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1981
Volume 12, Issue 4
  • ISSN: 2047-7368
  • E-ISSN: 2047-7376

Abstract

As a pervasive term in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s work, ‘nostalgia’ remains theoretically enigmatic and often politically contradictory. This article argues for the critical potential of nostalgia in Pasolini’s political aesthetics through a seemingly unlikely subject: his 1968 film and novel (). Set in post-war Milan, depicts the transformative encounter between a godlike visitor and five archetypes of the bourgeois household. After he leaves, they must reckon with his departure. I suggest that Pasolini’s formal and theoretical interest in nostalgia is crucial to understanding ’s aesthetic invocation of the sacred, which the film stages through an interplay of presence and absence in bodies, spaces and temporalities. Unpacking the etymological roots (‘pain’) and (‘return’), my reading forges intertextual connections within Pasolini’s oeuvre while also suggesting that Pasolini’s oblique, materially rooted nostalgia encourages a re-evaluation of the critical productivity of this term more broadly.

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2024-10-17
2026-04-12

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/content/journals/10.1386/jicms_00283_1
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  • Article Type: Article
Keyword(s): aesthetic politics; art cinema; corporeality and the body; media theory; myth and modernity; nostos and return; post-secularism; presentification

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