Benedikt Reichenbach, Pasolini’s bodies and places, 2018

In 1980 in Rome, a small cooperative around film critics Michele Mancini and Giuseppe Perrella produced a 600-page book of black-and-white photographs entitled Pier Paolo Pasolini: Corpi e Luoghi, dedicated to the work of Italian director, poet and writer Pier Paolo Pasolini. With its relentless and playful classification of some 2,000 film stills arranged under the categories “bodies” and “places”, quotation here is understood as a form of “appropriation”, as a practical use of an archive. In keeping with the great filmmaker’s credo, Pier Paolo Pasolini: Corpi e Luoghi is a colossal attempt to take this enormous amount of material, in book form, where it wants to go. Pasolini’s Bodies and Places is a new quasi-facsimiled edition in English. Mancini and Perrella introduce their compilation of quoted images with a compilation of texts by Pasolini where he describes his own research of bodies and places for his films.