Course: Examining Pier Paolo Pasolini
Tue 12 Jan – Tue 8 Mar
It would be reductive to define Pier Paolo Pasolini as solely an
Italian film director. A unique poet, journalist, playwright, an
intellectual provocateur, a controversial filmmaker, Pasolini was a
genius born outside his times and maybe of any time. On the
occasion of the 40th anniversary of his assassination we are going
to explore his dark, complex style, impregnated with classical,
pictorial and iconographic religious references, which he
represented in a new, humanistic and at times extremely personal
perspective to the point of appearing blasphemous to the
conformist and respectable society of his times.
This evening course will include two course screenings and lots of
discussion.
Led by Adalgisa Serio, Italian Associate Lecturer at CDLCI and
author of Collana Cinema Italia.
Tue 12 Jan, 18:30 – 20:30
Course session (Cinema 4)
Accattone (1961)
When he directed Accattone as his first film, Pasolini was already
known as one of the leading poets, writers and leftist intellectuals
of his generation. The film was his seminal work, whose extreme
realism, accompanied to deeply human piety, would have
subsequently forged Pasolini’s highly personal and auteur
signature. Like the uproar created by his first novel, Ragazzzi di
vita (1955), set in the Roman borgate (slums of the capital city),
the film portrayed the harsh conditions of precarious lives at the
margins of the society, representing the dark side of the then
accelerating Italian “economic miracle”.
Tue 19 Jan, 18:30 – 20:30
Course session (Cinema 4)
Mamma Roma (1962)
Pasolini’s careful and thought-provoking portrayal of the
downtrodden by the middle class Italian society of the 60’s,
continues with this film starring the majestic Anna Magnani as
Mamma Roma, a middle-aged prostitute who attempts to
redeem herself from her sordid past for the sake of her son. Though
banned when it was released for obscenity, Mamma
Roma remains a classic masterpiece of the legacy of Italian
neorealism. It is like a slap for the viewer convinced that Italy was
finally coming out from the misery and ashes of post-war Italy, and
confirms Pasolini’s enduring fascination with the poor and
marginalised. It is yet another example of a country’s most
controversial director experimenting and striving to find his own
style.
Tue 26 Jan, 18:00
Course screening (Cinema TBC)
The Gospel According to Matthew (137mins, PG)
Tue 2 Feb, 18:30 – 20:30
Course session (Cinema 4)
The Gospel According to Matthew (1964)
Post screening discussion and analysis of the film
Tue 9 Feb, 18:30 – 20:30
Course session (Cinema 4)
Teorema (1968)
Pre-screening discussion and analysis of the film
Tue 16 Feb, 18:20
Screening (Cinema tbc)
Theorem (98mins, 15)
Tue 23 Feb, 18:30 – 20:30
Course session (Cinema 4)
The Decameron (1971)
Based on some of Giovanni Boccaccio’s fourteenth-century moral
tales The Decameron, this is one of the director’s most popular
films. Moving the setting from Boccaccio’s Florence to Naples, it
already shows, though in a picaresque and more entertaining
form, the subtle mingle of carnal pleasure and punishment,
delights and dark sides of the human nature. The film (where
Pasolini appears as a pupil of the painter Giotto, at work on a
massive fresco), picks at the contradictions between the
constraints and freedom of religion and sex.
Tue 1 Mar BREAK – no session
Tue 8 Mar, 18:30 – 20:30
Course session (Cinema 4)
Salo`, or The 120 Days of Sodom (1975)
Pasolini’s last film before he was brutally murdered in 1975, has
been for so long easily dismissed and stigmatised as nauseating
and disgusting pornography, the product of a sick and depraved
homosexual mind. The film has been repeatedly banned,
censored and critically rejected. However, besides the fact that
the film is an example of perfect cinematic aesthetic beauty, it is
a powerful denunciation of Fascist Italy in 1944. Extreme scenes,
(accurately conceived as living tableaux of physical and
psychological torture mingled with sexual depravation in order to
shock), are used as a metaphor of the tyranny and degradation
of Fascism in particular and of any form of abuse of power in a
more universal meaning.
Beyond any personal judgement the cinematic truth is that the
film is a milestone of world cinema, culturally provoking, politically
crude and visually stunning.
Suggested Textbooks can be found at the following link:
http://www.pierpaolopasolini.com/books.htm
Useful weblinks:
http://www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/newsbfi/features/introduction-pier-paolo-pasolini
http://www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/news-bfi/features/five-waysknow-pasolini-film
http://www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/news-bfi/features/filmingdivine-gospel-according-matthew
http://www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/news-bfi/features/bolt-bluepasolini-theorem
http://sensesofcinema.com/2002/great-directors/pasolini/
Here you will find specific links on his filmography, bibliography,
articles in Senses and web resources.