From Pasolini to Moro: Notes on two unburied corpses and Italian cinema

Abstract

This text sets out to present the cinematic representation of Pier Paolo Pasolini and Aldo Moro from the idea of the “unburied corpse”. I propose here that, due to the circumstances of their deaths, the lifeless bodies of the filmmaker and the politician do not endorse their public identity but rather overflow and unfold it. Their corpses configured an identity of ordinary man that replaced the image of the public man in the Italian collective imagination and contended to the public character the space of representation. The text recovers some proposals of The Moro Affair (L’affaire Moro, Leonardo Sciascia, 1978) to reconstruct the links between these two protagonists of the intellectual and political life of the Years of Lead. I also analyze the way in which Italian cinema has attempted to interpret the split figures of Moro and Pasolini and their unburied corpses.