Pier Paolo fucking Pasolini: Search (I don't want to hear your destroy choices cause they're of no fucking interest to me)

Passolini's Salo - classic or dud?

AHAHAHAHHAHAHHHA

That attitude is classic if you refused to see 'Kill Bill' for the same reasons, and super dud if you didn't.

don't like Salo.

people don't seem to be eager to review "salo" as a film as opposed to as a gesture or a statement, which is unfortunate because there are both interesting and howlingly bad things about it. i think it's reputation as some kind of charnelhouse is a bit unearned. certainly something like "the animals' film" is far more difficult (say, impossible) to watch.

all of his films are interesting, to say the least, but none of them has quite satisfied me completely, except (maybe) "mamma roma."

"oedipus rex," btw, was a major inspiration for the taiwanese new wave directors.

Salo is certainly unpleasant and disturbing, but not that bad. I found it to be a very controlled and measured film, as though everything in it had been carefully thought out to fit into a precise framework. I didn't flinch once during the faeces banquet scene, but then perhaps that's what a decade of watching Eurotrash does for you...

a) it made real christs struggle (not passion or suffering, but struggle... in the political, economicic, fight the power sense)
b) it made christ human...by casting "real" people, by casting his mother and the hustlerr, by filming it how and where he filmed it it seemed as authentic as possible.
c)it was dusty, dirty, unkempt.
d) even managing b/c it was also poetic, it did not suffer the overly literal (he read the text, and moved from it, was not stuck there)

'In a series of works, Wyn Evans has staged text quotations either in the form of neon signs or letters made from fire-crackers. The 16mm film P.P.P (Oedipus Rex) (1998) documents the construction of a wooden scaffolding on the beach of Ostia (a harbour city of ancient Rome). The film displays the text, “On the banks of the Livenza silvery willows are growing in wild profusion. Their bows dipping into the drifting water”, written in fireworks. The quote is taken from the film Oedipus Rex (1967) by Pier Paolo Pasolini (the director was murdered by a lover on the very beach in 1975). Set against the sea and the night sky, the writing is set ablaze by the fireworks. Elegiac beauty is celebrated in a self-destructing spectacle. A memory of violent death is invoked, together with an image of grace and peace. Again, a simple visual thrill produces a sensual experience in which the invisible history of a clandestine life and philosophy are implicated. What you actually see becomes inseparable from what you potentially know. The obvious is enriched by the perceptible presence of the arcane.'

Anthony, I think you would like CWE's work, if you don't already know it.

When Medea gets into its stride, it's utterly gorgeous and glorious to watch. He did a short in the RoGoPaG film-of-four-films called Ricotta that's slightly skewed my watching of The Gospel According To St Matthew: it's sort of amiable mildly-satirical slapstick until the point where it isn't anymore.

I'm beginning to think was infinitely better as an essayist than he was as a film maker.

NYC retro:

http://www.filmlinc.com/wrt/onsale/pasolini/program.html

wow, I didn't expect to run into Momus-JohnD debate here. My favorites are Teorema and The Gospel According to Saint Matthew, need to see Porcile, Notes twd an African Oresteia and (maybe) Salo.

Salo is kind of distanced and numbed and I really don't feel it's that bad. The selection of the victims at the beginning is more disturbing than most of what transpires after. Doing Sade is more or less like doing Fielding except the eating scenes are a bit queasier.

I say search "Oedipus" and "Medea" - the opening section of Medea is a spell-out-Marxism-for-you-dummies snoozefest, but once the story gets underway it's great, and in both of these film's Pasolini's treatment of myth & primary sources is both radical and very carefully considered. If you're doing work in Greek tragedy & you see one of these two movies, you're struck (or I was, anyhow) by how much insight Pasolini has into both the mechanisms that run tragedy (Oedipus's visit to the oracle in the film is just terrifying & evocative of so much about Oedipus's character, amazing P.O.V. stuff without ever actually being explicitlly P.O.V.) and into the characters of myth.

Might be strange trying to comment on years old comments now, but which part of the beginning of Medea is 'Marxism-for Dummies'? I saw it a couple of days ago now...anyway, once this gets going its probably one of the most gorgeous films. Love the acres of silence during the rituals to the sudden switch. I do feel I missed loads, I've only skim-read the play a couple of times. Needs more work...

another push to reopen his murder case:

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/news/the-film-maker-the-confession-and-the-murder-that-refuses-to-die-1925418.html

ACCATONE is incredible

I remember reading that in the original case, someone suggested showing Salo in court as part of the defence, so as to imply that anyone who made such a film was practically begging to be murdered.

Still think the fuss over Salo is kinda exaggerated and ridiculous.

found this sequence very moving when i watched nanni moretti's dear diary

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AIBeQ7ddgXw

nanni moretti's dear diary

wanna see this film so bad. admittedly have not been keeping up but it was the hardest thing to find a couple of years back.

yeah i saw it in a theater. and he has like ten films before that that are very hard to see.

saw the bfi's new digital print of Theorem this evening, my first viewing. very beautiful in places - quite a lot of the landscapes seemed to be 'revisiting' antonioni locations (chiefly from Il Grido and Red Desert), and the film overall had a very heavy godarian vibe (accentuated of course by the presence of Anne Wiazemsky). interesting morricone score, too, sliding between straight jazz themes and more dissonant orchestral arrangements that mirror the film's fractured narrative, where the framing of bodies and landscapes and buildings is more important and considered - poetic effect - than narrative realism or consequence.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_lqsLTskEBA

liked Decameron for screwing nuns and N Davoli in barrel of shit

I saw from Letterboxd that you also saw The Canterbury Tales. Did you get to Arabian Nights? (I'm guessing you're watching them now for the same reason I did--they were leaving the Criterion Channel at the end of May.)

I think I like The Decameron and Arabian Nights about equally; they're both very warm, sexy, funny films. The Canterbury Tales is a bit more sour, a product, perhaps, of the source material (haven't read since undergrad), but at the very least, it leads to one of the most audacious and hilarious ending scenes in film history.

I saw Arabian Nights first a few years back at MoMA, don't remember it well

on The Decameron

https://www.artforum.com/film/andreas-petrossiants-on-pasolini-s-the-decameron-83588

Good piece. Been a decade since I saw The Decameron but there is work to be done on the way Pasolini engages with text and also his own readings of the change in the Italian working class at the time.

wrote an essay for @VersoBooks about pasolini's easter films (la ricotta, location hunting in palestine, il vangelo secondo matteo): his approach to landscape, technique of radical allegory, the influence of erich auerbach (thanks to @caitdoherty) https://t.co/lG9TU21XQm

— roland barfs (@rolandbarfs) April 2, 2021

With a thread title like this, I had to think if he had any films I would "destroy". La Rabbia is pretty irrelevant in 2021, and I didn't really get the point of Hawks and Sparrows. Everything else is interesting to great.

thread title otm

That's an interesting article by Andrew Key; I didn't realize Pasolini had written a screenplay about St. Paul.
One of my favourite books about the work of a single director is A Certain Realism by Maurizio Viano, he manages to touch on all of Pasolini's works, exploring common themes without rehashing the same points over and over.
Noodle Vague, are we really expected to love every film Pasolini made?

Is there a good/legal way to watch The Gospel according to Saint Matthew?

https://eurekavideo.co.uk/movie/the-gospel-according-to-matthew-il-vangelo-secondo-matteo/

However you see it, don't watch the colourized, cut and English-dubbed version from Legend Films!

However you see it, don't watch the colourized, cut and English-dubbed version from Legend Films!

https://eurekavideo.co.uk/movie/the-gospel-according-to-matthew-il-vangelo-secondo-matteo🕸/

the colourized, cut and English-dubbed version from Legend Films!

why the fuck would anybody do this??

I think it's meant for American Christians who presumably don't want to watch a long black-and-white film in Italian, whoever the main character is.

I rented a DVD of Gospel According to Matthew, was pretty old tho (Window-boxed)

Presumably whoever scripted the English-language version downplayed the Communist angle for the US audience too.

Most of the major work on The Criterion Channel. Have never watched Accatone, doing so tonight.

"Make sure to bury me over there, in the sunlight".

Presumably in celebration of his centennial.

For most of its running time Accattone plays like Rossellini or early Fellini: a seamier I Vitelloni. I don't know if the dream sequence quite works.

Watched the restored Gospel According to Matthew on CC; looks great.

It's true that Accattone isn't a formal break from the style and stories of neo-realism; what I love about it is the novelistic pacing and this thick aura of fatalism that overhangs the character, but is subtle enough that you can't put your finger on how it's created. I thought I might have voted for this in the all-time film poll, but instead I chose Edipo Re.

I'm still waiting for Noodle Vague to answer my question from eleven months ago.

Well that'll do ya

https://www.criterion.com/boxsets/6588-pasolini-101

I've still only ever see the Trilogy of Life.

just came here to post that. damn.

Trilogy of Life.

i have that blu-ray set

saw The Gospel According to Matthew recently and it seems like his greatest film. Mamma Roma, Accattone, The Hawks and the Sparrows, and Teorema are also really good

I thought Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom was a tedious and lifeless film

haven't seem the Trilogy of Life, those films are generally not available to rent

The documentary about Italian sex life sucks, I must say. It's done after 10 minutes.

Maurizio Viano says the only value the film has is as a documentary of the embarrassment and shame of the participants, who spend most of the time evading Pasolini's questions.

NYRB are releasing Teorema on paperback (didn't know it was a novel). I don't particularly care for him as a novelist but I am interested to see how these things translate.

My second favourite of his movies after St Matthew, I'm also interested in reading it

As I recall, the novel is a series of monologues by each of the family members and their relation to the guest.

Here's a thought I posted in the Rolling Stones thread:

On the subject of Metamorphosis, it occurred to me that "Family" has a lot in common with the Pasolini film Teorema: the four characters of the father, daughter, mother and son are very close, even in details like the daughter's attraction to the father and the son's impotent attempts to express himself as an artist...
But! The song was finished in June of 1968 and the film didn't premiere at the Venice Film Festival until September, so that would seem to indicate the film had no influence on the song...
But! Also in June of '68, the Stones filmed One Plus One with Jean-Luc Godard, whose wife Anne Wiazemsky would have just finished acting in Teorema itself at about that same time. Is it outlandish to propose that Jagger might have seen a summary or discussed the plot of the Pasolini film with either Godard or Wiazemsky herself, who appears in One Plus One (though not on-screen with the Stones)?

― Halfway there but for you, Saturday, January 29, 2022 4:28 AM (one year ago) bookmarkflaglink

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rIzA-QJRGV0

After watching The Gospel According to St. Matthew (eh), Mamma Roma (good, but rather too much spirited Anna Magnani laughter), and, tonight, Teorema, I realized we're not simpatico. Teorema is especially grueling. I admired its hesitations and its sketches of provincial life, but it's without a comma of humor -- this is Boudu territory yet it's so lethargic and po-faced.

I like those but I can understand why someone wouldn’t

Terence Stamp, whom I admire as an actor and figure, is so far from an erotic object that my hesitations also throw my sympathies out of whack

Hawks and Sparrows is probably his only comedy, and isn't very funny (though maybe someone finds Pigsty hilarious); although, as you mention, his characters seem to laugh a lot, maybe out of cruelty more often than joy.

The union's reaction to the boss's decision to give away his factory is meant to be funny, surely? But yeah I can't really with Pasolini either.

To me he is like a reader of texts turning to films. The New Testament, De Sade, old greek plays.

I loved Teorema and probably my favourite though I last saw it then years ago. Didn't feel like Stamp served as an erotic object, more like the thing that was missing in everyone he touched. It's a great idea.

Pigsty didn't work. Hawks and Sparrows I've yet to see

That's how I ultimately regarded Stamp.

a catalyst, more obvious with the son and his painting ambitions.

Terence Stamp, whom I admire as an actor and figure, is so far from an erotic object

Jake G has ruined all other men for you.

I've been aware of that for quite some time

I saw Teorema as a partial remake of My Man Godfrey

If William Powell had fucked Mischa Auer.

Viano suggests that, despite Teorema having some of the most literal gay content of any of Pasolini's films, it's actually the least concerned with homosexuality as a theme.