.
It is interesting to note that Rocha's initial film project, which he wanted to title O Nascimento da Terra (The Birth of the Earth) was significantly in tune with Pasolini's Notes.In an early draft, he imagines shooting the film not just in Brazil but also in Asia, Africa (he mentions Guinea-Bissau, Angola, Mozambique), and Latin America.The initial idea was linked not to The Gospel but to a rather abstract 'history of capitalism', from its expansion in the Global South to the progressive decadence of the Western empire (the United States and Europe in particular).Rocha's project matches Pasolini's Notes not only in terms of an ambitious reimagining of the Global South but also methodologically.'[T]hese episodes must be shown as fiction, but integrated through documentary footage from the press, photos and television', 46 he writes.This sentence is surprisingly similar to how Pasolini describes the Notes, where '[e]ach episode will include a story, briefly summarized through the most salient and dramatic scenes, and by preparatory sequences for the story itself (interviews, investigative reports, documentaries etc. […])'. 47ore importantly, these two projects express the friction between the author's desire to cast an interpretative shadow over the reality and the overwhelming nature of this reality, which constantly displaces them.In the two realized episodes from Pasolini's Notes -Notes Towards an African Oresteia and Notes on a Film in Indiathese contradictory elements are developed through an idea of incompleteness.Luca Caminati and Patrick Rumble argue that the work-in-progress structure (da farsi) of Pasolini's films reflects his Marxist and utopian vision.Caminati suggests a connection with Umberto Eco's theory of the 'open work' (opera aperta), which takes inspiration from Brecht's 'revolutionary pedagogy' involving a maieutic and open dialogue that could trigger the spectator's political self-awareness. 48n my view, the relation between 'open work' and the 'death of the author', who has difficulty withdrawing from a position of control, leaves space for reality as a loving flux, a love that is not-All.Both Rocha and Pasolini represented the Global South as something to be loved, not in spite of but because of its work-in-progress structure, in which the multiplicity of the details always exceeds the abstract universality.Halfway through Notes, Pasolini suggests a sudden shift from Africa by transposing the Oresteia to a jazz club in Rome.Pasolini proposes translating Cassandra's vision of the murder of Agamemnon into a jazz performance, which involves not only the black American community but also Latin America.The scene is sung by Yvonne Murray and Archie Savage, accompanied by the Argentinian saxophonist Gato Barbieri, in a piece reminiscent of John Coltrane's 1964 album A Love Supreme. 49If such a syncretic use of heterogeneous sources raises the critique of cultural appropriation, Pasolini's Notes also shows how the mosaic of the Global South is an open project, kept together by a utopian 'love supreme' for each of its parts.A Idade can consequently be considered to be more in tune with Pasolini's Notes than Rocha likely would have admitted.

Waiting for Pasolini: Death of the Author, Lives of the Extras
Daoud Aoula-Syad's 2007 film Fi Intidar Pasolini/Waiting for Pasolini offers a more ironic take on Roland Barthes's statement: 'the author is dead […] but in a certain way I desire the author: I need his figure'.The film is set in an unnamed village near Ouarzazate, the Moroccan location where Pasolini shot most of his 1966 Oedipus Rex.Lying between the High Atlas Mountains and the Sahara, the Amazigh-speaking Ouarzazate became a noted film location after Morocco's independence in 1956. 50In a town set in one of the poorest regions of Morocco, which experiences between twenty and fifty foreign film and TV productions per year, the film industry is considered the main source of income.A thousand locals may be hired to work in the film industry as extras or technicians with low-paid jobs, no long-term contracts, and no healthcare facilities. 51The documentary Ourzazate Movie (2001) by Ali Essafi, who is credited in Waiting for Pasolini for the original idea for that film, addresses the problems of the extras who live at the margins of these high-budget productions.Essafi shows the humiliation and precarious lives of the Ourzazate community, who themselves feel they are an integral part of the film system.Waiting for Pasolini took its inspiration from a scene in Essafi's documentary in which one of the extras tells the interviewer about having worked as Pasolini's bodyguard during the shooting of Edipo Re.The film begins when the news of an Italian production coming to the village convinces Thami, an older man who had a part in Pasolini's Edipo Re, that the Italian director would return.Due to his alleged friendship with Pasolini, all the people in the village rely on Thami to get them better jobs once casting begins.Thami's cheerful expectations, however, crash with the news that Pasolini is long dead.The scene is both ironic and tragic as Pasolini's death, which had occurred thirty years earlier, is recounted as if it had just happened and in a storytelling tone that projects Pasolini into the new Moroccan context: FRIEND: They stabbed him but he didn't die.So they cracked his head open, but he didn't die.Then he decided to run him over with a car […] he was unrecognizable.THAMI: But why? FRIEND: He was a communist.He was completely naked.Only a fine djellaba covered his nudity. 52spite being informed of Pasolini's death, Thami keeps reassuring his friends that Pasolini will come.From this moment on, the film enlarges its scope and describes the exploitation of the extras, who are put behind a fence and selected in a manner reminiscent of prison.Meanwhile, Thami copes with the death of his Italian friend and the lie he has told to the village.The film is a patent criticism of the white savior figure.As in A Idade, Pasolini is associated with a figure of Christor 'Zizi', as the people of the village mispronounce his name, which recalls Rocha's creolization of Christ into 'Kryzt'.However, the people are waiting for Pasolini to come back and bring not social justice but money.The words of the Berber song that functions as the soundtrack of the film leave no doubt: 'If it brings us money, we are for Socialism.And for Communism, if it brings us money.Pasolini, good man.Pasolini, good man, we want to work for you, and fill our pockets with money'.The possibility of Pasolini's second coming consequently takes a satirical turn, closer to Beckett's Waiting for Godot, to which the title alludes.The image of 'waiting' has been also used by postcolonial authors such as Dipesh Chakrabarti to criticize Western representations of Third World people as those left behind in the waiting room of history as they wait for modernity to come. 53Such an idea of belatedness, Chakrabarty argues, poses many questions for those historians who want to emancipate themselves from this one-sided narrative.Waiting for Pasolini deconstructs this imposed perspective by engaging in dialogue with a moment from Pasolini's Edipo Re, the scene in which the high priest, played by Pasolini, asks Oedipus to free the city from the plague.Waiting for Pasolini quotes this scene several times, first in a voice-off of Pasolini's character while Thami is looking at his old costumes.As Oedipus only gave the illusion of freeing Thebes from the plague but was actually the cause of it, so does Pasolini-Oedipus become a metaphor for the West that fails 'at offering a permanent solution to the problem of developing countries'. 54From this perspective, Daoud Aoulad-Syad adds a further ironic angle to Rocha's depiction of Pasolini as a 'Kryztedipo'.
This scene is quoted again, this time in a performance by Thami, who, dressed like Pasolini in Oedipus Rex, confronts the Italian troupe that is about to leave the village.Thami's disguise appears at the end of his confrontation with Pasolini's spectral presence, which starts at the beginning of the film with a long dialogue with a painting of the Italian director.The encounter with the mute image of his friend forces Thami to emancipate himself from Pasolini as the white savior.He begins his monologue: 'Why did you come back?Did you come to bother me?What am I going to tell to all these people who rely on you and who are waiting for you?' Thami proceeds to contest Pasolini's death: 'Why did you die?Could you wait a little bit? […] You had some problems.You had to stay to solve them.Do I have to stay alive in order to solve your problems?'In his monologue Thami not only exposes Pasolini's unresolved 'problems' but takes them on himself.After Pasolini's death, it is up to Thami and the people of the village to stay alive and find a way out of the exploitative chains that cinema has created under the pretense of salvation.Pasolini's authorship has lost its imposing weight and become an uncanny revenant, a bother to Thami's conscience.This confrontation also triggers a process of imitation that appears in a later scene when, during a party, Thami wears sunglasses that recall Pasolini's iconography while trying to explain what communism is.
Thami's double exposure of Pasolini's body on his own (see Figures 2-3) may also be interpreted as a variant of Homi Bhabha's concept of mimicry, in which colonial discourses force the colonized to imitate the colonizers' habits and values.Countering Frantz Fanon's assumption that these forms of imitation should be reduced to narcissistic assimilation, Bhaba argues that mimicry threatens colonial discourse by exposing the paradoxes of its own identity. 55This is certainly true for the other extras, who have been forced to recite lines in Italian or French, languages that they do not understand.This aspect, along with their wearing costumes that do not belong to their culture, give the effect of a parody of the imitated culture.But Thami's 'Pasolinization' differs from the mimicry performed by the other extras.Before his confrontation with the Italian troupe, we hear Thami's voiceover repeating in Italian the words uttered by the Pasolini character in Edipo Re, with some essential changes: 'Pasolini our teacher [maestro] we beg you to find a solution whether prompted by a God or men like us'.Thami understands the meaning of these words as he substitutes 'Pasolini' for 'Oedipus' and 'teacher' for 'king'.In an interview with Cahiers du Cinema, Pasolini explained that the words he pronounces as high priest also appear at the beginning of Sophocles' Oedipus Rex.He wanted to affirm his authorial voice over the Greek tragedy.
However, Thami's double exposure of the voices destabilizes this assumption: first, because the voice that accompanies Thami's voiceover from Edipo Re is not Pasolini's but belongs to an unnamed extra who speaks with a Sicilian accent.The use of Sicilian dialect to dub not only himself but all the actors clearly reveals Pasolini's intention of tracing a flexible cartography of the Global South, one extending to Southern Europe and all the clusters of resistance in the North.More broadly, Pasolini famously made consistent use of dubbing in order to displace any realistic approach to cinematic representation. 56As a consequence, the 'separation between the acoustic and the corporeal dimension' 57 applied to the director himself dislocates Pasolini's authorial centrality by showing that in place of a voice there is a space to be contested.Furthermore, Thami implies that such an 'authorial absence' is also an effect of Pasolini's tragic murder.After having approached the director, followed by the other extras, Thami refuses to accept Pasolini's death: You say that Pasolini is dead.I'd like to believe it.You say that he dies wearing a fine djellaba.Where is this djellaba?I was the one who gave it to him.Show it to me and I will recognize it.I will tell you something you don't want people to know.You are afraid of Pasolini because he is a communist.
The djellaba returns as the medium through which Thami can identify with Pasolini and renegotiate his role in the community.Similar to his deferred voice, the djellaba is a trace of Pasolini's lost presence, which is a reminder of Christ's shroud.By occupying the empty space left by Pasolini's departure, Thami thus succeeds in placing the extras at the centre of the film.'Without extras, there is no film', says one of Thami's friends.As Didi-Huberman writes, extras occupy the ambivalent position of being 'an accessory of humanity which serves as a framework for the role of the central heroes, the real actors in the story', the underlying canvas 'made up of faces, bodies and gestures' 58 that make the film possible.Waiting for Pasolini transforms the marginal position of the extra into an occasion to decentre the audience's blind relationship with the cinematic medium.For instance, the film reenacts some moments already shown in Ali Essafi's documentary, 59 creating a short-circuit fiction and a reality that leaves the audience suspended, questioning the 'reality' of what they are watching.Not too distant from what happens in Rocha's A Idade, in this case Pasolini's death signals the decentring of a certain political form of cinema in which the author is the exclusive, centralizing force.This is particularly effective in a scene in which Thami and other friends watch Pasolini's Oedipus Rex on a television screenevoking a similar moment in Essafi's documentary.It is once more a scene in which Pasolini plays the high priest, which Thami will later reproduce to challenge the Italian production.However, in this case, it is not Pasolini or the plot of the story that interests them but only the extras.The film has become an occasion for looking at the screen as a family album; they repeatedly freeze the film trying to recognize familiar faces, friends, and dead relatives among the extras.In their search for the community's past and by recalling private events, they contest the unidirectional plot of the film and take the place of the author.At the end of this sequence we hear Pasolini's dubbed monologue: 'Here is the maestro, here is Pasolini', says Thami, casting to the author an aura of untouchability.This moment, however, is immediately broken by one of Thami's friends, who yells: 'Stop!Stop!Here is Yamna'.When another friend replies: 'Are you still in love with her?', Pasolini's aura has been dispelled and the friends now have moved back to their lives and aspirations.The French for 'extra', figurant, recalls the root of the 'figure'; in its suggestion that the death of the author disseminates into a multiplicity of figurants who populate the film, Waiting for Pasolini reverses Barthes's sentence 'The author is dead but […] I need his figure'.More than a resurrection, Pasolini's authorial presence is ultimately conjured to predicate the extras' self-awareness and emancipation. 60

Conclusion: Haunting Voices
Both A Idade da Terra and Fi Intidar Pasolini show how Pasolini's murder reached beyond the biographical details.While the trauma of Pasolini's death has been seen as the moment of closure for a certain type of political cinema, Pasolini's presence continues to haunt later works by reopening questions left unresolved in his own films.From this perspective, Global South directors' interest in evoking Pasolini, writes Deleuze, is an elaboration of the role of 'intercessors' in Third World films: There remains the possibility of the author providing himself with 'intercessors', that is, of taking real and non-fictional characters, but putting these very characters in the condition of 'making up fiction' (fictionner), 'of making up legend' (légender), 'of story-telling' (fabuler). 61hese two films show, however, that the conjuring of Pasolini's spectre does not solve the political and aesthetic contradictions implicit in these works.Thami ventriloquizes Pasolini only to discover a constant deferral of the authorial voice; similarly, Rocha's use of Pasolini's death as an apotropaic moment gestures to the incompleteness of his own utopian politics.Quite interestingly, both films resort to voiceovers to express this ambivalent condition.Voiceover expresses the same spectral ambivalence between authorship and collective agency, presence and absence, utopia and trauma that is at the core of these films.Uttered by a person who is at the same time deprived of a referential body, the voiceover indicates the author's impossible mastery of the political reality.Both films, however, show that the voiceover gives room to the voices of those characters who have been left at the margins of the scene.
The two films displace Pasolini's death in order to address the question of an author whose disappearance can be a reason for both trauma and political transformation.They do not just mourn the Italian author, do not look for the truth behind the crime.They want to confront the unresolved problems in his authorial position and suggest that something in his project still endures.Ultimately, the transition from Pasolini's authorship to the extras and the multitudes who populate both Rocha's and Aoulad-Syad's films leads to a more fragmented and democratic concept of authorship, one in which the figures at the margin can renegotiate their condition and find their way to the centre of the film.Pasolini's voice, then, is neither entirely dispelled nor substituted; it disseminates into a plurality of voices that are both faithful and unfaithful to his legacy.
At the same time, these films end up addressing the very possibility of a political cinema as it was imagined when Pasolini was still alive.If the Italian was the last of the 'sorcerer's apprentices', as Serge Daney writes, the question of what kind of political cinema is left still remains.Thanks to their consistent use of self-reflexivity, both films not only question the author but also gesture to a reality 'outside' of the cinema, which undermines any ambition of aesthetic autonomy.In Rocha's case, A Idade's open-ended structure is a sign of resistance to patriarchal desire.The 'work-in-progress' structure of the film goes together with its obsessive repetition of images and scenes from different angles.In this way, the very idea of completion is transmuted into a play of repetition and difference.If Rocha's famous utopian image for people to come was that the land should turn into the sea, his last film seems to have incorporated the back-and-forth movement of the waves.Waiting for Pasolini, in contrast, points more literally to the world outside the film in terms of the film's production and its exploitative measures.A self-enclosed vision of the cinema is put into question with no less energy.'The cinema has arrived', scream the children when the news of a new production's arrival reaches the village.This cinema, however, is only of a certain kind: Western, exploitative of its surroundings, and with little interest in its role in the social context it is set in.By addressing the exploitation of the extras, Aoulad-Syad imagines 'another' cinema, not just in terms of a cinema that is fairer to the local community but also a cinema that encourages talent from Morocco and other underrepresented areas. 62asolini's death has thus become a way to question a certain approach to authorship and the cinema.These two films end up bringing forth an idea of 'death' that is paradoxically more faithful to Pasolini than may appear at a first sight.'Only in a moment of crisis, where death is a possibility and the outcome is uncertain', writes Pasolini in 'Unpopular Cinema', 'can one experience some form of enlightenment'. 63It is true that the enlightenment these films offer is provisional, incomplete, and sometimes contradictory.At the same time, they also show the unexpected and transformative effects that putting oneself on the 'firing line' between life and death can produce, not just in the name of a lost past but for a future that still needs to be imagined.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Figure 1 .
Figure 1.Double exposure with the nuns dancing in the street (wide shot) and the Amazon Queen (close up).A Idade da Terra, dir.by Glauber Rocha (Embrafilme, 1980) [Film Still].