Before going to Rome, I made up my mind to see the suburban Ostia Beach, a place that foreign short-term tourists don't likely to go. I don't know anything about that place, only that Pierre Paul Pasolini died there. It was a coincidence that I met Pasolini. In his twenties, he was still peeking into the doorways of art films like a curiosity, and saw that Pasolini only knew that he was the guy who made "120 Days of Sodom", and later knew that he was the guy who made "Decameron", "Canterbury Storybook" and "One Thousand and One Nights", a guy with heavy tastes. Later, when I saw the intimidating "Mother Roman" and "Matthew Gospel", I had begun to be infatuated with Antonioni and Fellini, so I did not have special feelings for this poet, former Communist Party member, and homosexual.
Why I must go to see the place where he was killed, in fact, this mood is not clear to even myself. It is vaguely as if the magic of the movie comes from illusion, and we must go beyond the screen to the place where it really exists, and then we can really settle down in our hearts.
On November 2, 1975, pasolini's body was found brutally beaten and crushed with a car in the desolate area of Ostia Beach, and a 17-year-old male prostitute was identified as the murderer and arrested. In 1993, in "Dear Diary", another Leftist Italian director, the motorcycle rider Nannie Moretti, rode the Vespa through the streets of Rome to commemorate him.
On July 8, 2011, I came here in a car for two hours from the center of Rome and saw a desert. Say hello on the Internet beforehand on the way to the beach from the city of Rome, and on that sweltering afternoon, take the M subway to the U line train.
The carriages of the U-Line train were dirty and hot, and the cars became more and more deserted, and the well-dressed passengers gradually got off the train and replaced them with expressionless working people and unemployed people. The atmosphere in the carriage gradually changed subtly, and the coldness and uneasiness floating out of the air coincided with the mood of visiting the destination where the death had died. The railway was coming to an end, and the scene outside the window began to slowly show signs of the sea, and then I found that the names of the last few stops were somewhat related to Ostia, so I got off at a certain station with the mentality of walking around casually.
Walking out of the station only to find that it was not a beach, but a small town, walking down the street for a quarter of an hour, already thirsty and hungry by the sun, ordering a cup of coffee and a plate of pasta in a kind little shop. The mood was no longer so tense, and I decided that it didn't matter if I couldn't find the real beach, so I got back on the train going forward.
After sitting two more stops and jumping off the platform, I seemed to be able to smell the sea. Straight out of the platform is an empty wasteland. On this side of the road—cheap buildings, desolate parking lots, low, ugly plants growing in open spaces, surrounded by barbed wire, an unattended motorhome parked alone in a clearing, as if it had not been far away for a long time; across a highway, on the other side of the road—sunbathing, beach volleyball, leisurely people playing in the sea, endless blue sea and blue sky. You can imagine that there is a highway across the road, but it is actually separated by two classes.
On this side of the road, that unexpected sense of desolation, fits my imagination of "the place where Pasolini was killed." Although the beach of Ostia stretches endlessly, and the place where the woman who went to buy vegetables that morning found Pasolini's body cannot be found, it seems in my heart that I have found the real place--although it is not at night, but under the hot sun, this terrible sight gives me a sense of "confirmation" satisfaction.
Walking around Ostia Beach, because there is no big tree shade, the road is constantly exposed, and even the foot is almost hot. But I was drawn to the bleak landscape in front of me, looking closely at crooked street signs, scrawled buildings, and quirky and prickly plants. In contrast, local vacationers basking in the sun on the beach, that kind of leisurely time, seems lifeless.
I wasn't ready to stay here much longer, took a few photos of places that no one wanted to take care of, and prepared to leave the beach. It was at this time that a young couple walked into the beach and sat down to watch the sea. They had their backs to me, standing on the side of the road looking down at their backs through the railings, their young flesh shining in the sun, suddenly touching.
That's pretty bad For Pasolini, right? I do not know. In short, after going to Ostia Beach, it seems that a point in the space-time coordinate system has been removed in my mind, the place where Pasolini was killed, the dark place that was once imagined in my mind, and become a photo exposed to light. The photo is still there, but the scene is gone. After some time back in China, I washed out the photos I took on the beach that day, and saw the backs of the pair of young boys and girls appear on the photo paper, and I felt like a flower suddenly bloomed on rotten land.