Utopians And Nihilists

Download or read book Pasolini, Fassbinder and Europe written by Fabio Vighi and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2010-08-11 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The present collection of essays brings into dialogue Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922–1975) and Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1945–1982) by comparing their cultural and intellectual legacy. Pasolini and Fassbinder are amongst the last radical filmmakers to have emerged in Europe. Born in Italy and Germany, they inherited a traumatic social and political past which is reflected in their works through a number of similarly articulated and unresolved tensions: high and popular cultures, theatre, literature and cinema, ideology and narration, major and minor codes of expression. The essays in this book examine the uncompromising character of Pasolini’s and Fassbinder’s films. Constantly oscillating between utopia and nihilism, these works invite us to reconsider subjective and collective questions which from today’s perspective seem lost forever.