Pier Paolo Pasolini

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The Ashes of Pasolini is nothing more than a… selfportrait of Pier Paolo Pasolini. It is a documentary film, a collection of material that has been chosen and organized with philological acumen and historicalcritical rigor. It is strongly marked by a subjective, poetic flow and structure. It is a documentary film of poetry where the documents are not suppressed under the authoritarian voice over of the ‘Expert’ who guides and reduces everything into a reassuring hierarchical pyramid of explanations. The Ashes of Pasolini is thus Pasolini’s autobiographical narration of his own human and artistic adventure, the contradictory and irreducible complex lived out by the greatest Italian postwar poet under the impulse of the extreme Mayakovskian shout: ‘Professor, if you would take off your bicycleeyeglasses, I myself will tell you about the weather, and about myself’.Read More »

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The concluding part of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s “Trilogy Of Life”, following The Decameron and The Canterbury Tales, Arabian Nights corrects many of the mistakes found in the latter, noticeably its ramshackle, uneven approach, and returns to the charming territory of the former. Indeed, the film is as good as The Decameron, if not better, and is generally considered to be the trilogies crowning moment and one of Pasolini’s finest films (critic Tony Rayns recently included it amongst his choices for Sight and Sound’s 2002 Top Ten Critics’ Poll).Read More »

it’s a movie about a woman who beheads her brother, stabs her children, and sends her lover’s wife up in flames. For Maria Callas, it’s a natural.

Based on the plot of Euripides’ Medea. Medea centers on the barbarian protagonist as she finds her position in the Greek world threatened, and the revenge she takes against her husband Jason who has betrayed her for another woman.Read More »

A man and his son take an allegorical stroll through life with a talking bird that spouts social and political philosophy.Read More »

Anna Masecchia wrote:
With her 16mm camera in hand, the optical prosthesis of a 20th-century flâneuse, Agnès Varda filmed 42nd Street in 1967, shooting a crowdof passersby to the beat of The Doors. Pier Paolo Pasolini is with her, getting lost in the lights, bodies, faces and chaos of a crowded and multicultural New York. Opening in soft focus and closing on Pasolini’s blurred face, the images shot in a direct style and without audio are merged with a dense dialogue between the two artists and intellectuals, which was recorded later. Prompted by Varda, Pasolini reflects on the relationship between reality and fiction, the Christian figurative tradition and the function of audiovisual language in contemporary society. All of which is enhanced by the audio-visual décalage that simultaneously reveals the camera as a device while emphasising the real and political information of the images, which emerges from the background and comes into the foreground. In a matter of minutes,Varda’s art captures Pasolini talking about himself and the essence of cinema as a whole, which for both is an expression of reality itself.Read More »

New, restored high-definition digital transfer, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray edition
The notorious final film from Pier Paolo Pasolini, Salò, or The 120 Days of Sodom has been called nauseating, shocking, depraved, pornographic . . . It’s also a masterpiece. The controversial poet, novelist, and filmmaker’s transposition of the Marquis de Sade’s eighteenth-century opus of torture and degradation to Fascist Italy in 1944 remains one of the most passionately debated films of all time, a thought-provoking inquiry into the political, social, and sexual dynamics that define the world we live in.Read More »

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The director presents takes and scenes filmed on location in Africa for a film-that-never-was, a black Oresteia.Read More »

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A mythical tale of love, betrayal and revenge, Medea is a fascinating collision of Freudian and Marxist themes from Italy’s most controversial director, Pier Paolo Pasolini. Adapted from the Euripides drama, Pasolini’s disturbing vision of personal and national conflicts stars operatic legend Maria Callas in the title role, offering an extraordinary performance as the high priestess Medea whose love is threatened by corrupt political ambition. A vivid and aesthetically challenging vision, Medea is a complex blend of classical mythology and contemporary social criticism.Read More »

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Pasolini doesn’t so much ‘meet’ with people of all regions of his country as interrogate them, trying to investigate the sexual mores of his time in a typical melding of politics and sex, of Marx and Freud. Although dated, it’s vital as a time capsule of 60’s Italy and as a man-on-the-streets pseudo-sociological examination of then-prevalent attitudes towards homosexuality, marriage, prostitution and divorce. The execution and image quality is rough – even for Pasolini – thought it’s no doubt intentional and a visual reflection of the project’s spur-of-the-moment, pieces-sewn-together approach.Read More »