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 Page 2 of 6 Pier Paolo Pasolini: a City Wide Celebration of His Genius Published on iItaly.org (http://www.iitaly.org) 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 Page 3 of 6 Pier Paolo Pasolini: a City Wide Celebration of His Genius Published on iItaly.org (http://www.iitaly.org) 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.
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