One step forward, two steps back (under the shadow of Thanatos)


Pasolini against the notion of an avant-garde who leave behind the terrain of the many - and the blurred lines of transgression and instituted power - for that of the "few" behind vacated enemy lines:

"What is important is not the moment of the realization of invention, but the moment of invention. Permanent invention; continual struggle. Whoever has cross over the line on which combat occurs has nothing more to risk. One of the recent "underground" films, presented to the "few," that of Bussotti ("Rara"), is, for example, a film which does not offer its author any possibility of demonstrative martyrdom. The transgressions of the film do not take place on the barricades, but in the enemy hinterland, within the concentration camp, where everything is transgression, and the enemy has disappeared: he is fighting elsewhere.

It is therefore necessary (in extremist terms or not) to compel oneself not to go too far forward, to break off the victorious rush toward martyrdom, and to go continuously backwards, to the firing line; only in the instant of combat (that is, of invention enforcing one's freedom to die in the teeth of self-preservation), only in the instant when one is face to face with the rule to be broken and Mars is ancipital, under the shadow of Thanatos, can one touch the revelation of truth, of the totality, or in short, of something concrete."

- Pasolini, "The Unpopular Cinema"

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