Julian Cole | Ostia / 1988

what is this thing called love?

by Douglas Messerli

 

Julian Cole (screenwriter and director) Ostia / 1988

 

There’s never been a short film (of only 26 minutes) quite like Julian Cole’s 1987 faux documentary of the death of the great Italian filmmaker, poet, and theorist Pier Paolo Pasolini.

    First of all, though it is based on some factual evidence, it presents its own theory of how the young boy Pino Pelosi (David Dipnall) might have been involved with others in the killing of Pasolini, a man not only reviled for being homosexual in an often homophobic society and well-known for his late-night sexual activities with boys, but hated by the Italian rightists for his Communist-leaning political ideology.

    Secondly, the film makes absolutely no attempt to be authentic in terms of its locale, relocating Ostia, the port city of ancient Rome to London and its suburbs.

    Finally, there is no film I am aware of where a major filmmaker, in this case British director Derek Jarman, gives testament to another great 20th century filmmaker through performing him in a film presentation. The closest one might get to such a noted actor playing a renowned figure is perhaps Orson Welles’ enactment of William Randolph Hearst. But that was mostly a negative and gigantically outsized representation, while Jarman’s is a positive and loving, even if painful presentation a man tormented by the recognition that he and his generation have been, in part, responsible for making the young very young street monsters who mindlessly seek out wealth, fiends who he finds so beautiful and desirable that he wants to engage them in sex.

    This rather admirable portrait of Pasolini, recognizes that in that his very engagement with the youth of the day—who imagine they are survivors but may be actually, as Pasolini wonders of the young Pelosi, gasping for their very last breath—are a danger to his own survival. But, obviously, in his philosophical approach to a sado-masochistic world, that is the very appeal of taking such chances, of picking up street boys who are well aware that their very rough and cold exteriors, their uncouth behavior and rude manners are precisely what make the refined intelligentsia like Pasolini so attracted to them.

    This film was made just after Jarman himself discovered that he was HIV-positive and shot during the same period when he and Tilda Swinton her collaborating on his screed against the end of English culture and the mean politics of Margaret Thatcher, The Last of England.

    Yet for all that, Jarman’s performance of Pasolini represents a rather complex layering of intellectual and sexual inquisitiveness, a laid-back sense of humor for the sequence of events that lead him to pick-up Pelosi and engage him in sex which he quickly realizes has become an act of violence, and, finally, a strong sense of cultural exhaustion and a resultant decadence—not so dissimilar to the way many of us today face the daily dictates of Trump or even the way so many intellectual Germans must have perceived Hitler in the late 1930s. Pasolini’s own informing model, clearly, is the fascist rise of Mussolini about whom Pasolini had filmed his dreadful testament in Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom, made the very year of his murder at 53 in 1975, referenced in the film by posters seen in Cole’s film behind the bevy of rent boys he briefly encounters before, soon after, picking up Pelosi.

    That truly remarkable scene—just before he picks up Pino Pelosi, accordingly to this version, right after having been tortured to help in the killing—wherein Jarman/Pasolini drives through a London pick-up spot for gay street boys, reveals youth who not only perform brief enactments of what they have to offer, pull down their zippers to let their cocks hang out, plant kisses on the windows of the passing cars, but mock their own sexual come-ons, turning the whole “come-and-get-me” affair into almost a drag travesty, truly transforming what might have otherwise been a simple lean against the wall to advertise their availability, into an absurd performance that was so appropriate to the period that produced what Ronald Tavel called “The Theatre of the Ridiculous,” a time in which, as he described it, “We have passed beyond the absurd: our position is absolutely preposterous.”

    Some of what I presume are younger commentators observe that this scene was so ahead of its time; while I would argue it was simply very much of its hour.* These things really happened, making this short work also a rather remarkable document of the period. Would that all student films were as was as brilliant as Julian Cole’s.

 

*I still recall almost a full two decades before this, in 1969, when I arrived in New York City and was temporarily living in the Sloane House YMCA, one slightly older and wiser queen telling me, “Honey, you go to some streets the boys not only will let you know that they’re fully available to fulfill your desires, they show you what you desire.”

 

Los Angeles, November 29, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (November 2025).