The cinema was an explosion of my love for reality.
Pier Paolo Pasolini B: 1922 / N: Italian

The films of Italian polymath Pier Paolo Pasolini demonstrate that the term 'reality' can be subject to multiple definitions. The concept of his 1964 film The Gospel According to St Matthew was to present the life of Christ as terse realism rather than romantic fantasy. What if Jesus were a real person, and his miracles mere humdrum acts administered at random? Pasolini started out working in the neorealist vein popular in postwar Italy, and his 1961 debut feature, Accattone, remains one of the finest examples of this influential movement interested primarily in the life of the common man. His casting of non-professional actors and his fulsome embrace of life's squalid underbelly would remain with him until the last. All of his films, whether set in the past or adaptations of bawdy medieval stories Bocaccio's The Decameron, Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales), speak to contemporary mores. He is a filmmaker with a thrilling sense of purpose and urgency. Prior to his brutal, unsolved murder in 1975, Pasolini directed Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom, a loose adaptation of the eighteenth-century novel by the Marquis de Sade. It is one of the most punishing and difficult films ever made, detailing a procession of violent acts and sexual humiliation inflicted on a group of teenagers by four wealthy middle-aged men. Salò deals in the reality of degradation, as Pasolini remains unflinching in his belief that witnessing these horrors is the only way to truly comprehend the reality of fascism.