Pier Paolo Pasolini – Porcile aka Pigsty [+Extras] (1969)

1. Pier Paolo Pasolini’s “Pigpen/Pigsty/La
   Porcile”
   is a detailed
   politico-philosophical statement in visual images about the sad state of what
   could be a moral evolution of the human specie. The film consists of two parts
   echoing one another. One depicts the destiny of a group of young cannibals
   surviving on the periphery of medieval country life, while the other (connected
   with the first through parallel montage) represents the life of a wealthy
   family in post-WWII Germany. Pasolini compares the ordeals of the medieval bums
   mad from hunger, with that of the son of a leading German corporate profit-maker,
   and his fiancée. His juxtaposition of the two historical periods produces astonishing
   results. The young leader of the local cannibals and son of the wealthy businessman,
   appear like brothers, even like twins by destiny. With unique images Pasolini sculpts
   the very logic of his medieval and modern young heroes’ intuitive perception of
   the reality, and explains how cannibalism (in the medieval part of the film),
   and bestiality of the son of the modern financial magnate come into existence. The
   director depicts these deviations not as “naturalistic” phenomena for the
   technicians of psychiatric diagnosis to brood about, but as a result of attempts
   by these two major characters to make sense of the world that surrounds them – each
   spontaneously metaphorizes his understanding of the reality, one into his cannibalism
   and the other into his bestiality correspondingly. In other words, their perversions
   are not reflection of their psychology as such or their “genes” but are results
   of their intellectual function that makes metaphors of their world (instead of
   just imitating it/adapting to it) by their very behavior. Pasolini’s representation of two types
   of grand-scale businessmen – the more traditional (trying to take into
   consideration the human and natural environment of their entrepreneurship), and
   the purely instrumental (oriented only on profit by any price), is shocking in
   its clairvoyance – by having predicted what we today observe in Europe and US:
   the morbid growth of profit-making practices neglecting concern for its social
   and environmental consequences. Director’s comparison of how differently
   language was used in medieval Europe and today is informing and stimulating. The exceptional performances of Pierre
   Clementi, Jean-Pierre Leaud, Anne Wiazemsky, Ugo Tognazzi, Ninetto Davoli and
   Alberto Lionello are character-, not circumstance-oriented. This style of
   acting is not suitable for passive/immediate identification of the audience with
   the personages that usually gives viewers a lot of easy, cheap and empty
   pleasure. The actors of “Pigpen”, on the other hand, discover their characters’
   unique reactions even on seemingly trivial impressions. By
   Victor Enyutin

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