Declinations of presence

A possible meeting between Pasolini, De Martino and theatrical research

Abstract

Pier Paolo Pasolini theorizes how cinema is semiologically configured as the «written language of reality», or rather, the film speaks through the «presence» of what constitutes reality itself. The concept of presence is a theoretical dimension pertaining to the theatre, an area where gradations can be identified culminating in what Erika Fischer-Lichte defines as the «radical concept of presence». On the anthropological side, it’s Ernesto De Martino who analyzes the presence, identifying it as the way of being in the world as a culture producing subject. By creating a short circuit between these declinations, this essay attempts to see how – in a moment of crisis like that one of the 1960s – personalities such as the protagonists of theatrical research and Pasolini have focused their attention on presence as an instrument of knowledge of reality: aesthetic vehicle through which to resist the end of a world whose values are irremediably changing.