Abstract:Pier Paolo Pasolini's most famous piece of film theory is "The Cinema of Poetry" (1965), in which he revives (consciously?) a distinction made almost forty years earlier by Viktor Shklovsky between a ...Pier Paolo Pasolini's most famous piece of film theory is "The Cinema of Poetry" (1965), in which he revives (consciously?) a distinction made almost forty years earlier by Viktor Shklovsky between a prosaic cinema and a poetic one.According to Shklovsky, "[in] its plot construction, its semantic composition, a prose work is based primarily on a combina- tion of everyday situations," while "in a poetic film the technical- formal features predominate over the semantic features."^Similarly,Pasolini defines the cinema of prose as the cinema of classical narrative, which is based on a repression of the cinema's poetic qualities.With the establishment of the conventions of the cinematic prose narrative, the cinema's "irrational, oneiric, elementary, and barbarie elements were forced below the level of consciousness."Pasolini identifies cinema with dreams and memory because both are based on the signification of images.This identification places the poetic cinema closer to the primary process than the cinema of prose.Plot becomes a form of secondary revision, turning cinema into a "gente of escapist performance, with a number of consumers unimaginable for ali other forms of expression."^Thus the cinema of the prose narrative is a deformation of the true cinema, the cinema of poetry, a deformation caused by the consumerism that Pasolini saw ali around him and which he hated for its ability to degrade everything it touched.However, just as psychic repression never destroys the repressed content, so too "the fundamentally irrational nature of cinema cannot be eliminated."^Pasolinifinds moments of poetry evenRead More