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

'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.

http://www.nga.gov/content/ngaweb/calendar/film-programs.html#film-programs.html?category=Film%20Programs&pageNumber=1

retrospective going in DC for free at the National gallery of Art

yesterday was the 40th anniversary of his murder

'65 interview:

Only a person with a great deal of professional experience is capable of inventing technically. As far as technical inventions go, I have never made any. I may have invented a given style—in fact, my films are recognizable for a particular style—but style does not always imply technical inventions. Godard is full of technical inventions. In Alphaville there are four or five things that are completely invented—for example those shots printed in negative. Certain technical rule-breakings of Godard are the result of a pains-taking personal study.

As for me, I never dared to try experiments of this kind, because I have no technical background. And so my first step was to simplify the technique. This is contradictory, because as a writer I tend to be extremely complicated—that is, my written page is technically very complex. While I was writing Una Vila Violente— technically very complex—I was shooting Accattone, which was technically very simple. This is the principal limitation of my cinematic career, because I believe that an author must have complete knowledge of all his technical instruments. A partial knowledge is a limitation. Therefore, at this particular moment, I believe that the first period of my cinematic work is about to close. And the second period is about to start, in which I will be a professional director also as far as technique in concerned.

http://www.filmcomment.com/article/pier-paolo-pasolini-interview/

http://www.panenka.org/destacadas/calcio-in-poesia/?alt_id=16112

interesting article if you can read Spanish and are interested in Pasolini's life-long passion for football (soccer).

Most interesting (to me) anecdote: Pasolini and Bertolucci had a falling out, they had once been close - Bertolucci having been an assistant director for Pasolini. They were filming in the general vicinity of each other - Pasolini filming Saló, Bertolucci Novecento - and Pasolini's helpers thought to cheer Pasolini up a meeting between the crews might be nice. Pasolini suggested a game of soccer. He played for the Saló crew, while Bertolucci was a bystander. Novecento won 5-2, Pasolini got mad, and stormed off after the game without even greeting Bertolucci.

Wish there was a cheap-ish copy of a selection of hsi poetry to hand

rewatched Abel Ferrara's Pasolini tonight. found it angrier than i remembered it, suitably angry tbh. such a sense of waste at the end.

That jim in glasgow story, two posts up, is awesome.

“Pino Pelosi, a former rent boy convicted in the 1975 murder of writer and director Pier Paolo Pasolini, died of cancer in a Rome hospital aged 58 Wednesday night,” reports ANSA. “Pelosi confessed to murdering Pasolini the day after his death on November 2, 1975 but several years later retracted his confession, fueling conspiracy theories that the iconic leftist gay novelist, poet and filmmaker had been assassinated by political opponents. Pelosi was found guilty in 1976 of murder along with unknown others; the court ruled he was not alone.”

http://www.ansa.it/english/news/lifestyle/arts/2017/07/20/pasolini-killer-pelosi-dies-4_8c49cdfc-b8ef-4086-8625-79f34f76fe7b.html

I resaw the Ferrara film tonight, and somehow never knew Ninetto Davoli became PPP's bf at age 15 til AF brought it up in the Q&A.

enjoyed Mamma Roma, I had never watched it before. It was dedicated to Rossellini and was made with Rome, Open City in mind, using the same actress, Anna Magnani, who is fantastic. It was interesting to read that Pasolini’s actors were mostly nonprofessionals who only starred in his films, and that he chose them because their acting did not seem “real” (eg, Ettore’s sleepwalking gait). I recognized quite a few of them in this from Accattone (the only other film of his I have seen so far)

never watched a film with Ninetto Davoli in it before. He is really charming in The Hawks and the Sparrows, as is Totò. I like that Pasolini as an atheist was looking for beauty in representations of faith

Davoli is in the Ferrara film... and a young actor plays him in it

I will look for it

wow Oedipus Rex is very satisfying. Franco Citti is such a hot-head!

I liked the abrupt split in eras in which the story took place, and that the time rupture did not coincide with the film’s division into its first and second parts

amateurist’s comment above that “it was a major inspiration for the taiwanese new wave directors” is interesting

also like that the thread starter has no user name

Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom is the first Pasolini film that has let me down

looking forward to seeing Theorem

haven't found a way yet to watch The Gospel According to Saint Matthew

*Teorema

Let's wait for Morbs to return from his Teorema screening earlier today.

It has its moments, even a few after Stamp departs, and I like how he makes Milan look like shit.

It's not a very queer movie; falling in love with Stamp is just a metaphor for having your bourgeois self wrecked. Not one of his best.

Had to turn off the gospel of st matthew, couldn't get past the seemingly endless series of pronouncements in close up. decameron was ok but I don't think I get pasolini at all right now

Rewatched Accatone, his first and among the best and most unsparing. Franco Citti had a very beautiful/ugly thing goin' on. (He's in many of the later films and shows up in Sicily in The Godfather.) The recurring scenes of the ne'er-do-wells' main hangout also anticipates the sidewalk social club/cafe in The Sopranos.

Franco Citti's crooked teeth are distracting

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.

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.

I re-watched Teorema. It's very funny and an excellent story idea, and well executed. Beautiful soundtrack. The music was ace.

Deeply cynical film. I kind want to watch recent 'Marxist'/class films like Triangle of Sadness now.

It's playing at the BFI soon, might go.