————————————————————————— [...] Pasolini's impossible desire -- to seize the world directly without the mediating screen always implicit in artistic creation -- is clearly part of a long poetic tradition that may have reached its apogee in the symbolist poets he so loved. In one famous poem, Rimbaud speaks of "seizing" the dawn, while the extraordinarily hermetic Mallarmé, who dreamed of turning the world into a "book," wanted the very sounds of words to evoke, to correspond with, meaning. The symbolist quest could almost be seen as a hermetic echo of primitive man's refusal to separate words and things, a refusal that evoked lyrical praise from Pasolini, who described it thus: "Magical formula, prayer, and miraculous identification with the thing pointed to." —Naomi Greene, Pier Paolo Pasolini: Cinema as Heresy