Pasolini and Fassbinder: Between Cultural Tradition and Self-Destruction

The goal of Pasolini’s working was the recovery of cultural values that he contrasted with the material values of the affluent society (even if in its embryonic form) and he identified these values in those of the “folk” (even if this conception had a strong idealistic component). The other goal of Pasolini’s ambitions was the education of low people to draw on high, “classic” cultural tradition. Both filmmakers represented the “unhappy consciousness” in an affluent society. While Fassbinder changed and renovated the style and language of German film, Pasolini become an epoch-making dimension insofar as he claimed to criticize radically the development model in its social, linguistic, artistic and communication aspects. Pasolini called into question the affluent society, its myths, its illusory promises, its communicative and artistic languages. Nietzsche conceives his own thought as “untimely” or rather in opposition to his time. Fassbinder use on the one side the German literary and film tradition and on the other side the Hollywood tradition with its cliché. Fassbinder conceived his own work as a resistance against the homologation of modern society. What joins both filmmakers to each other – more than their being outsiders, more than their provocative attention to the erotic, more than their Oedipus-complex – is just their “negative” way to the production of art. Both – each one going a different but parallel way – conceived the art as an artist’s failure, that brings necessarily to a self-destruction, but trough that it makes possible to effect a radical social critique and to give to the work of art an effectual and strong expressive power.