Panoptizmas distopiniame kine: žmogaus ir Dievo žvilgsniai Piero Paolo Pasolini filme „Teorema“
Panopticism in Dystopian Film: The Sights of Man and God in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Teorema

Summary/Abstract: Throughout time, humanity has concerned itself with utopias and dystopias. There are traces of them in religions, in philosophy and in literature. The art of cinema cannot elude utopian and dystopian narratives either. The article discusses Pier Paolo Pasolini’s film Teorema, which depicts a dystopian world, in terms of panopti- cism and an asymmetry of gaze. It focuses on the significance of the distinction close / distant for utopia and dystopia, arguing that dystopia can be regarded as a utopia that has lost its distant. It is further argued that panopticism, elements of which can already be found in religious utopias, is equally inherent in both utopia and dystopia. The birth of the disciplinary society in the 17–18th centuries, as described by Michel Foucault, can be traced to the process of secularisation, which saw the transference of the powers of panopticism, hitherto characteristic of the sphere of religion and God, to the earthly sphere, which allowed man to become the principle of its own enslavement. It is when humans no longer feel the presence of the beyond that they start to feel the look of the human observer that seems constantly directed at them. In contradistinction to God’s sight, the function of the human look in the process of the establishment of subjectivity consists in closing the openness of becoming and offering the idea of a steady and unchangeable identity. This brings us to the topic of Pasolini’s film Teorema. Teorema addresses the question of how it is possible to escape the cul-de-sac of the finite identities and materialistic values imposed by the bourgeois dystopia. Even though the film itself presents us with a dystopia, it is argued that it has a utopian potential. Thus, the ending of the film lends itself to an interpretation in terms of a promise of salvation for humanity. It is further argued that Pasolini’s film presents the spectator with an experiment, the trajectory of which suggests the possibility of turning a dystopia into a utopia by restoring sanctity, which is utopia’s absolute distant.

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