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Colleen Ryan-Scheutz, Sex, the Self, and the Sacred. Women in the Cinema of Pier Paolo Pasolini.

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Colleen Ryan-Scheutz, Sex, the Self, and the Sacred. Women in the Cinema of Pier Paolo Pasolini. Toronto: Toronto UP, 2007.

This is the first extended study of female character in Pasolini's cinema. The author states in the Introduction that her intent is to explore the concepts of innocence and authenticity present in the films' female characters, qualities that stand in diametrical opposition to the desecration of the modern bourgeois, neo-capitalist and patriarchal culture. The topic is to be viewed through the prism of the director's selfhood and bourgeois identity and "the fundamental gender divide that influenced his individuation as a child and his subsequent development as artist and intellectual" (9-10). Thus Pasolini's political and sociological concerns are folded into his view of art as a means for reaffirming the self: "Each of Pasolini's films has at least one female character who embodies the connecting point between marginalized political subjects and the author's personal desires" (10). The concise biographical and historical introduction gives special attention to the political tumult of the 1950s and 1960s, and to Pasolini's career-long defense of innocence and authenticity, as present in the "vitality" of the child, the female, the subaltern, the third-world, the oppressed. Ryan-Scheutz also details the scholarship that assisted her in the study, a range of critics she draws on throughout the book, integrating them into an argument that is original, accessible and intellectually provocative.

Chapter 1, "Susanna Pasolini and the Female Universe," offers an overview of Pasolini's roots, his deep love of his mother, and the progression of events that led him to incorporate the woman as Other into the aesthetic and ideological matrix of his films. A synopsis of the biography and the historical events that surrounded the director's work in cinema from Accattone (1961) to Salo (1975) frames the central role played by females. While the focus is on cinematic fiction, the author does dedicate a few pages to Comizi d'amore, a...

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