Pier Paolo Pasolini: a City Wide Celebration of His Genius Published on iItaly.org (http://www.iitaly.org)
Pier Paolo Pasolini: a City Wide Celebration of His Genius
Natasha Lerdera (December 19, 2012)
MoMA and Cinecittà Luce celebrate the enduring influence of Italian filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini with a comprehensive retrospective of his cinematic works. The program is accompanied by side events
Retrospective @ MoMA: December 13, 2012–January 5, 2013.
More than two decades after its 1990 retrospective of Pier Paolo Pasolini, MoMA once again joins with Cinecittà Luce and Fondo Pier Paolo Pasolini/Cineteca di Bologna to present a full retrospective of Pasolini’s cinematic output.
Many of these celebrated films will be shown in recently restored versions, and all are presented in newly struck prints. Much of this painstaking restoration work was performed by Cineteca di Bologna,
Page 1 of 6 Pier Paolo Pasolini: a City Wide Celebration of His Genius Published on iItaly.org (http://www.iitaly.org) alongside several of Pasolini’s former collaborators. Pasolini’s cinematic legacy is distinguished by an unerring eye for cinematic composition and tone, and a stylistic ease within a variety of genres—many of which he reworked to his own purposes, and all of which he invested with his distinctive touch. Yet it is Pasolini’s unique genius for creating images that evoke the inner truths of his own brief life that truly sets his films apart—and entices new generations of cinephiles to explore his work.
Pasolini’s cinematic works roughly correspond to four periods in the socially and politically committed artist’s life. The National Popular Cinema commenced with his debut, Accattone (1961), which immediately made a name for him as a filmmaker of prodigious talent and fury. This was followed by Mamma Roma and a number of episodic comic films containing warm, honest portraits of people living on the fringes of society, culminating in the masterful The Gospel According to Matthew. Marking him as a provocative thinker and audacious artist with an uncompromising vision, Pasolini’s middle period, often termed The Unpopular Cinema, features excoriating depictions of the bourgeoisie that lend a passionate immediacy to films like Teorema, Porcile, and a modern interpretation of Medea.
The Trilogy of Life—The Decameron, The Canterbury Tales, and Arabian Nights—produced between 1971 and 1974, is a triumphant reinterpretation of classic tales and fables that retain their universality despite being interpreted by thoroughly modern means. As Pasolini himself noted, he focused on the past precisely because it reflects the present most profoundly. Sometimes referred to as The Abjuration of the Trilogy of Life, the director’s utterly despairing final film, Salò or the 120 Days of Sodom, was held up for years due to censorship issues, and it remains a shockingly raw and profoundly disconcerting experience. Salò was completed in 1975, the year of Pasolini’s mysterious murder.
A series of supplemental events pay tribute to Pasolini’s multifaceted career. MoMA PS1 hosts two programs: a day of performances inspired by Pasolini (this event has already taken place) and an installation comprising three of Pasolini’s films screening continuously throughout the run of the retrospective (details to follow). A roundtable discussion about his artistic legacy took place at Casa Italiana Zerilli Marimò at New York University; a selection of Pasolini’s paintings and drawings is exhibited at Location One; and a seminar hosted by the Italian Cultural Institute titles Pasolini’s Languages launched a new publication featuring materials drawn from Pasolini’s archives.
Film Screenings and events @ MoMA
Uccellacci e uccellini (Hawks and Sparrows) 1965–66. Italy. Directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini. With Totò, Ninetto Davoli, Femi Benussi. “A whimsical fantasy about Christianity and Marxism (Roger Ebert, The Chicago Sun Times, May 7, 1969). In Italian; English subtitles. 89 min. Wednesday, December 19, 2012, 4:30 p.m., Theater 1, T1 Friday, December 28, 2012, 4:30 p.m., Theater 1, T1
Il Vangelo secondo Matteo (The Gospel According to Matthew) 1964. Italy. Directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini. With Enrique Irazoqui, Margherita Caruso, Susanna Pasolini. “In my opinion, The Gospel According to Matthew is incomparably the most effective picture ever made on a scriptural theme...” (Maryvonne Butcher, Film Comment, Autumn 1965). In Italian; English subtitles. 137 min. Wednesday, December 19, 2012, 8:00 p.m., Theater 1, T1 Monday, December 31, 2012, 4:30 p.m., Theater 1, T1
Mamma Roma 1962. Italy. Directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini. With Anna Magnani, Ettore Garofolo, Franco Citti. “Arguably in Mamma Roma the sub-proletarian world provides not only the subject matter but the actual subject of the film, for the story hinges on the attempts of Mamma Roma, an ex-prostitute, to ‘go straight’ and to provide a respectable petty bourgeois existence in which her adolescent son can grow up. The attempts fail and the respectable dream evaporates and, in a sense, there is a moral in this—the first statement by Pasolini of what is to become a recurrent theme: the un-livability of the modern bourgeois and petty-bourgeois world” (G. Nowell-Smith, “Pasolini’s Originality,” in Pier Paolo
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Pasolini, 1977). In Italian; English subtitles. 111 min. Thursday, December 20, 2012, 4:30 p.m., Theater 1, T1 Friday, December 28, 2012, 8:00 p.m., Theater 1, T1
Edipo Re (Oedipus Rex) 1967. Italy. Directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini. With Franco Citti, Silvana Mangano, Alida Valli. “The opulent and riveting adaptation of the ancient myth of Oedipus, a man who unknowingly kills his father and marries his mother.” In Italian; English subtitles. 104 min. Thursday, December 20, 2012, 8:00 p.m., Theater 1, T1 Wednesday, January 2, 2013, 4:30 p.m., Theater 1, T1
Teorema (Theorem) 1968. Italy. Directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini. With Silvana Mangano, Massimo Girotti, Terence Stamp, Anne Wiazemsky. “His film is a parable, seductively ambiguous and yet set forth with the calm certitude of a geometrical theorem: if five members of a wealthy industrialist’s household encounter God, five specific things will happen to them in consequence of their encounter.” (Joseph Morgenstern, Newsweek, May 5, 1969). In Italian; English subtitles. 105 min. Friday, December 21, 2012, 4:30 p.m., Theater 1, T1 Thursday, January 3, 2013, 8:00 p.m., Theater 1, T1
Porcile (Pigsty) 1969. Italy. Directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini. Pierre Clementi, Franco Citti, Jean- Pierre Léaud, Anne Wiazemsky. “All the references to art and culture in the film have the same kind of cynical despair about them, particularly when they involve things in which Pasolini himself has been engaged.” (Noel Purdon, “Pasolini: The Film of Alienation,” in Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1977). In Italian; English subtitles. 98 min. Friday, December 21, 2012, 8:00 p.m., Theater 1, T1 Thursday, January 3, 2013, 4:30 p.m., Theater 1, T1
Appunti per un’Orestiade Africana (Notes for an African Oresteia) 1970. Italy. Directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini. “Notes for an African Oresteia documents on film his 1970 location hunting and local casting tour of Tanzania and Uganda for a never-realized feature adaptation of the Greek tragedy The Oresteia.” (Variety, January 21, 1981). In Italian; English subtitles. 73 min. Le mura di Sana’a (The Walls of Sana’a) 1971–74. Italy. Directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini. “Sana’a, like all of the Third World for Pasolini, was two things, an intact, sublimely beautiful medieval Arab city of the past, and a corrupted, degraded city being developed in the present. In 1971, Pasolini made [this] film in the form of a plea to UNESCO to save Sana’a from the destruction of modernization” (Sam Rohdie, The Passion of Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1995). In Italian; English subtitles. 13 min. Saturday, December 22, 2012, 2:00 p.m., Theater 1, T1 Sunday, December 30, 2012, 5:30 p.m., Theater 1, T1
Il Decameron (The Decameron) 1971. Italy. Directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini. With Franco Citti, Ninetto Davoli, Silvana Mangano. “Taking 10 tales out of the 100 in Boccaccio’s Decameron, Pasolini has created one of the most beautiful, turbulent, and uproarious panoramas of early Renaissance life ever put on film. It is also one of the most obscene, if obscene defines something that is offensive to ordinary concepts of chastity, delicacy, and decency, although I’d hardly call the film offensive to morals” (Vincent Canby, The New York Times, December 9, 1971). In Italian; English subtitles. 111 min. Saturday, December 22, 2012, 5:30 p.m., Theater 1, T1 Friday, January 4, 2013, 4:30 p.m., Theater 1, T1
I racconti di Canterbury (The Canterbury Tales) 1972. Italy. Directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini. With Pier Paolo Pasolini, Hugh Griffith, Josephine Chaplin, Laura Betti. “Eight of Geoffrey Chaucer’s lusty tales come to life on-screen in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s gutsy and delirious The Canterbury Tales, which was shot in England and offers a remarkably earthy re-creation of the medieval era. (The Criterion Collection) In Italian; English subtitles. 123 min. Sunday, December 23, 2012, 2:30 p.m., Theater 1, T1
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Friday, January 4, 2013, 8:00 p.m., Theater 1, T1
Il fiore delle Mille e una notte (The Arabian Nights) 1973–74. Italy. Directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini. With Franco Merli, Ines Pellegrini, Ninetto Davoli, Franco Citti.“The film offers itself as the prototype of ‘pure’ narration: that is, of narratives that live off of one another, that are embedded in one another to such an extent that it is often impossible to determinate the containing tale from the contained. Il fiore will reproduce the image of the self- generating tales of the original text, and yet its expulsion of the original frame-tale, the story of Scheherazade, is a function of Pasolini’s refusal to trace a possible outer limit to narration within the film itself” (Patrick Rumble, “Stylistic Contamination in the Trilogia della vita: The case of Il fiore delle Mille e una notte,” in Pier Paolo Pasolini: Contemporary Perspectives, 1994). In Italian; English subtitles. 129 min. Sunday, December 23, 2012, 5:30 p.m., Theater 1, T1 Saturday, January 5, 2013, 5:00 p.m., Theater 1, T1
La rabbia di Pasolini (The Anger of Pasolini) 1963. Italy. Directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini. Commentary in verse by Pasolini, spoken by Giorgio Bassani, Renato Guttuso. Reconstruction by Giusseppe Bertolucci. “La rabbia had an even more unfortunate history than La ricotta. Upon its completion, the producer—either for commercial reasons or fear of censorship—decided it should be released together with a second short film to be made by a director on the other side of the political spectrum, that is, on the right. (…) La rabbia is less an attempt to answer the ‘dramatic questions’ posed by the preface than what Pasolini called ‘a Marxist denunciation of society and recent events,’ or even a ‘cry of rage’ against human suffering and man’s inhumanity to man” (Naomi Green, Pier Paolo Pasolini: Cinema as Heresy, 1990). In Italian; English subtitles. 81 min. La ricotta 1962–63. Italy. Directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini. With Orson Welles, Mario Cipriani, Laura Betti. “La ricotta is an explosion of disgust at consumer society and its vulgarity, a scabrous reproach to the Catholic Church for its abandonment of the poorest members of that society, a film about a film about the Crucifixion that shows Christianity’s central symbolic event being staged within a circus of depravity.” (Gary Indiana, Pasolini, Mama Roma, and La ricotta, 2004). In Italian; English subtitles. 35 min. Wednesday, December 26, 2012, 4:30 p.m., Theater 1, T1
Comizi d’amore (Love Meetings) 1963–64. Italy. Directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini. “[Pasolini] raced all over Italy, movie camera and tape recorder in hand, asking people everywhere, from famous soccer players to unknown peasants in the Crotone region, what they thought about love and sex. The intellectuals comment, and the people speak, freely voicing their particular truths. Comizi d’amore gives an unbiased picture of a changing Italy, and was a model for many later television documentaries. And yet what is striking is the presence on the screen of Pasolini himself” (Enzo Siciliano, Pasolini, 1982). In Italian; English subtitles. 90 min. Wednesday, December 26, 2012, 8:00 p.m., Theater 1, T1
Accattone (The Scrounger) 1961. Italy. Directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini. With Franco Citti, Franca Pasut, Roberto Scaringella. “the story delves into the dire poverty in the slums of Rome, made all the more real by Pasolini’s use of both professional and nonprofessional actors.” . In Italian; English subtitles. 117 min. Thursday, December 27, 2012, 4:30 p.m., Theater 1, T1
Salò o le 120 giornate di Sodoma (Salò or the 120 Days of Sodom) 1975. Italy. Directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini. With Paolo Bonacelli, Giorgio Cataldi, Uberto Paolo Quintavalle. “Four fascist libertines round up 9 teenage boys and girls and subject them to 120 days of physical, mental and sexual torture.”. In Italian; English subtitles. 114 min. Thursday, December 27, 2012, 8:00 p.m., Theater 1, T1 Wednesday, January 2, 2013, 8:00 p.m., Theater 1, T1
La sequenza del fiore di carta (The Paper Flower Sequence) 1968. Italy. Directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini. With Ninetto Davoli. From the anthology film Amore e
Page 4 of 6 Pier Paolo Pasolini: a City Wide Celebration of His Genius Published on iItaly.org (http://www.iitaly.org) rabbia. “[Pasolini’s film] is a reference to the Gospel parable usually called in English ‘The Barren Fig Tree,’ where Christ strikes down a fig tree because it isn’t bearing fruit in March, although it could hardly have known better.” (G. Nowell-Smith, “Pasolini’s Originality,” in Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1977). In Italian; English subtitles. 12 min.
Che cosa sono le nuvole? (What Are the Clouds?) 1967. Italy. Directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini. From the anthology film Capriccio all’italiana. With Totò, Ninetto Davoli, Laura Betti. “The poster announces the presentation of the film in which the poster is reproduced: Che cosa sono le nuvole? The painting is Las meninas. It depicts the artist Velázquez painting the painting that you see. In the painting the king and the queen who are absent from the painting appear in the mirror at the background of the painting. They are present only as a reflection. The mirror is reduplicated in the film. The painting becomes the subject of a shot in a film which the shots point to. Like the painting, the film is mirrored in the film. It is in the same relation to the mirror as was the painting mirrored in Las meninas. The structure of the Pasolini film is analogous to the Velázquez painting” (Sam Rohdie, The Passion of Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1995). In Italian; English subtitles. 22 min.
La terra vista dalla luna (The Earth as Seen from the Moon) 1966. Italy. Directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini. From the anthology film Le streghe. With Totò, Ninetto Davoli, Silvana Mangano, Laura Betti. “[In a segment reminiscent] in style to Don Quixote, a recently widowed father and his son travel around the country in search of a new wife and mother, and after a long period, they discover the literally speechless Mangano. She brings joy into their lives, but they are poor, and in order to find a better life for themselves, they concoct a scheme to try to make some quick cash. (…) The outlandish performances, artwork, and costumes does evoke great charm and likeability” (Vince Leo, 2004). In Italian; English subtitles. 30 min. Saturday, December 29, 2012, 5:00 p.m., Theater 1, T1
Medea 1969. Italy. Directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini. With Maria Callas, Laurent Terzieff, Giuseppe Gentile, Massimo Girotti. “Unlike Euripides, who in his tragedy concentrates solely on the final outcome of Medea’s jealousy (the murder of her children), Pasolini devotes almost half of his film to an evocation of the primitive culture of Colchis in which Medea was brought up and from which she flees with the Golden Fleece under the influence of her love for Jason.” (Roy Armes, Film and Filming, June 1971). Restoration by S.N.C. Presentation of the film in its original 35 mm format is made possible by Gucci. In Italian; English subtitles. 110 min. Saturday, December 29, 2012, 8:00 p.m., Theater 1, T1
Appunti per un film sull’India (Notes for a Film about India) 1967–68. Italy. Directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini. “His India film is a film in search of faces, bodies, ideas for a film to be made on India. The film you see is not that film; it is rather ‘a film for a film to be made,’ as if the script was a structure wanting to be another. (…) The film Pasolini wanted to make in India would have begun before Indian independence and continued through its attempts to modernise and industrialise” (Sam Rohdie, The Passion of Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1995). In Italian; English subtitles. 32 min. Sopraluoghi in Palestina per il film Il Vangelo secondo Matteo (In Search of Locations for The Gospel According to Matthew)
1964. Italy. Directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini. “In the course of his hastily improvised commentary, Pasolini explains that once he saw the Holy Land he realized that it would be impossible to film Il Vangelo there: everything —buildings, kibbutzes, faces—was far too modern. As we see him visit one legendary site after another, he begins to compare the landscape of the Holy Land with that of southern Italy, where he would actually film Il Vangelo secondo Matteo” (Naomi Green, Pier Paolo Pasolini: Cinema as Heresy, 1990). In Italian; English subtitles. 55 min. Sunday, December 30, 2012, 2:30 p.m., Theater 1, T1
Program @ MoMA PS1 Pier Paolo Pasolini: Teorema, Medea, and Saló, or The 120 Days of Sodom On view December 13, 2012—January 7, 2013 In conjunction with The Museum of Modern Art's retrospective, MoMA PS1 presents Teorema (1968),
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Medea (1969), and Salò, or The 120 Days of Sodom (1975) as continuous cinematic installations throughout the exhibition's entirety, during regular MoMA PS1 museum hours. The masterful and provocative imagery of Pasolini's films is derisory in scope and genre, and these three demonstrate powerfully different treatments of the medium. Pasolini's unerring eye for composition and tone reveals the artist's conflicting passion for modernity, religion, history, and sexuality, and proves the virtuosity of the director not just as a filmmaker but also as a visionary whose life and work embody the social upheavals of the time. Exhibiting the films as immersive installations celebrates Pasolini's vital contributions to postwar artistic practice, and brings the works to a larger, intergenerational audience. Original theatrical posters for the films from international debuts will be on view, as well as an open reading room that brings together Pasolini's distinguished works as a poet and writer.
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