Pier Paolo Pasolini

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zedz
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Re: Pier Paolo Pasolini

#51 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

#52 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
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Re: Pier Paolo Pasolini

#53 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

#54 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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Re: Pier Paolo Pasolini

#55 Post by therewillbeblus » Mon Mar 30, 2020 12:15 pm

I felt compelled to revisit Porcile and found that I misremembered a lot of the avenues Pasolini took to concocting a powerful whole. There is still a Godardian approach of clashing imagery with verbal intellectualization, highlighting the absurdity of attempts to summarize human conditions with distorted perspective, but the nouvelle vague influences I recalled only manifested in pieces as ways to playfully exaggerate the insane dynamics of socialization and lead into political meditations. My thoughts are so disorganized that I hope they may make sense to somebody, but it's difficult to draw any kind of thesis considering the vague conference of abstractions here.

This is a film that is about the nature and effects of contrast, all all their humor and horror. At first, when switching between the two storylines, I felt that there were contradictions in confidence unless that confidence was rooted in nonverbal experience. For a while I tended to think the silent scenes of the man wandering were truth: fear, confusion, immediate physical responses to immediate physical variables, visual contemplation in real landscapes; while the Leaud/Wiazemsky scenes were the artifice: taking place in constructed spaces, spouting ideas that are meaningless without any sensible connective tissue or an outlet for realization and development. Their words embrace paradoxes and juxtapositions of concepts delivered in opposing semantics just like the opening narration does, and their elitist privilege allows contradictions to exist without consequence. And yet Pasolini’s roaming silent man has no more answers than they do, and his life is no more meaningful; in fact Leaud makes it pretty clear he rejects meaning or identity pretty early (while in the same breath defining his rejection of these ideas by his male identity which is an explanation of meaning!). So can truth be relative or is it only meaningful in the form of intellectual ideas to the bourgeoisie, while to the poor the truth takes on a different form? Is the film saying that regardless of what shape our authentic experience takes, it’s not actually meaningful taken by itself? By presenting these two spaces, a jarring composite, we are forced into seeing two opposing truths, and thus are closer than any character or person (ourselves included) to realising expansive truth, because we get to see multiple perspectives through the gift of the medium. But this is an artificial instrument and a giant gag on us, for not only is this impossible in real life but even in the context of the film we get no real answers, only wild questions. Much like the best of Godard’s film essay work, the questions provide the outlet by pointing to the absence of answers while still identifying this as the void. Pasolini’s film is having fun with that idea though in a deliberately cheeky assembly, and the joke is on us for digging too deeply, when I believe the point is that we cannot do so, naturally or otherwise, but isn’t the medium of cinema amazing for affording us the ability to at least take on multiple positions and be asked multiple questions at once?

While this is very funny brimming with absurdist comedy of total surrender in disconnect, in both sections - whether between people and people/social norms/political ideas/signified definitions, or a person and an endless landscape, it is also gravely serious. There is exposition of the terror of that vast swallowing nature physically threatening the man, and that vast space of impossible connection between people in the mansion, using intellectual and ethical differentiation as disrupted pathways to intimacy (even when they suggest kissing, the key to this act seems to be in sharing perspective, which cannot occur so they remain at odds with one another and unpredictable to themselves). Contradictions are expressed in dichotomies: proclamations of love and affection in the same breath as the will to murder and make suffering the same party.

Each part mirrors the other: the silent man has concerns of safety while the rich are physically safe but emotionally barren via convoluted philosophical concerns. Perhaps, similar to how I read Hawks and Sparrows, Pasolini is saying that the moment we begin attempting to ignore the basic reality for some kind of meaning of life, we lose ourselves and that meaning that is all around us, though what is in front of Leaud and Wiazemsky isn’t exactly motivating worldly humility! The silent man encounters people and situations that are equally as absurd and puzzling, suggesting perhaps no matter whether you traverse direct, raw experience or the realm of ideological analysis, we’re in the same boat of perplexing vacancy of secure awareness or any grasp at harmonious comprehension of the world. There is a terrific scene where Wiazemsky argues with an older woman about what a comatosed Leaud’s perspective and interests were, each so sure about what he feels, thinks, and believes; they then turn to him and wonder what he would say if he could hear them, before analyzing him again with certainty! This is a familiarly rooted joke in solipsism and subjective handicaps, but manifested so strangely and permeated throughout this film that each gag mirrors as a troubling truth, taking on dual meanings and beyond. Even the dictation of events in telling stories between people doesn’t add up to anything substantial, but it surely passes the time and sounds interesting, while the silent man’s trek actually lives the stories, moving through time and yet is it more interesting? Characters interact or don’t but they are appearing aimless while still designed to approach objectives in each story. Leaud is sick of human association, so he surrenders. The silent man is sick of struggling, so he continues on. Is one right and one wrong? Or is either validated given their own distinct circumstances and point of view? A strong theme here is suffering, but whether that is impressed upon people as sufferers by others who process from their own vantage point (other characters toward Leaud; the audience toward the silent man) or if it’s sublimation in suffering in the context of Buddhism’s first noble truth which begets serenity, it’s unclear. This is a wonderfully ambiguous film, and one of the most fun abstractions to which we can assign our own meaning.

There is another critical scene where Leaud’s father’s rival states that Leaud is drawn to the pigsty despite going off to pursue education and meeting women, that his heart belongs with the pigs. They insinuate that the pigs may be synonymous with Jews here (which I have trouble with in this specific example, even if there is a clear allegory at play through the obvious postwar Germany attacks, Hitler mustaches and all), but the cryptic insinuation of Leaud’s fate to magnetize towards pigs' filth and non-human entities, coupled with a quip associating this with God’s omnipresence, before leaving it there unfinished sans answers, is a great gag specifically because it is frustrating in setting up absolute causal meaning only to subvert the audience and deprive of any answers, declaring in fact that there are none. I rewound that scene the other night about three times trying to figure out what he meant, but there we go: maybe the joke is on me- which would be fitting for my impression of Pasolini’s aims here at declaring anti-truths. I'm curious what zedz thoughts are on this one.

The political side perhaps finds the silent cannibal embodying the oppressed who in turn oppress in a cyclical process of destruction disguised as resilience; while the industrialist businessmen represent Germany’s sneaky dealings and the Leaud/Wiazemsky as the 60s children who either become revolutionaries of action and ideology, or apathetic and internalized in their social surrender. However, despite all of these political allegories, the social and philosophical propositions remain broad enough to apply much significance to, and whose humor is found in, nihilism - with both leads perishing through fate in the end as outcasts, whether by externally forced or self-persecution. Maybe that's another idea the film puts forth- if undisciplined (going by the opening narration separating the "disciplined" from "undisciplined" which I took to mean those who follow suit in ideology vs. those who attempt to self-actualize on their own) there is only one end to reach, but one's social status allows the choosing on how to meet that end. Therefore, the silent man will be captured and forcibly eliminated, while Leaud will indirectly lead himself to suicide.

Few exchanges are more darkly humorous than the final moments where the rival asks for any traces of Leaud's identity only to command that he be erased from all expression, reducing Leaud to nothingness even in memory, an extremely horrific cap on an idea of humans as vessels of meaning balled up in comic irony. This seems to be the only moment in the film that achieves absolutism (we as the audience aren't even granted continuity or visual catharsis in our main characters' respective fates), which could suggest that only the fascists can be granted such power, though in that concrete containment one misses the mystery and interest of life, such as the questions Leaud asks or the adventures the silent man experiences. Should we keep asking questions and experiencing adventure, even without safety? Well Pasolini has made a film that is full of intrigue and these are the reasons for such intrigue, so if that is as close to the meaning of life as we can get: to be interested, exploring, and self-actualizing; I'd say it's a step in the right direction. Whether they become punished or not isn't necessarily rendering the actions they have taken futile so much as created an entire absurdist milieu of chaos and challenge to confidently hold onto one's bearings, which is certainly a truth so far as Pasolini sees it. It doesn't help that we are ultimately isolated and cannot adequately communicate our ideas and identities! At least not without contradicting ourselves and chanting "Tra-la-la" in surrender to the madness.

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Re: Pier Paolo Pasolini

#56 Post by zedz » Tue Mar 31, 2020 5:49 pm

EDIPO RE

Okay, this is where everything starts to click for me: Pasolini mastering his mythic mode and weaving his various political, social and psychological concerns into the pre-exisiting material rather than overtly drawing them out (as in Il vangelo) or grafting them on (as in Uccellacci e uccellini). The Freudian and modern historic subtexts are opened up by the prologue and epilogue, but left hanging cryptically for much of the film, which offers an immersion in a fully realized, strange, ancient world (with even more outlandish costumes).

Pasolini has slashed the dialogue even more drastically than he had done in Il vangelo, and this would be his new normal (even with a contemporary-set film like Teorema). The silent film aesthetic extends to the use of intertitles to express the characters’ thoughts. The stark emphasis on visual storytelling is what makes this filmic mode so powerful for me, and Pasolini finds new expressive means in the simplest mise en scene and montage. After Oedipus consults the Oracle of Delphi, he walks away through the crowd, his personal isolation (he knows he can never return to Corinth) illustrated by cuts between Oedipus moving through the people and Oedipus, in the same location, completely alone.

The killing of Laius is also staged like no other fight scene I can think of, with Oedipus running away from the guards until they’re both exhausted. There’s even a moment when the two combatants both have to rest and catch their breath before they can re-engage. In this sequence I really like the decision to stage the moments of greatest brutality looking into the sun. It fits perfectly with the rough and improvised nature of the fight as well as alluding to the theme of blindness that runs through the film (consider Oedipus’ immediate reaction to the Oracle’s bad news and the manner in which he allows fate to conduct him to Thebes).

Pasolini’s conception of Oedipus is as a hot-tempered anti-intellectual, which both goes against the gain of the original myth – this Oedipus doesn’t defeat the Sphinx with intelligence, but with brute force – and mitigates the tragedy of his fate. He’s not an otherwise good man (and good king) stymied by an implacable fate, but an arrogant discus cheat who is largely complict in his own downfall because he’s so belligerent and obtuse. Key line, to the Sphinx: “I don’t know! I don’t want to know!” Pasolini himself turns up within the film to challenge the king over his handling of the plague. (Hey, this film is topical too!)

I love the breathless pace of the first half of the film, which employs Pasolini’s trademark reckless elisions to pack a lot of story into a compact time frame (while still allowing scenes like the conflict with Laius to unfold at surprising length). Once the story settles in Thebes things slow down – perhaps unnecessarily so – and Oedipus is so dim in putting two and two together (maybe, just maybe, that old guy you killed on the road who was wearing your crown was the former king?) that it starts to feel more draggy than it actually is.

Ninetto appears as a messenger – a role in which Pasolini would cast him in several films. He’s also called ‘Angelo’, and the idea of the actor as an Angel of the Annunciation also follows through in later works (Teorema perhaps most obviously). Franco Citti and Silvana Mangano also return, and they’re both fully into the strange, hieratic vibe of the film. Both actors juxtapose underplayed stillness with moments of childish pantomime. It’s completely non-naturalistic, but in tune with both the film’s aesthetic and Pasolini’s conception of the characters.

CHE COSA SONO LE NUVOLE? (Episode of Cappriccio all’Italiana)

The final Toto and Ninetto film, and probably my favourite of the three. As far as I’m aware it’s never been released with English subs, but it’s not too hard to follow if you have a little Italian and are familiar with Othello.

Ninetto and Toto are life-sized marionettes playing Othello (in blackface) and Iago (in greenface) respectively, before a rowdy provincial audience. The plot unfolds according to Shakespeare, with the unusual, and oddly touching, elaboration of Ninetto watching Iago’s machinations from the wings and sadly asking him between scenes why he is so wicked. And yet, on stage, despite this gifted insight, he is impelled to continue with the scripted tragedy.

However, the audience is so outraged by Iago’s wickedness and Othello’s jealous rage that they storm the stage and interrupt the performance, “killing” both Iago and Othello, who are carried away by the junk man and unceremoniously dumped. Broken and doomed, they look up at the clouds in the sky for the first time, with a sense of wonder.

For me, this film attains the seriocomic tone that I expect Pasolini was aiming for (and missing) with the actors’ previous collaborations. Toto died shortly after completing the film, putting paid to what might otherwise have been an ongoing three-way collaboration.

APPUNTI PER UN FILM SULL’INDIA

Notes for a film that was never made, this is a fascinating look at both the unmade film and Pasolini’s creative process.

Pasolini travels around India, scouting locations and actors for a film that he has thoroughly conceptualized, but not yet written. It’s about the relationship between religion and hunger (which makes it a close cousin of Uccellacci e uccellini), and also represents a parable of India’s colonial and independent history.

A maharajah offers his body to some starving tigers (this event is drawn from an Indian legend), and thereafter his impoverished family travel the country, destitute, as each of the four survivors (widow, daughter, two sons) die from hunger in far-flung parts of the country. Not just a grim story, but a grim vision of India post-independence.

Pasolini evaluates and dismisses locations and faces, and, most interestingly, employs Comizi d’Amore-style street interviews to assess the plausibilty of his story in terms of modern psychology. Hence the remarkable spectacle of Pasolini asking random Indians if they would be willing to sacrifice themselves to feed a starving tiger. He’s met mostly with demurrals, and I have no idea whether that became a stumbling block to actually making the film, or whether it was just a matter of logistics and finance.

As far as I’m aware, this film has only ever been released in an English-friendly edition on the old Tartan box set.
Last edited by zedz on Tue Mar 31, 2020 6:08 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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Re: Pier Paolo Pasolini

#57 Post by zedz » Tue Mar 31, 2020 5:58 pm

TEOREMA

I tend to run hot and cold on this film, but this time through I really appreciated it. I think the issue is that I love the filmmaking, but am kind of underwhelmed by the schematics of the story. So this time I was trying to engage with the latter more critically.

The ‘theorem’ of the title is usually simplified into some platitudes about the disruptive power of sex on the staid bourgeoisie, but 1) that’s not really borne out by the film’s plot; and 2) Pasolini is experimenting in other dimensions with this film as well.

Let’s deal with the filmmaking first. Here, Pasolini sees what will happen if he applies his mythic mode of filmmaking to a contemporary, bourgeois subject. So we get very minimal dialogue, faux silent-film sections, faux cinema verite sections and so forth. So that’s one f(x): mythic mode (anti-mythic content). It’s also the first film Pasolini had made with a wholly professional cast (I guess we can count Ninetto as a professional after six films!) So that’s another f(x): professional cast (Pasolini film). It actually works really well, because everybody tends to keep a lid on their performances, allowing the characters’ sometimes crazy behaviour to play as credible as possible.

The film’s narrative f(x) is Terence Stamp, and while it’s obvious that x stands for this bourgeois household (and presumably the Italian bourgeois in general), the nature of f, and the meaning of its outcomes, are much more opaque. Stamp’s visitor is a vehicle for sex, but in most instances he is not the character that initiates it and on closer inspection is much more passive than one might recall from a distance.

In fact, what he’s really offering the various household members in most cases is empathy. After he saves her life, Emilia the maid offers herself to him; he turns her down. She is ashamed and he consoles her. Pietro the son is ashamed of his homosexual feelings towards the visitor; the visitor consoles him and assures him it’s all right. Lucia the mother strips off and lies in wait for the visitor, then feels shame at her actions. The visitor consoles her and has sex with her. Are we noticing a pattern here? The patriarch is perhaps the most complicated character. He observes his son sleeping with the visitor, which arouses his own suppressed homosexual longings, then tries to initiate sex with his wife to assert his straightness and fails miserably. He lapses into a psychosomatic illness, from which the visitor provides relief by raising his legs onto his shoulders. Paolo the father later confesses his confusion to the visitor, who offers to fuck him better in the environs of the kind of riverside inn Massimo Girotti had inhabited in Visconti’s Ossessione all those years ago. Odetta the daughter slightly breaks the pattern, and is the only family member with whom the visitor truly initiates sex unprompted. She is obsessed with her father and distraught by the illness his sexual identity crisis has brought on. The visitor liberates her from this “domestic cult.”

The visitor’s intervention – which as we have seen has taken the form of both consolation and sex – impacts each of the members of the household in different ways. As soon as he has effected these changes, Ninetto’s messenger arrives to announce his departure.

For Pietro, discovering he’s gay has shattered his previous identity. He now knows that he is fundamentally “different from others” and so becomes a really shitty artist.

Lucia realises the hollowness of her life and its bourgeois values, and the sudden absence of the visitor’s great sex (plus her gay husband’s non-sex) drives her to seek anonymous sexual encounters with roadside rough trade.

Odetta, in contradistinction to her brother, feels that having sex with Terence Stamp has rendered her suddenly normal (liberating her from her father fixation). She regressses to childishness and ultimately an infantile catatonia: the purest expression of conformity. Pasolini is clearly exploring ideas of sexuality as a key marker of normative life, a central pillar of hegemony. And here we can see just how useful his ‘research’ in Comizi d’Amore would prove for this film.

Paolo first becomes bedridden, then, acknowledging that his identity has been destroyed, also loses his faith in order, and specifically ownership (the fundamental order of bourgeois society). He surrenders his factory to the workers, strips naked, and walks off into the wilderness. But first, he’s given the opportunity to embrace a new identity when he cruises a gay man at the train station. He cannot bring himself to accept his own homosexuality, and would rather lose everything instead.

So the impact of f(x) on the bourgeois family is one of complete disruption (all but possibly Lucia leave the family home), but this disruption results in new identities that are just as shallow and constrained as their old ones.

And what of the maid? Her tale is fundamentally different from those of the other household members, and is placed structurally in opposition to them, as it’s the story that we watch unfold in bits and pieces, interrupting the sequential fates of the family members. For additional significance, Pasolini casts his mother in this section, and if you’re buried alive by Pasolini’s mum, you must be pretty special, right?

Emilia leaves the house, returns to her home, where she becomes a self-abnegating holy figure, eating nettles, healing the sick, levitating, and ultimately sacrificing herself by being buried alive.

Where the family’s transformations are all variations on self-indulgent retreat into themselves, Emilia’s is the only one marked by selflessness and helping others.

For the bourgeois family, the visitor’s function is one of sex, and their responses to his visit and departure ae predicated on that: Odetta conforms; Pietro rebels (not sexually, but in the socially acceptable form of artistic expression, however pitiful); Lucia seeks a new identity defined by sex; Paolo’s identity is shattered by his inability to accept his true sexuality.

But for Emilia, it’s the other aspect of the visitor’s behaviour that transforms her: empathy, consolation. She accepts his true message, and uses it to help others.

There’s a fairly transparent political allegory here (the proletariat are better primed for social transformation, whereas the bourgeoisie are bound by narcissism, conformity and self-interest), but there’s also a religious one, with the maid the only person able to interpret and accept the visitor’s Christian message (“love thy neighbour” in its fullest form, not the narrow reading that's all the bourgeois family see).

The music is credited to Enno Morricone, but the film’s memorable, uncredited theme is actually Mingus offsider Ted Curson’s sublime ‘Tears for Dolphy’. Mozart’s in the mix as well, so I’m guessing Morricone contributed the Ligeti-like elements of the score and possibly the jangly pop that accompanies Ninetto’s annunciation and plays on radios throughout the film.

LA SEQUENZE DEL FIORE DI CARTA (Episode of Amore e Rabbia)

Kind of a coda to the Toto / Ninetto films, without the late Toto. Ninetto cavorts through city streets, with and without a large paper flower, while his activies are overlaid by newsreel footage.

At the surface level, this is an extremely literal interpretation of the portmanteau film’s “brief”, a juxtaposition of indulgent footage of Pasolini’s lover with apparent outtakes of his collage documentary La Rabbia.

At only ten minutes, it’s more of a vignette than even a short, but there’s a neat theological twist towards the end with God (on the soundtrack) begging Ninetto’s oblivious character to give him a sign that he acknowledges His existence.

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knives
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Re: Pier Paolo Pasolini

#58 Post by knives » Tue Mar 31, 2020 6:12 pm

I always felt that with Teorema Pasolini was sort of working in conversation with Renoir's Boudu. Like in that film Pasolini seems mostly curious about what happens when the mirror is lifted and the real people come out. Though as you highlight Pasolini does this in a rather inverted way. Just comparing Stamp and Simon highlights that as whereas Simon is a grotesque, hyperactive imp Stamp is a stoic Adonis (Pasolini really knew how to make men attractive when he wanted to) who functions more as a traditional mirror.

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Re: Pier Paolo Pasolini

#59 Post by therewillbeblus » Tue Mar 31, 2020 6:53 pm

I like both of your readings of Teorema (more than I like the film) though to make it even simpler, Stamp seems to function not for cause (empathy, reflection) but as a self-actualized rogue constant. By simply existing within a milieu that has so much defensive internal and socially enforced external conflict, his mere presence results in his function being that of sex, of empathy, or a mirror, a grab bag of use - but I think it’s important to differentiate what he becomes in the presence of various chaoses vs his status as an independent variable. One could even say that he is only in that independent role because he doesn’t conform to the real independent variables that are social mores and psychological handicaps barring identity and self-honesty, so his presence shakes things up only as an extension of what the response to him is. So he’s a mirror but not because he embodies that trait, only by how he is used by the characters when faced uncomfortably with novelty and juxtaposition. To say it another way: because he’s another equal variable who is immune to becoming dependent on the independent variables of sociopolitical and emotional turmoil, he becomes forced into the role of the fiercest independent variable by others, as a threat to the comfortable ones that are expected rather than his unexpected isolative zen garden. I guess that wasn’t simpler.

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zedz
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Re: Pier Paolo Pasolini

#60 Post by zedz » Wed Apr 01, 2020 11:31 pm

PORCILE

The modern / ancient synthesis of Teorema is, with the subsequent film, reconceptualised as a dialectic, with two thematically related stories told simultaneously. The film’s two halves are radically different stylistically as well, the ancient story told entirely in visual terms (it has only one line of audible dialogue, with its other burst of speech, the proclamation of a sentenc, drowned out by church bells). The stark volcanic landscape (Pierre Clementi is in an extended rehearsal for La Cicatrice interieure) of the ancient story is consistently asymmetrical, whereas the settings for the modern story are rigidly symmetrical – and yet Clementi is generally right at the centre of the frame, whereas the framing in the modern story is consistently, queasily off-centre, both in close-up and long shot. The modern story is also very funny, in an extremely dark mode.

The two films are in perpetual collision, and I find this dynamic really compelling, given how completely different in texture the two narratives are. There are little moments of sparking connection scattered throughout, however. I particularly like the small detail that, the first time we move from the oppressive symmetry of the modern world to the chaos of the ancient one, the first thing we see is Clementi devouring an emblem of symmetry: the butterfly.

Both films deal with “unspeakable” social transgressions, but it’s only in the near-silent ancient story that Clementi is able to articulate the unspeakable, in his only line of dialogue. In the insanely verbose modern story, nobody is able to broach the unspeakable until Ninetto’s witness / messenger (the only actor / character common to both stories) spills the beans at the very end. The bourgeois response? “Shhhh.”

MEDEA

This has been my favourite Pasolini film ever since I first saw it, and while I love the productive dichotomies of Porcile more than ever, I think Medea retains its position at the top of the heap, as it’s the best example we have of what Pasolini, in his mythic mode, did that nobody else did, before or since.

The film opens with a verbal / visual gag that manages to condense the dialectic of Porcile into a few on-screen minutes: Chiron the centaur narrates the ridiculously complicated back story of Jason to his young charge, who falls asleep in the middle of it. (This is another Pasolinian reconception of a classical figure as something of an incurious oaf.) If we’re similarly ignoring Chiron’s blocks of exposition, we might miss the articulation of a key idea of these mythic films: the idea that myths are a real part of everyday life.

There follows a powerful, extended depiction of Colchis (represented by a stunningly photographed Cappodocia) that goes deeper into imaginative ethnography than any other Pasolini film, with a blow-by-blow account of human sacrifice and associated rituals. In this section of the film, which takes up most of the first half, we’re completely immersed in Medea’s culture before she’s removed from it.

Pasolini gives a great sense of scope and scale to his films by embodying each of the narrative’s locations with radically different real-world landscapes and architecture. Iolcus is a Syrian village (thematically appropriate, as Jason dismisses it as too parochial after seeing the splendours of Colchis); and Corinth is a classical Italian walled city, monumental and orderly (also thematically significant for its clearly demarcated ‘inside’ and ‘outside’).

After two features relying heavily on the skills of professional actors, Pasolini is back working with amateurs in the lead. Callas is terrific in her only film acting role: a commanding presence that isn’t at all “operatic”. And Giuseppe Gentile, in his only film, period, is pretty good too as a loutish Jason who doesn’t do anything remotely heroic during the course of the film.

The score – as far as I can tell – is entirely assembled from found music: traditional music from all over the world (African, Bulgarian, Japanese). It’s part of an amazing sound design that takes Pasolini’s non-verbal cinema to its expressive height: silence, music, screams, chants.

The most remarkable thing about the film’s narrative, and the element that really wowed me the first time I saw the film, is its double denouement. We see Medea’s revenge twice, first as prophecy (a fleshed out, ten-minute sequence, not just a momentary flash forward), then as actuality. It’s a pretty remarkable literalisation of the power of magic and prophecy in this ancient world, but it’s also fascinating on rewatch and re-rewatch for the ways in which the two tellings of the same story differ. The first version is more explicitly supernatural, with Medea’s grandfather Helios, the sun, inspiring and encouraging the curse, then enacting it as Glauce bursts into flames upon donning Medea’s garments. This version also places more emphasis on the gifting of those garments. The actualization of the curse is complicated by Creon’s unforeseen banishment of Medea, and her stalling for time in which to enact her vengeance, and extended by the preparation and execution of her final revenge on Jason: the murder of their sons. Perhaps more remarkable is that Pasolini’s bold structural experiment here is faithful to the literary / historical record, as there are various extant versions of the end of Medea’s story that don’t line up in their details.

There’s a sense here that the gods in Pasolini’s world are far more remote than in the original myths. Helios is invoked in the Prophecy version of the climax, but does not feature at all in the “real” events that follow (in which Glauce and her father throw themselves from the city walls). Similarly, in one of the film’s strangest scenes, the two incarnations of Chiron (centaur and human) that we’d seen at the beginning of the film, unexplained, appear together to explain to Jason that his love for Medea is not genuine love, but a form of enchantment engendered by the centaur Chiron. In the legend, it’s the meddling of Eros or Aphrodite.

APPUNTI PER UN’ORESTIADE AFRICANA

Using a very similar format to his Indian ‘non-making-of’, Pasolini outlines a putative version of the Orestes story set in Africa. Again, we see a scouting of locations and potential actors (and this time he’s more explicit than ever in comparing found people with found landscapes), and hear an explanation of the story he’s intending to tell and the reasons he has for proposing such a radical narrative transplant. Key among these is relocating the advent of democracy (and thus the birth of ‘modern’ society) in the source play to the arrival of democracy and ‘modernity’ in the newly decolonised states of Africa.

Rather than do his usual vox pop research in the streets, Pasolini screens bits of the film in progress to African university students and asks for feedback, and they’re rather critical of his own colonialism. Africa is a continent, not a country, one student notes pithily, and another points out how problematic Pasolini’s emphasis on tribalism is, given how tribalism had traditionally been used as a justification for colonialism.

There are some appealing ideas tossed out over the course of the film (the Furies taking a non-human form: trees perhaps; a free-jazz Cassandra), but they never convince me as components of an actual film, and the links Pasolini draws between the source material and his proposed embodiment of it all seem more academic that persuasively filmic. Of course, there’s always the possibility that no real-world film was ever actually intended, and this essay film was Pasolini’s way of presenting and exploring some ideas he found intriguing.

LE MURA DI SANA

Probably Pasolini’s most traditional documentary, an activist film inspired by the incipient destruction (physical and cultural) of the ancient city of Sana in Yemen and directed at Unesco. He likens it to the ruined skyline of the medieval Italian town of Orte. It’s a fine, very straight film, thematically related to the African documentary, and I liked that the corruption of modernity was represented by English biscuits, shoes and Oum Kalthoum LPs!

A note on two other films credited to Pasolini on IMDB that I’m not covering:
- L’Orgia seems to be a filmed record of a theatrical performance of a play written by Pasolini (and starring Laura Betti), which is not what I’d class as “un film di Pasolini”.
- Appunti per un romanzo dell’immodezza was an unfinished documentary from 1970 that has subsequently been cobbled together a couple of times into different films, but I don’t think either of them count as proper Pasolini works. As far as I know, and despite IMDB, I don’t believe there’s any 1970 version of the film.

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zedz
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Re: Pier Paolo Pasolini

#61 Post by zedz » Fri Apr 03, 2020 11:19 pm

THE TRILOGY OF LIFE

This is where Pasolini’s output doesn’t just dip into the ordinary, but for the first time in his career becomes boring to me. I can understand his desire to make films that connect with the mass audience (while simultaneously shaking up "bourgeois values"), but there’s so little to recommend the first two films of the trilogy they almost feel like the work of some uninspired imitator.

I first saw The Decameron on VHS, the only Pasolini film in the local video store, soon after I discovered his work, and was shocked by its banality. There were traces of the very distinctive signature I’d fallen for in Il vangelo secondo Matteo, but this looked the work of somebody who’d given up.

I caught up with the remaining two films on the repertory circuit in London (back when there was a repertory circuit in London) in the early 90s, along with the majority of his other features, and was doubly shocked: The Canterbury Tales was even worse that The Decameron, an objectively bad film by any measure; but Arabian Nights was somehow inspired, and threatened to redeem the entire project all on its own. Of the three films, I’ve revisited the last a few times in the intervening years, the first once, and had never been so desperate as to rewatch The Canterbury Tales.

IL DECAMERON

I can appreciate the craft of this film more now that I’m inured to the drastic drop in quality from Medea et al., but it’s all over the place, even on its own modest, commercial terms.

Franco Citti, who provides the unifying figure of the film’s first half, is good as an ominous common thread, but the climactic tale focussing on his character is rather lame. In this part of the film, we also see Ninetto Davoli attempting his first real dramatic role in a Pasolini film, and he’s really fucking bad, mugging shamelessly and killing dead everybody else on screen with the aurora of his shittiness.

After Citti’s character is written out, Pasolini himself takes over as the loosely focal figure of the second half, somewhat irrelevantly, as his scenes are even less integrated into the various stories than in the first part of the film.

The stories throughout the film are predictable and samey, smutty rather than erotic (the view of sex in this film and its sequel is far more bourgeois than Pasolini would like to admit). One saving grace, or point of difference, is that male nudity is far more prevalent in this movie than in most other ‘sexy’ films of the time (or, for that matter, now), but even that modest distinction would be wiped out in The Canterbury Tales.

I RACCONTI DI CANTERBURY

Pasolini learns the commercial lessons of his biggest hit and doubles down on them cravenly. There’s even a scene here of Pasolini as Chaucer cribbing from The Decameron.

I came into this rewatch as charitably as possible, but in every respect it’s a lesser imitation of what was, up until this point, Pasolini’s worst film. The gags are crasser (lots or arses, lots of farting and shitting); the stories are more repetitive; the acting is more uneven (and neither soundtrack really helps much); and there’s lots and lots of gratuitous female nudity for the raincoat brigade (e.g. Ninetto’s dream).

The English landscape and architecture is far more ordinary than we expect from Pasolini, and the costumes are garish and uncoordinated. Visually, this film is a bit of a mess for most of its running time.

One of the most interesting features of Chaucer’s work is the way in which the individual tales express the personalities and relationships of their tellers, but the framing story in the film is so underdeveloped (and the tales selected so samey) that this element is all but completely lost in adaptation.

The film wasn’t quite as bad as I remembered, it’s more just consistently uninspired. The stand-out sequences are: the strikingly misconceived Cook’s Tale, in which Ninetto is required to sustain a completely mediocre Chaplin impersonation for the duration; the paired tales that cast Franco Citti as a very effective Death (culminating with the film’s one great cinematic moment: the sudden darkness that descends as soon as Death claims the rent collector); and the Summoner’s Tale at the end. It’s no coincidence that the two Death anecdotes and the Summoner's Tale (also a Death anecdote) are the three tales that eschew the cuckolded husbands / conniving wives / randy students template of everything else.

IL FIORE DELLE MILLE E UNA NOTTE

This film reveals that, however bad the preceding films of the trilogy were, it wasn’t a flaw of their conception, as here Pasolini delivers what I presume he was trying to do all along: a celebration of sex and storytelling that’s continually engaging and inventive. The nesting of narratives in this film is an ingenious solution to the structural problems of the first two films (the rather arbitrary focal figures of The Decameron’s two halves; the half-hearted frame of The Canterbury Tales). The message is: if you have a good story and engaging characters, you don’t need to see the storyteller. This approach is also democratising, with everybody one encounters a potential narrator of their own story (which is the approach we probably would have seen in a less haphazard Canterbury Tales, rather than the uninspired Chaucer default we ended up with.)

The vast improvement we see with this film fundamentally boils down to better stories and better acting (even Ninetto pushes in the stops), but it’s also far more interesting on a subtextual level. Where The Canterbury Tales often turned into an adolescent boy's spank bank, this film balances male and female nudity (extensive in both cases) and has a strong feminist undertow, in which women are the authors of their own stories, are resourceful, powerful and intelligent – where even a slave girl can earn her freedom through her wits, outwit the men who seek to re-enslave and abuse her, and ultimately become King of a great city. Even tragic Aziza is the one calling the shots (however painful they might be) in her story.

This might have the only joyous ending of any Pasolini film, and it’s one that feels genuinely earned. (Though both of his heroes will get their comeuppance in his last film.)

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AidanKing
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Re: Pier Paolo Pasolini

#62 Post by AidanKing » Wed Apr 08, 2020 5:40 am

I am really enjoying zedz' run-through of Pasolini's films and am looking forward to his take on Salo.

If anyone is interested in more reading on Pasolini, I can recommend Pasolini Requiem, a biography by Barth David Schwartz, and this edition of some of Pasolini's poetry, translated by Stephen Sartarelli. I think the poems from Gramsci's Ashes fit particularly well with the films, with The Apennines and Gramsci's Ashes being reminiscent of the more mythic films and The Cry of the Excavator evoking Rome in a similar way to the first two features.
Last edited by AidanKing on Thu Apr 09, 2020 4:23 am, edited 1 time in total.

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zedz
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Re: Pier Paolo Pasolini

#63 Post by zedz » Thu Apr 09, 2020 1:21 am

Thanks for reminding me I hadn't posted this!

SALO O LE 120 GIORNATE DI SODOMA

A film I’ve watched sparingly over the years. The first time was in a 35mm print that was so battered it ran about quarter of an hour short without censorship. I think I’ve watched it once since then.

I find it viscerally repellent (well, duh) but intellectually intriguing. Pasolini is proposing that fascism is ultimately all about the control of bodies, and thus of sexuality. The Holocaust is just off-screen throughout the entire film (as it had been in the modern section of Porcile, to which this film is most closely related), as slaughter is the ultimate exercise and last resort of this bodily control. After the round-up and selection of children, including the ‘medical’ examination and rejection of a large percentage of them, we don’t see the execution of the rejected, just as we don’t see the execution of the victims who are excluded from the final group of the tortured, but that’s the nature of this depraved society.

Pasolini explores various dimensions of the fascist paradigm. Sometimes they’re obvious, like the identification of the torturers by their symbolic occupations (president, duke, bishop, judge) and the faux gentility of the prison’s “salon”, complete with tinkling pianist. But there’s a lot more going on here than such obvious pot shots. There’s a running commentary about the victims’ witting and unwitting complicity in the monstrous community they’ve become a part of. When one of the Masters begins singing a patriotic song, most of the victims automatically join in; when one of the victims is discovered in a “sin”, they readily betray others in the hope of saving themselves (or sharing the misery). There are also many occasions throughout the film where the roles of victim and accomplice are blurred. Some of the abducted kids at the beginning reappear not as victims but enforcers, and the guards and servants can be included in the ghastly punishments despite their “privileged” status. And of course, the daughters / wives of the masters are included in the concluding slaughter. If you're not a master, you're a slave.

Although this is a hard film to like, I do admire its consistent respect for the trauma of the victims. Almost all of them are named, their suffering is never glibly dismissed, and they even manage to exercise agency where possible (albeit with generally disastrous results). There’s no hope of escape, and Pasolini only alludes to the eventual (historic) comeuppance of the fascists on the soundtrack, with the distant sound of aircraft. It’s worth paying close attention to the film’s soundtrack, as it’s the only component of the film where ‘objective’ elements (i.e. aspects of the external world that aren’t distorted by the perverted power dynamics within) may still be detected, and Pasolini will at times accompany the outrages of the prison with an audible storm without, as if in protest. He also takes care to include a broadcast by diligent fascist and anti-Semite Ezra Pound.

Showing an ending to this abuse of power onscreen would be entirely contrary to Pasolini’s conception of the film, which is about continuity: the four masters in his hellish scenario are the same four masters of modern-day Italy. Their game is still power, it’s just that today’s atrocities are more muted, masked by a veneer of respectability.

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Re: Pier Paolo Pasolini

#64 Post by AidanKing » Thu Apr 09, 2020 4:44 am

I think it's fair to say that Salo is probably the only undoubted masterpiece of world cinema that I couldn't in all conscience recommend to anyone!

Along with all the points zedz has made, I think it's clear that Pasolini is arguing that fascism was a bourgeois rather than working class construct, which is fairly obvious really, but, more interestingly and controversially, based on the art on the walls, he also seems to be making an explicit link between fascism and modernism, which fits in with Ezra Pound featuring on the soundtrack, which I either had not been aware of or had forgotten prior to zedz' post. Naomi Greene, in her book Pier Paolo Pasolini: Cinema as Heresy, also argues convincingly that the film-maker is implicating himself, as well as the viewing audience, in the atrocities committed, which probably helps to make it a better, or at least more honest film, than Michael Haneke's Funny Games.

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Re: Pier Paolo Pasolini

#65 Post by ex-cowboy » Thu Apr 09, 2020 7:11 am

A very good point. The link between fascism (as used in the modern sense of applying to nazism, (Italian) fascism, falangism etc.) and modernism is particularly pertinent in an Italian context where the Futurists and their manifesto directly inspired the Fascist manifesto and it is interesting to compare the Trilogy and Life and Salò in the ways in which they represent the positives and negatives respectively of forms of modernist universality - philosophically, culturally etc. Whilst there are many aspects of Pasolini's work which are more universal, several of the cultural references in Salò particularly apply to Italian fascism as many fascistic artists in Italy (the Futurists in particular) had their work banned or censored in Nazi Germany.

Whenever viewing the film I am reminded of a quote from the Portuguese Estado Novo dictator where he discusses the similarities between that regime and those of other European fascism but distinguishes the Estado Novo as being bound by Catholic morality. This highlights another cultural link between Salò and the ToL in it's examination of the influence of paganism and esoteric forms of Abrahamic religion on societal and cultural mores. The theme of paganism is perhaps most obvious in the Bishop's dress for the wedding sequence as well as the use of 'Veris Leta Facies' from Carl Orff's Carmina Burana.

In terms of the relationship with Funny Games - I'd agree it's far better than Haneke's work partly because, as mentioned, it doesn't approach the topic from an elevated holier-than-though position of moral superiority. Pasolini may have been vociferous in his attacks on injustice, capitalism, racism, the corruption in Italian civil life, but he never presented himself as a saint. In fact he often argued against the established left positions and implicated those who appeared to be his allies - most (in)famously with his denunciation of student demonstrators and support for the policemen (if not the institution of the Police) as members of the working class.

One of the films that reminded me of Salò was Julia Leigh's Sleeping Beauty - although rather than viewing controlling sexuality and the manipulation/degradation of the body as an extension of power, inverted this relationship, so approached a similar topic from a different ontological position.

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Pier Paolo Pasolini

#66 Post by Mr Sausage » Thu Apr 09, 2020 11:49 am

I’m not sure it’s all that controversial (or insightful, frankly) to link fascism with modernism when so many of modernism’s leading lights—Pound, Eliot, Yeats, Wyndham Lewis—were vocal fascist sympathizers, when they weren’t outright capital ‘F‘ Fascists.

It’s worth pondering I guess why so many experimental and avant garde artists would’ve been attracted to an ideology hostile to innovation and modernity. There is a paradox there that one cannot begin to approach merely by associating the two. Nor is the association fair to all those modernists who were not fascist, such as Joyce, Beckett, Stein, Hemingway, Hart Crane, Kafka, Mann, Musil, and so on. But, yeah, fascism does hover over the movement thanks to some of its bigger idiots (looking at you, Pound).

Also, it’s ironic to hear Pasolini criticize fascism as bourgeois rather than working class given that the same is true of communism. Communism has always been the province of fairly well-born intellectuals possessed of good educations (see: the architects of the Russian revolution) rather than truly of the working class.

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Re: Pier Paolo Pasolini

#67 Post by AidanKing » Fri Apr 10, 2020 6:01 am

Maybe that's one of the reasons why modernism has remained so culturally significant: that it involved artists with both left-wing and right-wing sympathies, who produced equally valuable and significant works of art? Maybe fascism was attractive to people because it not only appealed to crude nationalistic and racist ideas but because it embraced the trappings of modernity: the car, the motorway, the plane, the tank?

I'm glad that zedz has written these posts because they remind me of how much pleasure can be gained from reading and thinking about Pasolini, sometimes even more than actually watching the films themselves ('Salo', for example).

Pasolini's version of communism was of course highly idiosyncratic, being based as much on idealised social bonds in the pre-modern peasantry as on an emanation of working-class consciousness. I suppose his sense of a kind of totality of Italian history, geography and culture, along with the varieties to be found in the regions, is one of the reasons he was so attracted to the ideas of Gramsci.

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Re: Pier Paolo Pasolini

#68 Post by knives » Sun Apr 12, 2020 12:19 am

Sausage, I believe Pasolini had actively criticized communism for some of what you say (look at his statements on the student protests mentioned above) with his parody of Godard in Porcile also serving to connect certain leftist idealogs to what he critiques in the right.

As to the film itself, I think one of the powerful elements to it and what connects it to the trilogy (my understanding is that this was intended to be the first in a trilogy criticising the previous films) is that there's a bounty of humour that slowly disappears until you get to the fire.

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Re: Pier Paolo Pasolini

#69 Post by therewillbeblus » Thu Jul 09, 2020 10:42 pm

zedz wrote up a great analysis on The Gospel According to Matthew, which I just revisited tonight and loved far more than I did on a first watch. The "eclecticism" zedz refers to strikes a strange balance for me in imbuing a raw grit, in both the filmmaking techniques and Christ's demeanor, coupled with a continual loosening of these holds to submission of the limits of the will and the nature of all things, which is Pasolini's version of grace through more delicate ethereal camerawork. The fusion is wild, and summarizes what I believe to be as close as Pasolini can come to envision harmony in mankind- which is inherently a form of disharmony, where pains of emotion drive agency and the spiritual knowledge of the massive space of futility in realising these goals gives one pause. It's a place of purgatory on earth, but one that is rather beautiful in affirming our empowered mechanisms and alleviating that burden we place on ourselves, yet acknowledges that relieving this burden can directly challenge the value of that resolution in the first place.

The constant push-pull is so fluid in its dynamic approach that I found myself in awe of the formalism as the key to unlocking the psychological conflicts at the center of this film. By using Jesus as a stand-in for mankind at their fallible best trying to initiate change and exercise the will, these personal struggles of the mind, heart, and spirit find their conjunction in graduating into philosophical development, to recognize the fragments of discord as synthetic to achieving authentic unity in one's internal system. I appreciated that total nirvana is never reached as a reality, but instead a level of acceptance and surrender that acknowledges imperfection in practicing one's principles as best they can. There is no more shame in a more human Christ who considers the possibility of failure, self-doubt, or succumbs to intense emotion, vs one who reframes failure as a nullified state, doesn't act emotional, or have cause that he will ferociously attempt to inspire; and that distinction is incredibly validating to the human in all of us who, religious or not, measures oneself up against the Christian idealism that is spread throughout our teachings.

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Re: Pier Paolo Pasolini

#70 Post by accatone » Sat Mar 05, 2022 2:01 pm

https://www.deutschlandfunkkultur.de/pi ... r-100.html

Probably not available to everyone and german language only, but a great great radio feature on PPP on his 100 birthday. I read a lot about him and would say this is very well put together!


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andyli
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Re: Pier Paolo Pasolini

#72 Post by andyli » Wed May 25, 2022 1:25 am

Fascinating story! Thanks for sharing.

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Re: Pier Paolo Pasolini

#73 Post by ianthemovie » Tue Nov 01, 2022 11:46 am

Fireflies Press has just put out a lavishly designed book on Pasolini (actually a box set of two books), Writing On Burning Paper, with remembrances and appreciations written by Catherine Breillat, Mike Leigh, Jia Zhangke, Radu Jude, and others.

A book launch is being planned at the Metrograph later this week in conjunction with a screening series of six Pasolini films: Mamma Roma, The Hawks and the Sparrows, Teorema, The Decameron, Arabian Nights, and Salo.

Criterion re-tweeted this news with the hashtag #Pasolini100 and also posted about it on The Current, noting that "celebrations of the centenary of the birth of Pier Paolo Pasolini carry on around the world." I'd say there is still a good chance we'll see Criterion do something with these new restorations of the films.

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mrb404
Joined: Wed Jan 23, 2019 9:56 pm

Re: Pier Paolo Pasolini

#74 Post by mrb404 » Tue Jan 24, 2023 2:14 pm

German-Austrian Plaion (ex-Koch Media) has a Teorema UHD planned for release in Italy on March 16:
https://fanfactory.shop/it/teorema-4k-u ... 0628663759
https://www.amazon.it/dp/B0BSVHC4JH/

No details yet available but the first listing seems to suggest that this will *not* be an English friendly release.

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