Animals and animality in pasolini’s films: La ricotta and Uccellaci e uccellini

Sažetak

This paper is concerned with the various manifestations of animals, the animalesque and animality, using as a background platform two films by the Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini. The texts of French philosophers Henri Bergson and Jacques Derrida constitute the theoretical framework for the aforementioned re­search. According to the philosophical concepts of the said phi­losophers, laughter and habitus are percieved as features which primarily differenciate ʻhumansʼ from ʻanimalsʼ.

Furthermore, in the analyzed films La ricotta (I, 1963), and Uccellacci e uccellini (I, 1966), Pier Paolo Pasolini uses diffe­rent modes of fictional animal representations, such as metap­hors, symbols or allegories, as well as parables, recurring in the above-mentioned philosophers. He also anticipates the more modern, present-day concepts of Georges Didi-Huberman. The hypothesis behind the guiding logic of this paper is that in the films analyzed, animals stand for the human condition in diffe­rent ways.