The Assassination of Pier Paolo Pasolini in the Garden of Earthly Delights is an unrealised film treatment by Derek Jarman.
It is based on the events leading up to and including the 1975 murder of Italian film director Pier Paolo Pasolini following the making of his final film Saló, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975).
Written in 1984, the setting of Jarman's film is inspired by the Dutch renaissance painter Hieronymus Bosch’s triptych, The Garden of Earthly Delights (1490-1500), a painting that depicts both the joys and perils of temptation, and which Jarman encountered on a visit to the Museo de Prado in Madrid the year he began work on the project.
For the first time a facsimile of the film’s treatment is presented alongside reproductions from Jarman's workbook for the project, which show his calligraphic notes towards the film’s sequences, themes, cinematography, lighting, sound, costume, casting and props.
2025 marks fifty years since Pasolini's murder and thirty-two since Jarman’s death from AIDS. Against a backdrop of funding cuts to the arts and the arrival of the HIV/AIDS epidemic that vanished away so many important artists and visionaries, The Assassination of Pier Paolo Pasolini in the Garden of Earthly Delights is a powerful elegy to the decadence of queer cinema and the tragedy of its last auteur.
Pilot Press, 96pp, 15cm x 19cm, paperback, 2025
