Motherhood and myth: Female figures in the cinema of Pier Paolo Pasolini

This dissertation examines the roles and trajectories that Pasolini assigned to women in his cinematic production. The first chapter is based on biographical information including the importance of the author's "native" lands of Bologna and Casarsa della Delizia in Friuli. In this introduction I discuss not only the fundamental role of the rural setting, education, family life, and World War II, but also the various female figures in the artist's life--colleagues and companions--each influential upon his view of women. After disclosing Pasolini's perception of women at a personal level, I incorporate essential elements of feminist theory based on the work of Teresa De Lauretis and Laura Mulvey regarding gender and the cinematic gaze. My intention is to demonstrate how he created an image of Woman, mythic yet socially real, with the very codes that feminist criticism has striven to deconstruct or eliminate.The second pair of films characterize, instead, the female figures from Pasolini's "cinema of myth." In these remakes of Oedipus Rex and Medea mother/female figure gains subject status within the male narrative itinerary. Pertinent to these chapters are Freudian, Jungian, and Lacanian psychoanalytic theories, as well as Mircea Eliade's Storia delle religioni and Il sacro e il profano. My intent is to show how Woman is the Spiritual Other within the author. She is the "difference" that he contends with, but also the requisite Otherness that makes him whole.In the conclusion I return to the author's own mother by identifying her as the keystone to the "female" discourse throughout Pasolini's opera. Thus, I effect the "promised return" that Pasolini repeatedly alluded to: the experience of life's cycle in full, including death, and a return to the vital source--the maternal font or metaphoric womb.Chapters two through five treat four of Pasolini's films in particular. I examine the women, mothers and prostitutes, who love at the margins of society, representing their exclusion from the progression of history. In a discussion of structuralism and kinship relations I refer to the theories of Freud and Levi-Strauss to explain why women are relegated to certain traditionaal roles that found all communal relations upon which, in turn, all reality is built.