Television, Neo-Capitalism, and Modernity: Pasolini on TV

In this chapter I discuss the role of Pier Paolo Pasolini both as a TV critic and a TV character. As is widely known, Pasolini’s disapproval of the widespread consumer society in post-war Italy emerged from a lengthy discussion of the role of Italian television as a symbol of so-called “cultural genocide.” Though this point was widely discussed in Italian historiography at the time, such analysis focused only on the initial remarks by Pasolini on early Italian television (1954– 61), in interviews that were published in magazines and shown on T V. The aim of this paper is to define Pasolini’s “organic” thoughts on television, and to compare this intellectual assertiveness with traces of his own presence, whether physical or symbolic, on Italian television between 1954 and his death in 1975. Following a brief explanation of the historical context—in terms of the cultural relationships between Italian intellectuals and public service broadcasting—I pursue this aim using both audiovisual sources (preserved by the Teche RAI archive) and a set of comments by Pasolini and others that were used to orient a debate on early TV in the Italian communist periodical Vie Nuove between the end of the 1950s and the start of the 1960s.