Caesura and Binocular Vision in Pasolini's Pigsty

Pigsty [Porcile] (Italy/France, )1 is the third film in a group of four that is referred to as the ‘mythical cycle’ in Pier Paolo Pasolini's filmic oeuvre.2 The four films of the cycle reflect a preoccupation with the survival of a mythical or mythicized past. The Oedipus myth, for example, is interpreted in the cycle's first work, Oedipus Rex, and recurs in Pigsty, even if in a significantly different form. Pigsty's treatment of the emergence of the Oedipus situation for its main protagonist will be the focus of this article. The film has previously been considered to make references to Freud's case of the Wolf Man (Viano, 1993), but I intend to show that Pigsty can also enter into fruitful dialogue with the work of Melanie Klein, and the work of Wilfred Bion.

Pigsty is composed of two intertwined narratives. One of the narratives occurs some time during the late 1960s in a palatial mansion located in Germany, where a young man named Julian (Jean-Pierre Léaud) lives, largely indifferent to his parents and their business, and to his girlfriend Ida (Anne Wiazemsky) who occasionally visits. Throughout a considerable length of the film - while other events take place in the mansion and in the other setting - Julian is seen in his bedroom, to which he has retreated, and in which he lies immobile and silent, with his eyes open. The other narrative follows another young man (Pierre Clémenti) wandering in a volcanic landscape, in the surroundings of what appears to be a medieval village. In my view, some of the events taking place in these two parallel narratives and the way they come together as a whole can be understood through the reading of one of Bion's early articles, entitled The imaginary twin (Bion, 1950). Here Bion further develops his concept of ‘binocular vision’ as a process of unisensual investigation aimed at reality testing, in connection with his consideration of the emergence of the oedipal conflict. In Pigsty, Julian's