Herculean Unproductivity in Pasolini’s La ricotta and Teorema

Abstract:This article examines the relationship between work, capitalist productivity, and the filmmaking practice of Pier Paolo Pasolini. This article examines how Pasolini’s La ricotta and Teorema represent an interruption of labor and a contestation of the disciplining mechanisms that compel workers to work. Recuperating Jean-François Lyotard’s concept of acinema, this inquiry suggests that Pasolini creates scenes that oppose the capitalist work ethic through formal techniques associated with immobility and contingency. It deploys Hannah Arendt’s concept of action and Jacques Rancière’s dissensus to describe workers’ political actions in these films as gestures where they shed their identity as workers to enjoy life as humans. The purpose of this intervention is to reframe academic debates of anticapitalism around workers’ desire not to work. Pasolini’s films give viewers images that highlight workers’ unproductive potentials, thereby giving them examples of immobile, nonwork dissensual actions, or Herculean unproductivity.