A VOID IN THE COSMOS AND FROM THERE YOU SING: EARLY PASOLINI
One of the most original and controversial thinkers of the twentieth century, Italian artist and intellectual Pier Paolo Pasolini embodied a multitude of often seemingly contradictory ideologies and identities—and he expressed them all in his provocative, lyrical, and indelible films. Relentlessly concerned with society’s downtrodden and marginalized, he elevated pimps, hustlers, sex workers, and vagabonds to the realm of saints, while depicting actual saints with a radical earthiness. Traversing the sacred and the profane, the ancient and the modern, the mythic and the personal, these films stand as a monument to his daring vision of cinema as a form of resistance.
Films in this Program
Pier Paolo Pasolini
117 minutes
Poet and painter turned filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini courted controversy with his very first feature by using Catholic iconography and liturgical music to render a plaintive, brutally beautiful portrait of a shiftless Roman pimp and thief (then-nonprofessional Franco Citti, in a revelatory performance) whose life of petty crime turns increasingly desperate when the woman who supports him is imprisoned. Melding a hardscrabble neorealist milieu with classical influences, Pasolini offers a vision of underclass struggle as a kind of modern sainthood.
“Pasolini’s first film, 1961’s ACCATTONE, was the original HUSTLE & FLOW. As the story of a Roman pimp’s demise—one that articulated his sense of social and emotional deprivation—ACCATTONE created a humane precedent that continued well into the filmmaker’s career. ACCATTONE may also be seen as a post-neorealist where-are-they-now sequel to Vittorio De Sica’s iconic SHOESHINE, but Pasolini’s realistic grasp of human and social progress—with De Sica’s shoeshine boys growing up to be pimps, not good state cogs—was too much for the fascist powers-that-be, as was the director’s ballsy Christ-to-man correlations. In the film’s most significant scene, a homoerotic Pietà takes shape as Accattone weeps on his friend’s shoulder. Pasolini was not sentimental, but his sympathy for layabouts was an affront to capitalist Italian society, which relegated undesirables like Accattone to the periphery.” - Ed Gonzalez, Slant
“Pasolini’s first film, 1961’s ACCATTONE, was the original HUSTLE & FLOW. As the story of a Roman pimp’s demise—one that articulated his sense of social and emotional deprivation—ACCATTONE created a humane precedent that continued well into the filmmaker’s career. ACCATTONE may also be seen as a post-neorealist where-are-they-now sequel to Vittorio De Sica’s iconic SHOESHINE, but Pasolini’s realistic grasp of human and social progress—with De Sica’s shoeshine boys growing up to be pimps, not good state cogs—was too much for the fascist powers-that-be, as was the director’s ballsy Christ-to-man correlations. In the film’s most significant scene, a homoerotic Pietà takes shape as Accattone weeps on his friend’s shoulder. Pasolini was not sentimental, but his sympathy for layabouts was an affront to capitalist Italian society, which relegated undesirables like Accattone to the periphery.” - Ed Gonzalez, Slant
Pier Paolo Pasolini
106 minutes
Famed for her seemingly spontaneous, volcanic displays of emotion on screen, Anna Magnani has perhaps her supreme role as the middle-aged sex worker nicknamed “Mamma Roma,” a footsore veteran of the street who lives only to imagine a better life for her teenage son who, newly arrived in the Italian capital from the country, begins to slip inextricably towards delinquency. Pasolini may have made greater films, but he never made one as awesomely moving—proof that the master of cinematic modernism was a magnificent melodramatist as well.
"It was in the precarious margins that Pasolini felt most comfortable—among hustlers, whores, petty thieves, and loafers. MAMMA ROMA, from 1962, essentially rewrites his previous film ACCATTONE from a female point of view, but it’s more structurally provocative, the first of many Pasolini pictures to hinge on dueling narratives. Anchored by a contentious, manic-depressive performance by Anna Magnani, the film contrasts the fates of a mother and son separated by gender and generation. Its finale is a heartbreaking coup de grâce, as is the pair of majestic tracking shots that conceive Mamma Roma as a celestial body circling a solar system of hookers, pimps, and streetlights—the poetic expression of a woman struggling to define her place in the world." - Ed Gonzalez, Slant
"It was in the precarious margins that Pasolini felt most comfortable—among hustlers, whores, petty thieves, and loafers. MAMMA ROMA, from 1962, essentially rewrites his previous film ACCATTONE from a female point of view, but it’s more structurally provocative, the first of many Pasolini pictures to hinge on dueling narratives. Anchored by a contentious, manic-depressive performance by Anna Magnani, the film contrasts the fates of a mother and son separated by gender and generation. Its finale is a heartbreaking coup de grâce, as is the pair of majestic tracking shots that conceive Mamma Roma as a celestial body circling a solar system of hookers, pimps, and streetlights—the poetic expression of a woman struggling to define her place in the world." - Ed Gonzalez, Slant
Pier Paolo Pasolini
92 minutes
Let’s talk about sex.
In this radically engaged and engaging documentary, Pier Paolo Pasolini takes to the streets, town squares, beaches, factories, and universities of 1960s Italy to solicit everyday citizens’ thoughts on a host of hot-button subjects, including sex work, gender equality, homosexuality, and divorce. What emerges is both a kaleidoscopic cross section of faces and places—from the industrialized cities of the North to the rural villages of the South—and an incisive portrait of a society where, despite the rapid modernization brought on by the postwar “economic miracle,” hypocrisy, repression, and conformism still hold sway.
The remarkable LOVE MEETINGS is nothing less than a cinema-vérité Kinsey Report – with occasional Godardian touches – on Italian sexual mores in the 1960s.
In this radically engaged and engaging documentary, Pier Paolo Pasolini takes to the streets, town squares, beaches, factories, and universities of 1960s Italy to solicit everyday citizens’ thoughts on a host of hot-button subjects, including sex work, gender equality, homosexuality, and divorce. What emerges is both a kaleidoscopic cross section of faces and places—from the industrialized cities of the North to the rural villages of the South—and an incisive portrait of a society where, despite the rapid modernization brought on by the postwar “economic miracle,” hypocrisy, repression, and conformism still hold sway.
The remarkable LOVE MEETINGS is nothing less than a cinema-vérité Kinsey Report – with occasional Godardian touches – on Italian sexual mores in the 1960s.
Pier Paolo Pasolini
137 minutes
A committed Marxist, director Pier Paolo Pasolini made this chronicle of the life of Christ faithfully according to St. Matthew’s account, clearly showing the revolutionary and radical fervor implicit in the story and imparting the nature of its appeal to common people over so many centuries. Shooting with non-actors against the rugged landscapes of southern Italy, in a style simultaneously suggesting Quattrocento painting and contemporary cinéma vérité, Pasolini strips the Gospel down to its core, in the process rediscovering the radical thought at the heart of Christ’s teachings. The result is a film that drew praise from both doctrinaire communists and the Vatican newspaper.
"But thinking of the film only on Marxist lines too often misrepresents it as an intellectual soapbox, trivializing its stark, unpretentious, elegantly tossed-off beauty. THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO ST. MATTHEW is a lament for a bygone era and a celebration of Christ’s life, work, and death, told without cynicism, irony, or doubt, where every plangent image embodies Scripture at its most rapturous." - Ed Gonzalez, Slant
"But thinking of the film only on Marxist lines too often misrepresents it as an intellectual soapbox, trivializing its stark, unpretentious, elegantly tossed-off beauty. THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO ST. MATTHEW is a lament for a bygone era and a celebration of Christ’s life, work, and death, told without cynicism, irony, or doubt, where every plangent image embodies Scripture at its most rapturous." - Ed Gonzalez, Slant
Pier Paolo Pasolini
88 minutes
While wandering the countryside, a pair of father-and-son vagabonds (played respectively by Italian cinema legend Totò, in his final major film role, and Pasolini regular Ninetto Davoli) happen upon a talking crow who spouts Marxist philosophy and launches them on a freewheeling picaresque through time, space, and the margins of a rapidly modernizing Italy. A comic fable that balances heady ideas about religion, poverty, and class struggle with the irreverent slapstick sight gags of silent comedy, THE HAWKS AND THE SPARROWS finds Pasolini at his lightest yet as stingingly subversive as ever.
"Pasolini saw his characters as living in an inescapable social hierarchy. That’s very much the subject of THE HAWKS AND THE SPARROWS, which is the ultimate expression of Pasolini’s ‘free indirect discourse’ style of filmmaking. The film, which is concerned with the explicability of nature according to laws of cause and effect, feels driven by a notational abstraction that recalls Buñuel’s THE MILKY WAY. But it’s also livelier in the way that it looks at the battling forces of nature and ideology. Alternately caustic and gently comic, this melancholy film offers a beautiful parable of capitalistic change." - Ed Gonzalez, Slant
"Pasolini saw his characters as living in an inescapable social hierarchy. That’s very much the subject of THE HAWKS AND THE SPARROWS, which is the ultimate expression of Pasolini’s ‘free indirect discourse’ style of filmmaking. The film, which is concerned with the explicability of nature according to laws of cause and effect, feels driven by a notational abstraction that recalls Buñuel’s THE MILKY WAY. But it’s also livelier in the way that it looks at the battling forces of nature and ideology. Alternately caustic and gently comic, this melancholy film offers a beautiful parable of capitalistic change." - Ed Gonzalez, Slant
