Conference - Pasolini and Fassbinder: the European legacy between utopia and nihilism

Date: 25-26 April 2009
Location: Council Chamber, Main Building, Park Place, Cardiff University

Organised by: Dr Fabio Vighi and Prof Alexis Nuselovici

In an age when Europe is increasingly perceived as an administrative and bureaucratic machine unable to inspire socio-political passion, it is perhaps time to bring back Walter Benjamin’s reflections on Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus: what if it is only by directing our gaze to the ruins of the past that we might be able to think the New? What if, more precisely, we can imagine a truly alternative vision of Europe only by redeeming the utopian spark betrayed by key events in Europe’s recent past?

Pasolini and Fassbinder are amongst the last radical authors to have emerged in Europe. Born in Italy and Germany, they inherited a traumatic social and political past which they chose to address either directly or via different topics related to the cultural memory of Europe. The link between law and violence – a quintessential Western quandary that has haunted European philosophy since Antigone – is, for instance, a central preoccupation in their works, illustrating what Georg Simmel called “the tragedy of culture”. This tragic dimension is reflected in their aesthetics 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 uncompromising character of Pasolini’s and Fassbinder’s works, fluctuating between utopia and nihilism (but also tradition and revolution, mythology and realism) encourages us to reconsider subjective and collective questions which from today’s perspective seem lost forever. These questions are often unconsciously embedded in their films and require critical interventions aimed at locating them against the grain of conventional criticism. To only look at these questions in the context of the sixties’ and seventies’ and their climate of revolt misses the scope of the two authors’ creative undertakings.
 
The cinemas of Pasolini and Fassbinder present a number of common features that, in their comparative capacity, have generally been neglected by commentators. Their works can be analysed according to a number of themes, such as class, sexuality, race, religion, anarchy, nationalism, etc. Our conference aims to focus on these themes, unravelling their potential to speak for a European identity to come. We believe that the comparison of Pasolini’s and Fassbinder’s cinemas might provoke us into asking difficult yet pressing questions such as ‘What is the European culture today?’ or ‘What does it mean to be European?’