Pier Paolo Pasolini

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rohmerin
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Re: Pier Paolo Pasolini

#26 Post by rohmerin » Sun Jan 22, 2012 9:27 am

Pasolini had a strong supporting role in Carlo Lizzani's WWII film Il gobbo (The hunchback).

Pictures from his role I made in my blog

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JPJ
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Re: Pier Paolo Pasolini

#27 Post by JPJ » Sun Jan 22, 2012 11:40 am

He chose interesting roles, a pimp in Il gobbo and a priest in Lizzani's spaghetti western Kill and Pray.

accatone
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Re: Pier Paolo Pasolini

#28 Post by accatone » Mon Oct 29, 2012 4:55 am

Short film with English subtitles - very interesting.

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jbeall
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Re: Pier Paolo Pasolini

#29 Post by jbeall » Thu Dec 27, 2012 10:58 am


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ShellOilJunior
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Re: Pier Paolo Pasolini

#30 Post by ShellOilJunior » Mon Sep 16, 2013 10:36 am

This is an interesting selection from John Ewing, Director of Cleveland Cinematheque, which details the licensing of Pasolini's films:
In my 27+ years of programming movies for both the Cinematheque and the Cleveland Museum of Art, I feel that I have presented film series devoted to most of the world’s great filmmakers—or at least the major non-American ones. Nevertheless there are still important directors whose careers remain unexplored in a series at either of my venues. Mostly these are individuals whose major movies are unavailable in the U.S., so would have to be imported (at great expense) from overseas.

Well, I’m happy to report that one of these elusive auteurs, Italy’s late film poet Pier Paolo Pasolini, will soon have his moment in the Cinematheque sun. In January and February we are scheduled to present 13 features and three short works from a complete Pasolini retrospective that is now touring North America under the auspices of the Istituto Luce Cinecittà—the same Italian agency that provided the print of Fellini’s The Voice of the Moon that we screened in July.

Luce Cinecittà seems to be a new name for Cinecittà International, which organized and circulated the complete Antonioni retrospective we presented in 2000, as well as the 15-film Totò series we showed in 2001. It’s great to be working with them again after a hiatus of many years. Luce Cinecittà promotes Italian cinema by assembling comprehensive packages of great movies and then shipping them around the world. They prepare beautiful new 35mm prints for these traveling retrospectives and maintain a library of high-quality film copies of Italian classics. It is always a pleasure to see these superb prints projected on the big screen.

So I am pumped about our upcoming Pasolini retrospective. Everything we will show (with one exception) will be presented in a new 35mm print from Italy. The series has already played the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the National Film Theatre in London. Other U.S. cities hosting the show are Los Angeles, San Francisco/Berkeley, Houston, Washington, and Columbus.

But here’s the bad news. Though Luce Cinecittà provides gorgeous copies of films to show, they do not own the rights to the movies they circulate. Thus every screening must be licensed from the foreign or domestic distributor who owns the rights to the title in the country that is presenting it.

For the Pasolini series we have had to license our upcoming screenings from a total of six different companies—three in the U.S., three in Italy. The U.S. companies have been pretty easy to deal with. They know us and our capabilities, so they have asked for reasonable, mostly affordable rental fees. The Italian companies, on the other hand, have quoted screening fees that are much higher than those of their American counterparts. Although one of the Italian companies did negotiate and lower its prices a bit (and, really, why should Cleveland pay the same fee as New York City for one screening of a movie?), the other two haven’t budged on their fees, adopting a take-it-or-leave-it stance.

Because of this inflexibility, my enthusiasm for our upcoming Pasolini retrospective has dimmed. The exorbitantly high screening fees from these two holdouts have compelled me to remove their two titles from our upcoming Pasolini exhibition. And they were two of the movies I was most excited to be able to present. Both are modern-day color fables made during the late 1960s: Pigsty (Porcile, 1969) a satire starring Pierre Clémenti, Jean-Pierre Léaud, Anne Wiazemsky (of Bresson’s Au Hasard Balthazar), and Ugo Tognazzi; and Theorem (Teorema, 1968), one of Pasolini’s key works, a parable about a mysterious stranger (Terence Stamp) who seduces every member of a wealthy Italian family and then departs, leaving chaos in his wake.

The Italian rights holder to Pigsty wants 550 euros (approximately $725) and the Italian rights holder to Theorem wants 1000 euros (around $1335). In both cases, this is for one screening of a film print that these two companies are not even supplying! These prices are three to five times what we normally pay for classic movies, and we can show those two times. In fact, the Theorem price is the highest rental fee I have ever encountered in my 27 years of running the Cinematheque.

Showing Pigsty in Cleveland may just be a matter of holding my nose, biting the bullet, and upping my usual ante—all for art’s sake (and with the hope that some other Pasolini movie will do well enough to cover the losses on this one—doubtful given the high cost of the whole series). But with Theorem, even if I had the money, should I pay what is in essence an extortionist fee? It would be a bad, bad precedent—especially since the rights holder (who is a TV executive and probably a multi-millionaire) has already refused a collective offer from five of the American Pasolini presenters (including us)—2000 euros for one screening of the film in five different cities. We thought he would accept this not insignificant amount rather than get nothing. But he chose nothing. So all five of us have dropped Theorem from our retrospectives. Even Luce Cinecittà appealed to him to work with us and negotiate an affordable fee (“we hope that a mere question of money will not interfere with the cultural value of Teorema, that is an essential part of Pasolini’s vision”), mentioning the support the retrospective received from the Italian Ministry of Culture. He turned a deaf ear to their request as well.

So at present this story does not have a happy ending. But I guess we should be grateful for the 11 Pasolini features that we have secured, and the beautiful prints in which they will be seen. This tale also illustrates what we sometimes have to go through to bring great cinema to Cleveland, and maybe explains why my hair is so gray.

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zedz
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Re: Pier Paolo Pasolini

#31 Post by zedz » Mon Sep 16, 2013 4:54 pm

This is unfortunately an all too common situation, and there are a lot of great films that would be much more widely screened and better known if rightsholders / sales agents were less recalcitrant.

I was involved in a similar situation in the 1990s with a 'Cahiers du cinema' programme. A bunch of beautiful, fresh 35mm prints touring as a group, but for which the rights had to be individually negotiated. Some rightsholders were very fair and straightforward to deal with; one even let us show their film for free; some demanded extortionate fees (in the worst case a flat fee that would have amounted to nearly $10 a head even if we had somehow managed to attract a capacity audience - and this was for the film in the programme with by far the lowest international profile); one never returned calls until we finally got hold of them two days before the screening. It was an organizational nightmare, and made the programme practically impossible to market efficiently. In the end the worst offender had to be removed from the programme at the very last minute.

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ShellOilJunior
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Re: Pier Paolo Pasolini

#32 Post by ShellOilJunior » Fri Jan 03, 2014 8:22 am

The good news is the Cleveland Cinematheque cut a deal with the distributors. It's going to mean $3 more per ticket but better than not screening them at all. This is the series slated to begin 1/11. I've heard many of these films will be in Toronto soon after:

Accattone
Mamma Roma
The Gospel According to St.Matthew
The Hawk and the Sparrows
Teorema
Oedipus Rex
Pigsty
Medea
Notes for an African Orestes
The Decameron
La Ricotta
The Witches
Canterbury Tales
Salo
Arabian Nights

accatone
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Re: Pier Paolo Pasolini

#33 Post by accatone » Thu Sep 11, 2014 5:05 am

A fantastique chronological trip through Roma, its places and people. Just click the bottom timeline to move ahead.

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Toby Dammit
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Re: Pier Paolo Pasolini

#34 Post by Toby Dammit » Mon Jan 15, 2018 10:48 am

It's time for an update of the editions available on BluRay
I think most of it has been edited in the Uk / Region B

1.- Accattone: Masters of Cinema, 2012

2.- Mamma Roma: Criterion 2004

3.- La Ricotta (segment of RoGoPaG) Masters of Cinema, 2012

4.- The Gospel According to St.Matthew: Masters of Cinema, 2012

5.-The Hawk and the Sparrows: Dvd only. Masters of Cinema 2012

6.- The Earth seen from the Moon (segment from The Witches): Arrow Academy, 2017

7. -Oedipus Rex: Masters of Cinema, 2012

8.- Teorema: BF1; 2013

9.- Pigsty: Dvd only. Masters of Cinema 2012

10.- Medea: BFI, 2011

11.-The Decameron/Canterbury Tales/Arabian Nights: BFI, 2011 ; Criterion, 2012

12.- Salo: BFI, 2011; Criterion, 2012

Missing BluRays titles for Region "A": Accattone, The Gospel According to St.Matthew, Teorema

Missing BluRay edition in both sides of the Atlantic: Mamma Roma, The Hawk and the Sparrows, Pigsty
Last edited by Toby Dammit on Mon Jan 15, 2018 12:39 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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antnield
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Re: Pier Paolo Pasolini

#35 Post by antnield » Mon Jan 15, 2018 10:54 am

Toby Dammit wrote:Missing BluRay edition in both sides of the Atlantic: Mamma Roma, The Hawk and the Sparrows, Pigsty
Eureka released Hawks and Sparrows and Pigsty on a single limited-edition Blu.

sky
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Re: Pier Paolo Pasolini

#36 Post by sky » Mon Jan 15, 2018 10:58 am

Both "Hawks and Sparrows/Pigsty" are part of Masters of Cinema released on a dual-layered blu-ray - https://www.eurekavideo.co.uk/moc/hawks ... ows-pigsty" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false; They just didnt get a separate release/two in one case. Region B locked.

http://www.dvdbeaver.com/film5/blu-ray_ ... lu-ray.htm" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
http://www.dvdbeaver.com/film5/blu-ray_ ... lu-ray.htm" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

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Toby Dammit
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Re: Pier Paolo Pasolini

#37 Post by Toby Dammit » Mon Jan 15, 2018 11:07 am

antnield wrote:
Toby Dammit wrote:Missing BluRay edition in both sides of the Atlantic: Mamma Roma, The Hawk and the Sparrows, Pigsty
Eureka released Hawks and Sparrows and Pigsty on a single limited-edition Blu.
Oh! thanks!
is unavailable now, I suppose

Pepsi
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Re: Pier Paolo Pasolini

#38 Post by Pepsi » Mon Jan 15, 2018 11:11 am

Notes for an African Orestes
This is as an extra material on BFI The Decameron, in 1080i.

Pepsi
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Re: Pier Paolo Pasolini

#39 Post by Pepsi » Mon Jan 15, 2018 11:15 am

Eureka released Hawks and Sparrows and Pigsty on a single limited-edition Blu.
Oh! thanks!
is unavailable now, I suppose
13,99£ in Eureka shop, and 12,99£
Amazon.uk, and 9,53£ Amazon.uk/marketplace.

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Toby Dammit
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Re: Pier Paolo Pasolini

#40 Post by Toby Dammit » Mon Jan 15, 2018 11:36 am

Pepsi wrote:
Notes for an African Orestes
This is as an extra material on BFI The Decameron, in 1080i.
Thanks! i forgot other Pasolini documentaries

Sopralluoghi in Palestina [Scouting in Palestine] is included in The Gospel According to St.Matthew

Is Appunti per un film sull'India [Notes for a Film in India] included in any recent BluRay edition?

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swo17
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Re: Pier Paolo Pasolini

#41 Post by swo17 » Mon Jan 15, 2018 11:47 am

It isn't. See also my guide to his '60s films. Also, MoC never released Mamma Roma.

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Toby Dammit
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Re: Pier Paolo Pasolini

#42 Post by Toby Dammit » Mon Jan 15, 2018 12:46 pm

swo17 wrote:It isn't. See also my guide to his '60s films. Also, MoC never released Mamma Roma.
You're right. Original post corrected

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JSC
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Re: Pier Paolo Pasolini

#43 Post by JSC » Mon Jan 15, 2018 3:12 pm

Just to add a few more odds and ends.

Pasolini's 1969 short film La sequenza del fiore di carta, was his
contribution to the portmanteau film Love and Anger. I think it was
released on DVD by the now defunct label NoShame but never made a
transition to blu-ray.

Also La Rabbia his 1963 documentary collaboration with Giovannino
Guareschi was released by Raro Video on DVD, but still no blu-ray.

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domino harvey
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Re: Pier Paolo Pasolini

#44 Post by domino harvey » Thu Jul 05, 2018 5:45 pm

From Reddit:

Image

"In 1973 Pier Paolo Pasolini saw the film THE GODFATHER in this cinema without paying for his ticket"

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zedz
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Re: Pier Paolo Pasolini

#45 Post by zedz » Tue Mar 24, 2020 9:43 pm

Kicking off a complete Pasolini rewatch, something I’ve been intending to get around to for years but needed a lockdown to actually achieve. Where there are separate threads for the films and their releases, I'll cross-post the relevant comments.

ACCATTONE

This first feature is an awkward, impressive debut. It’s a bold and brash stab at a post-neo-realism aesthetic, without the sentimentality and anecdotal neatness, and stripping away as many vestiges of professionalism as Pasolini can identify. Most of the cast really are non-professionals (and most of them act like it, which can make for rocky but fascinating viewing). The editing is blocky and inelegant, new scenes starting abruptly with a close-up for example, and tidy shot / reverse-shot grammar being the exception rather than the rule. This might look at first flush like the failings of a novice, but given how central a role this kind of disjunctive montage would play in his later features, it’s either a deliberate strategy at this early stage or a happy accident that Pasolini adopted as standard practice.

Tonino Delli Colli’s sunbleached (or Stygian) photography is technically impeccable, but it too thumbs its nose against cinematographic “best practice” and adds to the provocative rawness of the film. Franco Citti already has a magnetic presence, though neither he nor Pasolini have figured out that it’s so much more powerful when he’s quiet and still, and he’s least effective here when he’s emoting.

The film exhibits for me what seems to clearly be a gay gaze. For all that it’s a story about objectifying and exploiting women (the world it depicts is one of abject, irredeemable misogyny, and Pasolini rubs our noses in it at every opportunity), the camera is obsessed with its sub-proletariat male ‘models’ (in the Bressonian sense). Just look at the scene where Maddalena is identifying her assailants at the police station.

The use of Bach throughout is thoroughly sarcastic, bordering on sacrilegious, as the central character and his world remains squalid and brutal throughout, never coming close to the nobility of tragedy. (Pasolini does offer some nifty fakeouts throughout, as when his antihero appears to be regretting his isolation from his son, or when we hope he might not be simply grooming Stella.)

Stella is the only sympathetic character in the film, and while her plight provides us with a moral centre, she’s not a sentimentalized victim. When she reveals that she knew all along what Vittorio was doing, it’s all the more heartbreaking.

A really bracing debut that assembles a few key components of Pasolini’s artistic signature and would provide the template for his second film, which does a sort of two-steps-forward three-steps-back with very similar material.

MAMMA ROMA


In many respects a retread of and retreat from Pasolini’s bold first feature, Mamma Roma is at once more conventional, more accomplished and more problematic than Accattone.

Where Accattone was brutally unsentimental about its protagonist, this film plays into conventional tragedy, both with Magnani’s character and, more awkwardly, with her son Ettore, and I find the arty allusions, Christ references and classical music accompanying his end grotesquely unearned. (That whole demise is rather clunkily delivered: for example, the hacking cough that abruptly, arbitrarily, conveniently arrives a couple of minutes in film time before it does him in).

Also problematic for me is the disparity of the performances. Where Accattone was a level playing field of amateurism (I mean that in a good way), Mamma Roma mixes Magnani’s big star performance with Citti’s sinister underplaying (he’s already learnt lessons from the previous film), with many of the same amateur players from last time, with a second lead who’s really not up to the demands of the role (which is the thing that ultimately sinks the film for me – for me it’s Pasolini’s least successful narrative feature of the 60s).

Where the film advances on Accattone is in terms of Pasolini’s mise en scene. Those painterly references in the opening wedding scene and the closing prison ones show the beginning of a distinctive vision, and the use of the urban wasteland dotted with ancient Roman ruins is the first great example of the extraordinary found landscapes that would add so much real-world texture to his later films.

LA RICOTTA

Even though it’s an episode within a portmanteau film, this is a major work for Pasolini, a turning point where we find much of his mature style coalescing for the first time. The big difference from the first two features is just how stylistically heterogenous the film is – something he may well have co-opted from certain films of the nouvelle vague. The quasi-neo-realist observation is still present, but it’s intercut with the highly stylised colour tableaux of the film within the film. Some sequences are delivered in Benny Hill-style accelerated motion, accompanied by the mid-sixties Italian equivalent of ‘Yakety Sax’ (though there seems to me a more direct relationship in terms of the music used here to the pixillated sex scene in A Clockwork Orange).

This stylistic eclecticism extends to the soundtrack, where the incongruous classical cues of the previous films now share space with modern dance music, and there’s a running gag of the ‘wrong’ music being played to accompany a scene. It’s rudimentary here, but his next fiction feature will do magnificent things with this idea.

And welcome aboard, Laura Betti. Betti would not just appear in almost all of Pasolini’s remaining 60s films, it looks like she didn’t work for any other director during that period. She seems to have subsequently adopted the mantle of ‘muse’, which may be fair enough given that record, but she wouldn’t be Pasolini’s only one.

While looking forward to his future projects (most notably The Gospel According to Matthew), La Ricotta also features specific call backs to the previous films. The idea of dying from indigestion was evoked in Accattone. Ettore Garofalo (still called ‘Ettore’ in this film) reappears from Mamma Roma, as a secondary tableau figure and as an angel. And this is the third film in a row that takes time to depict two guys scuffling in the dirt. At one point Orson Welles reads from the filming diary of Mamma Roma. I presume this is something that actually exists, though the cover changes between shots (only the first shot identifies it as the filming diary).

There’s a strange moment in the film where one of Laura Betti’s lines of dialogue is completely missing from the soundtrack (according to my very dodgy Italian lip-reading skills, it begins and ends with “Basta!”). I checked the old Criterion Mamma Roma and it was missing from that version as well (and oh boy, does that transfer look like shit now!) It’s been at least a quarter of century since I saw Ro.Go.Pa.G on film, so I can’t recall whether this was always a problem with the film, or it it’s specific to the source used for these transfers. Anybody have any insight to offer?

LA RABBIA

A weird attempt at a dialectical documentary, with two politically opposed filmmakers both tackling the same topic (basically – what’s wrong with the world today?). Giovannino Guareschi represents right-wing conservatism; Pasolini Marxism.

While most of Pasolini’s work is informed by Marxism, he was such an idiosyncratic thinker that he doesn’t really fit comfortably within the Marxist box, and the two halves of the film don’t work as a dialectic. I had enough of a look at Guareschi’s to remind myself of how trivial and obnoxious it was: e.g. “kids today!” rants, condemnation of modern media as “pornography” while Guareschi regurgitates its images of minimally clad women lasciviously.

Pasolini’s half of the film is a lot more creative and interesting. It’s a collage of stills and newsreel footage that shifts from personal declarations (guided by “political and poetic feelings” – Pasolini’s “get out of Marxist jail free card”, I suppose) to Marker-like essay film, to rousing silent Soviet political documentary, to parodies of newsreels (“Gershwin and Louis Armstrong defeat Karl Marx!”). After the fact, it’s tempting to see that last element as a dig at Guareschi’s triviality, but I have no idea how much the two halves of the film were conceived and completed in isolation. Pasolini even makes room for a meditation of Marilyn Monroe as a kind of sacrificial victim of the modern age – not something you’d expect in a ‘good’ Marxist polemic.

And that’s the key to the film and its mismatch: Pasolini’s La Rabbia is not really a polemic at all. The tone of his narration is poetic and incantatory, and there’s too much ambivalence inherent in its attitudes to work as persuasive political argument. Even as he celebrates the recent wave of African independence, he is downbeat about the poverty, struggle and reprisals that are bound to follow.

COMIZI D’AMORE

At first, this seems to be strictly a commissioned job, even more constrained and prescriptive than La Rabbia: an investigation, via vox pop interviews, of Italy’s sexual mores. But Pasolini leaps right into the middle of the project, conducting all the interviews personally, and, as the film unfolds, it becomes more and more apparent what he gets out of it.

This is a much more effective and natural way of confronting bourgeois Italian morals that the artificial dialectic of La Rabbia, and you can imagine it providing a lot of raw material for Pasolini’s subsequent projects (Teorema, for one).

He’s a great, inquisitive interviewer, gently pushing people on the logical inconsistencies of their stated positions and fearlessly getting straight to the point when necessary. The film ranges far enough to address emerging feminism (which most people hope will go back wherever it came from) and homosexuality, leading to the piquant spectacle of all kinds of Italians obliviously telling Pasolini how despicable and disgusting he is.

At various points, Pasolini reflects on the results (and the project as a whole) with Alberto Moravia and Cesare Musatti, acknowledging how self-selection tended to eliminate middle-class respondents, and expressing disappointment at how reactionary most of the working class interviewees were.

This film isn’t really like any of Pasolini’s films, or even like any of his other documentaries, but it’s an enjoyable time capsule that gives a better sense of his priorities and personality than the declarative La Rabbia.

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domino harvey
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Re: Pier Paolo Pasolini

#46 Post by domino harvey » Tue Mar 24, 2020 9:52 pm

COMIZI D’AMORE
[..] This film isn’t really like any of Pasolini’s films
Ha, no wonder it’s one of the two Pasolini films I actually like out of the eighteen I’ve seen!

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zedz
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Re: Pier Paolo Pasolini

#47 Post by zedz » Sat Mar 28, 2020 9:54 pm

IL VANGELO SECONDO MATTEO

This was the first Pasolini film I ever saw, on a dub of a dub of a television screening in the university library, and it amazed me. There were other films I’d seen that were as weird and exotic (The Colour of Pomegranates, for one), but nothing had had the primitivist punch of this, or the stylistic eclecticism.

Coming to it in the context of Pasolini’s film career to that point, it’s easy enough to see traces of its use of untutored “models”, of striking found landscapes, and of disjunctive editing in the earlier films, but there’s still a big leap into a fully formed mythic film language, where dialogue is largely eschewed and human figures and faces are treated like landscapes. There’s a total immersion in an alien, ancient world for the first time in Pasolini’s filmmaking, and that’s probably his most distinctive mode (and certainly the one I respond to most readily). Pasolini’s swerve into this kind of filmmaking was anticipated by Rocha’s Black God, White Devil, which debuted earlier in the year, but the release dates are too close for there to be a plausibly direct influence.

The ‘authentic’ period film is achieved by paradoxically inauthentic means, namely a temporal disjunction encouraged by the film’s stylistic heterogeneity. The camerawork veers between classical pictorialism and guerrilla handheld footage evoking cinéma verité, including point of view shots of somebody struggling to see the historic goings on from within a crowd of bystanders. It’s a dialectical mix of coded “realism,” familiar religious imagery and alienation effects (like the frequent frontal gaze of the actors), and the soundtrack is even more radically alienating, mixing and matching “spiritual music” from the ages and all over the world: Bach, Odetta, Blind Willie Johnson, and the Missa Luba. All of this disjunction shakes up the familiarity of the narrative and inoculates against piety, because that’s definitely not where Pasolini is headed with this material.

The political and polemic dimension of the film is quite direct. Pasolini is pitching his Christ as an angry, revolutionary, Che-like figure, whose teachings are severe and often hard to follow (in more ways than one). In service of this vision of the Gospel(s), he tosses a lot of other subtly sacrilegious nails in our path. We open not just with a peasant Madonna, but a teenaged, unwed one. There’s a strong hint that the Magi were unwittingly complicit in the persecution of Christ's people (we don’t see a countrywide cull, but a targeted attack). And the startlingly abrupt resurrection (sans ascension – this revolutionary Christ is still among us) is a final slap in the face of orthodoxy.

In more general terms, and in common with a lot of Pasolini’s “mythic” films, he is superimposing the ancient world onto the modern one by positing continuity and connection with the present-day subproletariat. Pasolini was all too aware that places like Sassi di Matera were still inhabited by the poor.

One more puzzle piece: this film sees the arrival of Ninetto Davoli, Pasolini’s lover and muse, who would be a consistent presence throughout the rest of his film career.

Although I can still recall the bright burn of my first discovery of Pasolini with this film, my later responses have cooled a bit. It’s a film I still admire greatly, and wholeheartedly love great gobs of, but I do find Christ a bore after a (very little) while, and his verbosity dominates and overbalances an otherwise lean and non-verbal film in the second half. I realize that’s an intrinsic part of the package, and one of Pasolini’s main points is to recontextualize all of those words, but I much prefer the balance in later “mythic” films – and in Porcile he finds a way to play with the verbal / non-verbal conflict in a much more interesting way.

SOPRALLUOGI IN PALESTINA

I actually prefer this (not) making of to its parent feature in many respects. Pasolini scouts locations in the middle east, hoping to film his story in its original locations. The reason he doesn’t follow through on this initial plan is very revealing about his creative priorities and approaches, and he’s candid about sharing these with us. It turns out that the actual landscape is too small-scale, banal or “tainted” by the present to match up with his personal vision (which, we have seen, is spectacular). The underwhelming local landscapes do put him in mind of several of the Italian analogues he will ultimately select.

More interesting, perhaps, is that the absence of a subproletariat in Israel will starve him of extras. The people he encounters ae also “tainted” by modernity, and the actual local subproletariat of Arabs don’t fit his casting conception.

UCCELLACCI E UCCELLINI

Pasolini, having found his footing as a radically original filmmaker with Il vangelo, then stepped sideways into allegorical farce, with – to put it kindly – mixed results.

Ninetto is promoted to lead, alongside the venerable Toto, as itinerant father and son who encounter a Marxist raven that tries to educate them about the world. There’s a big detour of a parable where Toto and Ninetto feature as disciples of St Francis tasked with preaching to the hawks and the sparrows. They eventually learn to communicate in the birds’ languages and have brief theological discussions with them, but the enlightened hawks still prey on the sparrows regardless. It turns out that religion is no answer to hunger (and this is the thread that runs through the film’s other shaggy anecdotes).

It’s all a bit of a chore, as the pedagogical meat is eked out with lots of lame slapstick sawdust.

The moral of the story is: what good is a left wing intellectual when you’re starving? But one might just as well ask: what good is a left wing intellectual in an alleged comedy?

LA TERRA VISTA DALLA LUNA (Episode of Le Streghe)

Toto and Ninetto return (playing different characters this time: Miau and Baciu), as father and son looking for a replacement mother after the untimely death of the previous one. Along comes Silvana Mangano, as an impassive, green-haired, deaf and dumb supernatural creature, who readily complies.

This is still laboured and largely unfunny, though there are a couple of decent gags (the best one involving a cat) and Mangano finds herself far more in tune with the material than anybody else by playing it mostly deadpan. She’d appear in a few more Pasolini films, and her underplayed stillness works superbly in those as well.
Last edited by zedz on Tue Mar 31, 2020 5:49 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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domino harvey
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Re: Pier Paolo Pasolini

#48 Post by domino harvey » Sat Mar 28, 2020 11:20 pm

Unsurprisingly, you don’t like the only one I really like, Sparrows! But I value Pasolini not at all on any deep theoretical level and for me there’s nothing “alleged” about the comedy bonafides of this one— the sung opening credits alone are a riot. At least we agree that the Witches sketch is actually unfunny, though I can grant it zero effective gags.

Despite being beloved by just about everyone with an opinion I trust, I truly, 100% do not understand the appeal of this filmmaker on any level, but I appreciate reading your thoughts, zedz, even though it seems unlikely any sea change is forthcoming based on my own experiences. He’s inescapable for any lover of world cinema from this most fertile period of the medium, so I wish I could share in the fandom!

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knives
Joined: Sat Sep 06, 2008 6:49 pm

Re: Pier Paolo Pasolini

#49 Post by knives » Sat Mar 28, 2020 11:41 pm

I love Hawks and Sparrows as well though perhaps in a different way given that I'm riding the Pasolini train hardcore. I think only Porcile and maybe Arabian Nights tops it for me.

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therewillbeblus
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Re: Pier Paolo Pasolini

#50 Post by therewillbeblus » Sun Mar 29, 2020 10:58 pm

I’m hot and cold on Pasolini but decided to watch Hawks and Sparrows just to see what a full blown Pasolini comedy would be like and I loved every second of it, ranking just behind Porcile as another masterpiece. I haven’t seen a good chunk of his work from this period so I can’t say these films are outliers but it’s no surprise that both remind me of the nouvelle vague style and playful energy; though this one has a clear Italian bite. They both also delve into extreme ungrounded absurdism whilst continuing to meditate on real modern issues and the complications of engagement, specifically communication, in accessing harmony with corporeal needs or mystical connection. Each film has characters that talk at each other (or don’t talk at all) rather than participate in a meaningful dialogue, rendering expression as inane and yet a default tool for comprehension of ideas (In Porcile this hardly matters for the poor though, and the ideas professed by the elite aren’t worth a damn as empty actions). Provocations on religion are not mean-spirited and don’t disregard an interest in faith but render the rigidity of absolutism as comic itself, as well as proposing that the focus on a higher power or pretentious conceptualizations are actually easy pathways to ignore the people and problems right in front of us to simply greet.

Perspective is inherent to life for Pasolini, and the impenetrable nature of joining with another in this regard seems to be a good premise for a joke. Pasolini seems to waver throughout his career between laughing at and pointing out the horrors of this social puzzle, and does both at once in his best film, but it’s nice to see his sense of humor so strong here, as well as a creative nose for finding fresh ways to laugh at failings to link with our fellows, articulate our own psyches, and futile existential searches for finite meaning in the heavens or abstract space of theoretical knowledge. I laughed out loud on many occasions at mere facial expressions edited as glances between men with an absence of any energy or understanding between them. The linguistic jokes were great (especially the incredible opening credits) but the silent comedy mechanisms were as good as in any film that was so many decades removed from the era. Totò does a great Buster Keaton impression while brining his own versatility in unpredictable range, and the frenzied silly speed antics played like a Chaplin/Zazie visual gag. Those persistent concessions release holds on the subject into pandemonium and show the film's honest position to be belly-laughing at the act being too serious about, or sticking to, any core concept, matching that of the characters and posturing at an argument of the nonlinear process of distractions humans engage in when broaching these grey areas of where to turn our focus of concern for attention or answers.

The central religious parable detour summed up my thoughts on the thematic interest of the film well, in acting as if Flowers of St. Francis was inverted into a wild surrealistic farcical joke, rather than the ‘joke of life’ the Rossellini film embraces. For example, Francis’ attempts to shoo away the bird so he can pray, a comic scene that highlights how even the most disciplined and faithful of men can blindly attempt to exert control over nature and bend life to their own terms, finds a powerful beauty in humble surrender as well as a smirk at our relatable attempts at the same, and at the security of universal human bond of fallibility and simultaneous growth. In this film's section, the running gag of Totò is that he is trying to communicate with birds, as representative of the uncontrollable nature of God’s creations, totally blinded in actually consciously confusing control with spirituality, as opposed to Francis’ impulsive humanity kicking in even during spiritual connection. Totò actually believes he understands what the birds want, thus playing God like all humans; but even when he does reach such an understanding this becomes trivial, reinforcing the joke of absolutism and obsession with concepts outside of our peripheral scope. As the duo continuously encounters sociopolitical corporeal barriers, the whole array of ideas turns into soup. I actually admire Pasolini for not consistently tying together ideas, which itself fools the audience who may actually buy into the possibility of concreteness on these subjects, since that’s the large thematic blanket gag in the futility of this clarity. Basically the film seems to present life as complex, people as ridiculous when presented with multiple directions to turn attention (spiritual cosmos, political concerns, basic socialization), and how communication modalities can obstruct opportunities at engagement partly because of the nature of man and partly because of the relative significance of any moral prioritization. But Pasolini knows life is crazy, and that's essentially what the film is about, which is enough for me because he fills his milieu to the brim with all his anthropological perceptions, reveals his film to be a tornado, and makes a mess of it all to demonstrate that point.

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