Summary

Pier Paolo Pasolini's cinematographic thesis is based on the idea that reality is not natural, but cultural. Thus cinema reveals it, making us aware of the fact that we do not act upon reality but live inside of it, as if reality was a continuous system of signs of which we are part of. The revision, in the United States, of the semiotic theory of the Italian director and essayist has returned to the eye of the western movie debates, mainly due to the new readings of the works by Charles Sanders Peirce. The following article claims that the realistic bases of documentary cinema come close to the false naturalism referred to by Pasolini by mixing much of the perceptive processes that nourish the spectator minds.