A Filmmaker in His Library: The Circulation of Ideas in Pasolini's "Impure" Work

Abstract

In his 1952 essay “For an Impure Cinema: In Defense of Adaptation,” André Bazin defended cinema’s “impurity” as a necessary element in the medium’s formal evolution and technical development. The Italian writer, filmmaker, and essayist Pier Paolo Pasolini based his own artistic method on the tension among the distinct artistic languages that characterizes Bazin’s “impure cinema,” thereby situating his work in his “library-laboratory,” a space where ideas circulate beyond their disciplinary fields. In keeping with Bazin’s essay, this article illuminates how Pasolini turned his library into a toolbox and blurred the boundaries between mediums of creation and categories of theoretical thought.