Pier paolo pasolini was many things: a celebrated novelist, a playwright, a successful poet, a journalist, an actor and a political commentator. He was a public intellectual who loved playing and watching football, calling it “the last sacred ritual of our time”. He was a communist and an openly gay man who made a magnificent film about Jesus Christ. Yet his reputation, especially outside Italy, has been marked by his final controversial film and overshadowed by his murder. His surname has not been turned into an approving adjective in the way that of his contemporary, Federico Fellini, has. On the centenary of his birth, it is worth asking: what would “Pasolinian” describe?

It would not refer only to his films, for a start, as Pasolini worked as a director for a relatively short period—a mere 14 years. Poetry was his first love. He was born in Bologna and moved often during his childhood; it was in poetry that a young Pier Paolo found a way of anchoring his wandering existence. He completed his first collection at the age of 18 but it was only in his 30s that Pasolini established himself as a literary figure, with his novels “Ragazzi di vita” (“The Ragazzi”, 1955) and “Una vita violenta” (“A Violent Life”, 1959). In these tales of street life in the slums of Rome, he carved out a distinctive voice and style of straightforward, sometimes grim, realism.

Although they sold well, his books were attacked by both the political right—who attempted to censor them—and the left, who disliked the fact that the working-class characters weren’t depicted in a more positive light. (Such criticism was to be a constant throughout his career. Pasolini was that rare thing: a public intellectual who was loved more by the public than by other intellectuals.)

Fellini asked Pasolini to refine the dialogue of “Le Notti di Cabiria” (“Nights of Cabiria”, 1957) and Pasolini would soon go on to write and direct his own film, “Accattone” (“Beggar”, 1961). Along with “Mamma Roma” (1962), “Accattone” was a continuation of his attempt to portray the lives of the lumpenproletariat without straying into romanticism. Since he had already provoked the ire of the authorities, it was an audacious move indeed to choose as his next subject the life of Jesus, but “Il vangelo secondo Matteo” (“The Gospel According to St Matthew”, 1964) is one of the few biblically inspired films to rank as a masterpiece. It is surprisingly reverential, too. At its premiere at the Venice Film Festival a large section of the audience had arrived prepared to boo; at the end of the film they gave the director a standing ovation.

Despite his reputation as a critic of his country—and particularly what he saw as a lamentable bourgeois sensibility—Pasolini was no ideologue. His provocations were not fuelled by an adolescent need to shock. “I am not interested in deconsecrating,” he said. “This is a fashion I hate, it is petit-bourgeois. I want to reconsecrate things as much as possible, I want to re-mythicise them.” This urge to re-mythicise can be most clearly seen in his celebrated cycle of three literary adaptations, all set in the Middle Ages: “Il Decameron”, (“The Decameron”, 1971), “I racconti di Canterbury” (“The Canterbury Tales”, 1972) and “Il fiore delle mille e una notte” (“The Arabian Nights”, 1974). This “Trilogy of Life” celebrated the characters’ fight for freedom against the authorities of their respective ages; each film included plenty of ribald and slapstick humour.

The films were a popular success in Italy, but the director himself was appalled by the wave of semi-pornographic, or fully pornographic, imitations that were subsequently released in cinemas. His celebration of sex, nudity and the body had been turned into cheap exploitation, a commodification which was part of the consumerism he spent years railing against in newspaper articles and on television. Motivated and inspired by this anger, he embarked on a new series, to be called the “Trilogy of Death”. He began with the film that was to be his most notorious and most controversial, as well as his last. He was murdered three weeks before “Salò o le 120 giornate di Sodoma” (“Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom”, 1975) had its premiere.

“Salò” is one of cinema’s most gruelling experiences. Pasolini took the material of the Marquis de Sade’s infamous novel of 1785 and set the plot during the Italian Social Republic, set up by the Germans following the King of Italy’s surrender to the Allies. A quartet of eminent men round up a group of teenagers in a villa and subject them to rape, torture and violent death. Much of the two-hour running time is an affront to the viewer; the film-maker subjects them to some of the most nauseating images ever filmed. Yet it inspired directors as diverse as Rainer Werner Fassbinder, John Waters and Gaspar Noé.

The darkness that surrounded Pasolini’s death and seeps from “Salò” does not represent his oeuvre; instead, a work that is “Pasolinian” brings things to the light. Those things are often violence, corruption and hypocrisy, sexuality and the body and people on the margins of society. Pasolini embraced life in its rudeness and appreciated its more ridiculous aspects. He criticised and celebrated ideas with little regard for censors or ideological pieties. That attitude might be lauded were he alive today. ■