Pier Paolo Pasolini

Pier Paolo Pasolini was born 5 March 1922, a poet and openly gay man who embraced Marxism after World War II and began excoriating what he saw as the consumerist rot eating Italian culture from within. He brought that fury to film: The Gospel According to St. Matthew in 1964, then the Trilogy of Life — The Decameron, The Canterbury Tales, Arabian Nights — juxtaposing folklore with graphic sexuality. His final work, Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom, remains one of cinema's most unsparing examinations of power and degradation. On 2 November 1975, he was abducted, tortured, and killed at Ostia; rec…