In 1975, Pier Paolo Pasolini -- philologist, film maker, poet, novelist and political essayist -- was murdered on a wintry beach near Rome by a teen-age hustler with unknown accomplices. Throughout his fervidly productive career, Pasolini had courted contradiction. He was an open homosexual who deplored sexual permissiveness, divorce and the legalization of abortion; a radical who despised the student protesters of 1968; a Marxist who elegized rural tradition and believed that ''internationalism'' equaled cultural genocide; a professed nonbeliever who -- in films like ''Teorema'' and ''The Gospel According to St. Matthew'' -- produced very powerful religious art. At the time of his still unsolved murder, Pasolini was under siege from both left and right as a gadfly, a self-deluded messiah.
Pasolini has aged better than his critics. Today he is acknowledged as one of the great firebrand prophets of 20th-century European culture. International festivals are devoted to his movies; his analysis of the rottenness of Italian politics and the resurgence of Fascism in Europe appears ever more prescient; even his demands that the Christian Democrats, among others in Italy, be put in the dock have been realized. In 1993 Giulio Andreotti (the former Prime Minister, now on trial for consorting with the Mafia) confessed, as a Corriere della Sera headline put it: ''Pasolini was right!''
Pasolini's life was stamped with the same obstinate originality as his work. Born in Bologna in 1922, the son of a Fascist army officer and a Friulian schoolteacher, at 20 Pasolini published his first book of poems in a Friulian dialect very much of his own concoction. After two decades of the Fascist project of ''Italianization,'' this young poet's decision to launch his career in dialect stood as a provocatively countercultural profession of faith. Having made his name as a poet and scholar of ''regionalism,'' Pasolini -- now transplanted to Rome -- won overnight fame for his novels and films of the 1960's; they documented in street dialect the forgotten, violent underworld of prostitutes, pimps and petty pickpockets living in Rome's outlying projects. It is part of Pasolini's humanistic mission that much as he reworked the Christian Gospels and Greek tragedies in contemporary Calabria, Tanzania or Yemen -- landscapes where ancient rites were still intact -- so in his novels and in films like ''Mamma Roma'' and ''Accattone,'' he sought to show Jesus or Mary Magdalen in the faces of broken hoodlums.