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La presentazione dell'evento e i film proiettati nel corso della retrospettiva [in inglese]
MoMA
The Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53 Street New York, NY 10019
(212) 708-9400
Pier Paolo Pasolini
December 13, 2012–January 7, 2013
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| Il Giardino del MoMA con l'esposizione di sculture en plein air |
More than two decades after its 1990 retrospective of Pier Paolo Pasolini, MoMA once again joins with Luce Cinecittà and Fondo Pier Paolo Pasolini to present a full retrospective of Pasolini’s cinematic output. Many of these celebrated films will be shown in recently restored versions, and all are presented in newly struck prints. Much of this painstaking restoration work was performed by Cineteca di Bologna, alongside several of Pasolini’s former collaborators. Pasolini’s cinematic legacy is distinguished by an unerring eye for cinematic composition and tone, and a stylistic ease within a variety of genres—many of which he reworked to his own purposes, and all of which he invested with his distinctive touch. Yet it is Pasolini’s unique genius for creating images that evoke the inner truths of his own brief life that truly distinguishes his films—and entices new generations of cinephiles to explore his work.
Pasolini’s cinematic works roughly correspond to four periods in the socially and politically committed artist’s life. The National Popular Cinema commenced with his debut, Accattone (1961), which immediately made a name for him as a filmmaker of prodigious talent and fury. This was followed by Mamma Roma and a number of episodic comic films containing warm, honest portraits of people living on the fringes of society, culminating in the masterful The Gospel According to St. Matthew. Marking him as a provocative thinker and audacious artist with an uncompromising vision, Pasolini’s middle period is often referred to as The Unpopular Cinema, in which his excoriating depictions of the bourgeoisie lent passionate immediacy to films like Teorema, Porcile, and a modern interpretation of Medea.
The Trilogy of Life—The Decameron, The Canterbury Tales, and The Arabian Nights—produced between 1970 and 1974, is a triumphant reinterpretation of classic tales and fables that retain their universality despite being interpreted by thoroughly modern means. As Pasolini himself noted, he focused on the past precisely because it reflects the present most profoundly. Termed The Abjuration of the Trilogy of Life, the director’s utterly despairing final film, Salò or the 120 Days of Sodom, was held up for years due to censorship issues, and it remains a shockingly raw and profoundly disconcerting experience. Salò was completed in 1975, the year of Pasolini’s mysterious murder.
A series of supplemental events pay tribute to Pasolini’s multifaceted career. An evening of recitals by well-known Italian and American actors highlights Pasolini’s accomplishments as an acclaimed essayist and beloved poet; MoMA PS1 hosts a program of performances inspired by Pasolini and his work as a composer; roundtable discussions about his artistic legacy take place at New York University; and a selection of Pasolini’s paintings and drawings will be exhibited at Industria Superstudio.
Co-produced by The Museum of Modern Art, New York and Luce Cinecittà, Rome.
The exhibition is organized by Jytte Jensen, Curator, Department of Film, The Museum of Modern Art, and by Camilla Cormanni and Paola Ruggiero, Luce Cinecittà; with Roberto Chiesi, Cineteca di Bologna; Fondo Pier Paolo Pasolini, Bologna; and Graziella Chiarcossi. Presented in association with the Ministry of Culture of Italy. Special thanks to The Italian Cultural Institute, New York.
The exhibition is supported by Gucci.
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MoMA - Film Screenings and Events
Medea
1969. Italy. Directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini. With Maria Callas, Laurent Terzieff, Giuseppe Gentile, Massimo Girotti. “Unlike Euripides, who in his tragedy concentrates solely on the final outcome of Medea’s jealousy (the murder of her children), Pasolini devotes almost half of his film to an evocation of the primitive culture of Colchis in which Medea was brought up and from which she flees with the Golden Fleece under the influence of her love for Jason. (…) The tragedy arises not simply from an excess of passion or a conflict of character (Medea and the mediocre Jason) but also from a profoundly observed clash of civilizations” (Roy Armes, Film and Filming, June 1971). In Italian; English subtitles. 110 min.
Thursday, December 13, 2012, 7:00 p.m., Theater 1, T1 (Introduced by Ninetto Davoli and Dante Ferretti)
Saturday, December 29, 2012, 8:00 p.m., Theater 1, T1
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Accattone (The Scrounger)
1961. Italy. Directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini. With Franco Citti, Franca Pasut, Roberto Scaringella. “Pasolini punctuated this vision of an unknown Rome with a series of remarkable images: Accattone’s dive from the bridge with statues of angels; his drunken, wet face covered with sand, as if in premonition of his burial; his wearing a woman’s hat and placing a basket on Fulvio’s head. (…) The film proceeds through a series of gestural moments, consciously modelled on the fresco panels of the great Florentine masters of the early Renaissance” (P. Adams Sitney, “Accattone and Mamma Roma,” in Pier Paolo Pasolini Contemporary Perspectives, 1994). In Italian; English subtitles. 117 min.
Friday, December 14, 2012, 4:30 p.m., Theater 1, T1
Thursday, December 27, 2012, 4:30 p.m., Theater 1, T1
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Recital
An Evening Dedicated to Pier Paolo Pasolini the Poet
Italian and American performers recite excerpts from Pasolini’s essays and poetry, some set to his own musical compositions.
Friday, December 14, 2012, 7:30 p.m., Theater 1, T1
.±.La terra vista dalla luna (The Earth Seen from the Moon)
1966. Italy. Directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini. From the anthology film Le streghe. With Totò, Ninetto Davoli, Silvana Mangano, Laura Betti. “[In a segment reminiscent] in style to Don Quixote, a recently widowed father and his son travel around the country in search of a new wife and mother, and after a long period, they discover the literally speechless Mangano. She brings joy into their lives, but they are poor, and in order to find a better life for themselves, they concoct a scheme to try to make some quick cash. (…) The outlandish performances, artwork, and costumes does evoke great charm and likeability” (Vince Leo, 2004). In Italian; English subtitles. 30 min.
Che cosa sono le nuvole? (What Are the Clouds?)
1967. Italy. Directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini. From the anthology film Capriccio all’italiana. With Totò, Ninetto Davoli, Laura Betti. “The poster announces the presentation of the film in which the poster is reproduced: Che cosa sono le nuvole? The painting is Las meninas. It depicts the artist Velázquez painting the painting that you see. In the painting the king and the queen who are absent from the painting appear in the mirror at the background of the painting. They are present only as a reflection. The mirror is reduplicated in the film. The painting becomes the subject of a shot in a film which the shots point to. Like the painting, the film is mirrored in the film. It is in the same relation to the mirror as was the painting mirrored in Las meninas. The structure of the Pasolini film is analogous to the Velázquez painting” (Sam Rohdie, The Passion of Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1995). In Italian; English subtitles. 22 min.
La sequenza del fiore di carta (The Paper Flower Sequence)
1968. Italy. Directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini. With Ninetto Davoli. From the anthology film Amore e rabbia. “[Pasolini’s film] is a reference to the Gospel parable usually called in English ‘The Barren Fig Tree,’ where Christ strikes down a fig tree because it isn’t bearing fruit in March, although it could hardly have known better. In the episode, [Davoli] is shown happily down the via Nazionale in Rome, while in super-imposition there are images of various things going on in the world, such as the bombing of Vietnam, of which Ninetto remains blissfully ignorant and unaware” (G. Nowell-Smith, “Pasolini’s Originality,” in Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1977). In Italian; English subtitles. 12 min.
Saturday, December 15, 2012, 8:00 p.m., Theater 1, T1 (Introduced by Davoli)
Saturday, December 29, 2012, 5:00 p.m., Theater 1, T1
.±.La ricotta
1962–63. Italy. Directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini. With Orson Welles, Mario Cipriani, Laura Betti. “La ricotta is an explosion of disgust at consumer society and its vulgarity, a scabrous reproach to the Catholic Church for its abandonment of the poorest members of that society, a film about a film about the Crucifixion that shows Christianity’s central symbolic event being staged within a circus of depravity. Its Christ is a starving film extra who gives his own box lunch to his hungry family, loses a meal he’s stolen to a visiting movie star’s lap dog, and, after managing to stuff himself with ricotta cheese, dies from indigestion on the cross” (Gary Indiana, Pasolini, Mama Roma, and La ricotta, 2004). In Italian; English subtitles. 35 min.
La rabbia di Pasolini (The Anger of Pasolini)
1963. Italy. Directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini. Commentary in verse by Pasolini, spoken by Giorgio Bassani, Renato Guttuso. Reconstruction by Giuseppe Bertolucci. “La rabbia had an even more unfortunate history than La ricotta. Upon its completion, the producer—either for commercial reasons or fear of censorship—decided it should be released together with a second short film to be made by a director on the other side of the political spectrum, that is, on the right. (…) La rabbia is less an attempt to answer the ‘dramatic questions’ posed by the preface than what Pasolini called ‘a Marxist denunciation of society and recent events,’ or even a ‘cry of rage’ against human suffering and man’s inhumanity to man” (Naomi Green, Pier Paolo Pasolini: Cinema as Heresy, 1990). In Italian; English subtitles. 50 min.
Sunday, December 16, 2012, 2:00 p.m., Theater 1, T1
Wednesday, December 26, 2012, 4:30 p.m., Theater 1, T1
.±.Comizi d’amore (Love Meetings)
1963–64. Italy. Directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini. “[Pasolini] raced all over Italy, movie camera and tape recorder in hand, asking people everywhere, from famous soccer players to unknown peasants in the Crotone region, what they thought about love and sex. The intellectuals comment, and the people speak, freely voicing their particular truths. Comizi d’amore gives an unbiased picture of a changing Italy, and was a model for many later television documentaries. And yet what is striking is the presence on the screen of Pasolini himself” (Enzo Siciliano, Pasolini, 1982). In Italian; English subtitles. 90 min.
Monday, December 17, 2012, 4:30 p.m., Theater 1, T1
Wednesday, December 26, 2012, 8:00 p.m., Theater 1, T1
.±.Sopralluoghi in Palestina per il film Il Vangelo secondo Matteo (In Search of Locations for The Gospel According to Matthew)
1964. Italy. Directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini. “In the course of his hastily improvised commentary, Pasolini explains that once he saw the Holy Land he realized that it would be impossible to film Il Vangelo there: everything—buildings, kibbutzes, faces—was far too modern. As we see him visit one legendary site after another, he begins to compare the landscape of the Holy Land with that of southern Italy, where he would actually film Il Vangelo secondo Matteo” (Naomi Green, Pier Paolo Pasolini: Cinema as Heresy, 1990). In Italian; English subtitles. 55 min.
Appunti per un film sull’India (Notes for a Film about India).
1967–68. Italy. Directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini. “His India film is a film in search of faces, bodies, ideas for a film to be made on India. The film you see is not that film; it is rather ‘a film for a film to be made,’ as if the script was a structure wanting to be another. (…) The film Pasolini wanted to make in India would have begun before Indian independence and continued through its attempts to modernise and industrialise” (Sam Rohdie, The Passion of Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1995). In Italian; English subtitles. 32 min.
Monday, December 17, 2012, 8:00 p.m., Theater 1, T1
Sunday, December 30, 2012, 2:30 p.m., Theater 1, T1
.±.Uccellacci e uccellini (Hawks and Sparrows)
1965–66. Italy. Directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini. With Totò, Ninetto Davoli, Femi Benussi. “For the first time the most cultured figurative reference is given not by painting alone, but by the cinema... We are nearly at the highest expression of specifically cinematographic competence because Pasolini intends to pronounce the same sort of funeral oration for cinematic neorealism as he did with his poetry for literary neorealism” (Gian Piero Brunetta, Italian Quarterly, Fall 1980–Winter 1981). In Italian; English subtitles. 89 min.
Wednesday, December 19, 2012, 4:30 p.m., Theater 1, T1
Friday, December 28, 2012, 4:30 p.m., Theater 1, T1
.±.Il Vangelo secondo Matteo (The Gospel According to Matthew)
1964. Italy. Directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini. With Enrique Irazoqui, Margherita Caruso, Susanna Pasolini. “Pasolini’s film (…) came again and again with a salutary shock of surprise, starting with the very first sequence. (…) With neither the money nor the facilities to embark on far-flung locations, Pasolini made his picture in the rock country of his own southern Italy, as bare and as austere as Stevens’s American desert, but far more intimately related to the scale of men working for their living in an unkind land. (…) In my opinion, The Gospel According to Matthew is incomparably the most effective picture ever made on a scriptural theme...” (Maryvonne Butcher, Film Comment, Autumn 1965). In Italian; English subtitles. 137 min.
Wednesday, December 19, 2012, 8:00 p.m., Theater 1, T1
Monday, December 31, 2012, 4:30 p.m., Theater 1, T1
.±.Mamma Roma
1962. Italy. Directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini. With Anna Magnani, Ettore Garofolo, Franco Citti. “Arguably in Mamma Roma the sub-proletarian world provides not only the subject matter but the actual subject of the film, for the story hinges on the attempts of Mamma Roma, an ex-prostitute, to ‘go straight’ and to provide a respectable petty bourgeois existence in which her adolescent son can grow up. The attempts fail and the respectable dream evaporates and, in a sense, there is a moral in this—the first statement by Pasolini of what is to become a recurrent theme: the un-livability of the modern bourgeois and petty-bourgeois world” (G. Nowell-Smith, “Pasolini’s Originality,” in Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1977). In Italian; English subtitles. 106 min.
Thursday, December 20, 2012, 4:30 p.m., Theater 1, T1
Friday, December 28, 2012, 8:00 p.m., Theater 1, T1
.±.Edipo Re (Oedipus Rex)
1967. Italy. Directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini. With Franco Citti, Silvana Mangano, Alida Valli. “The prologue of Oedipus Rex, which is balanced by a modern epilogue, is one of the most striking aspects of the film. It contains a beautifully lyrical evocation of the enigma of woman—the long-held shot of the mother’s blank, mask-like face accompanied by a phrase from Mozart’s C-major quartet, which recurs as a leitmotif throughout the film. The hostility which the child’s presence arouses in his father comes to a climax when the father ‘squeezes the child’s tiny bare feet as if he wanted to crush them.’ And with this Pasolini cuts abruptly but with perfect precision to the empty Moroccan landscape and ancient Japanese flute music which together form the basic elements of his vision of the world of Sophoclean myth” (Roy Armes, The Ambiguous Image, 1976). In Italian; English subtitles. 104 min.
Thursday, December 20, 2012, 8:00 p.m., Theater 1, T1
.±.Teorema (Theorem)
1968. Italy. Directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini. With Silvana Mangano, Massimo Girotti, Terence Stamp, Anne Wiazemsky. “His film is a parable, seductively ambiguous and yet set forth with the calm certitude of a geometrical theorem: if five members of a wealthy industrialist’s household encounter God, five specific things will happen to them in consequence of their encounter. The Deity appears as a mysterious houseguest who offers himself freely, ambisexually, to anyone who wants him. And everyone wants him: the industrialist, his wife, daughter, son and maid. Once the guest has gone, the maid becomes a saint, the daughter a catatonic, the mother a nymphomaniac, the son an Abstract Expressionist, and the father a spiritual wanderer across mountains of volcanic ash that Pasolini has thrown in to portray the aridity of modern life” (Joseph Morgenstern, Newsweek, May 5, 1969). In Italian; English subtitles. 105 min.
Friday, December 21, 2012, 4:30 p.m., Theater 1, T1
.±.Porcile (Pigsty)
1969. Italy. Directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini. Pierre Clementi, Franco Citti, Jean- Pierre Léaud, Anne Wiazemsky. “All the references to art and culture in the film have the same kind of cynical despair about them, particularly when they involve things in which Pasolini himself has been engaged. Thus the prone Julian is compared by Mrs. Klotz both to Christ on the cross, and to the iconography by a Mannerist St. Sebastian—when in fact he is lying there like a log looking like either. The bourgeoisie is intelligent and voracious enough to assimilate even art which sets out to destroy it” (Noel Purdon, “Pasolini: The Film of Alienation,” in Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1977). In Italian; English subtitles. 98 min.
Friday, December 21, 2012, 8:00 p.m., Theater 1, T1
.±.Appunti per un’Orestiade Africana (Notes for an African Oresteia)
1970. Italy. Directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini. “Notes for an African Oresteia documents on film his 1970 location hunting and local casting tour of Tanzania and Uganda for a never-realized feature adaptation of the Greek tragedy The Oresteia. (…) The concept is to set The Oresteia in Africa circa 1960, when many colonies were following Ghana’s lead in achieving independence. Pasolini saw the play’s transformation of the Furies into the Eumenides paralleling Africa moving from tribalism to democracy” (Variety, January 21, 1981). In Italian; English subtitles. 65 min.
Le mura di Sana’a (The Walls of Sana’a)
1971–74. Italy. Directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini. “Sana’a, like all of the Third World for Pasolini, was two things, an intact, sublimely beautiful medieval Arab city of the past, and a corrupted, degraded city being developed in the present. In 1971, Pasolini made [this] film in the form of a plea to UNESCO to save Sana’a from the destruction of modernisation” (Sam Rohdie, The Passion of Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1995). In Italian; English subtitles. 16 min.
Saturday, December 22, 2012, 2:00 p.m., Theater 1, T1
Sunday, December 30, 2012, 5:30 p.m., Theater 1, T1
.±.Il Decameron (The Decameron)
1971. Italy. Directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini. With Franco Citti, Ninetto Davoli, Silvana Mangano. “Taking 10 tales out of the 100 in Boccaccio’s Decameron, Pasolini has created one of the most beautiful, turbulent, and uproarious panoramas of early Renaissance life ever put on film. It is also one of the most obscene, if obscene defines something that is offensive to ordinary concepts of chastity, delicacy, and decency, although I’d hardly call the film offensive to morals” (Vincent Canby, The New York Times, December 9, 1971). In Italian; English subtitles. 111 min.
Saturday, December 22, 2012, 5:30 p.m., Theater 1, T1
.±.I racconti di Canterbury (The Canterbury Tales)
1972. Italy. Directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini. With Pier Paolo Pasolini, Hugh Griffith, Josephine Chaplin, Laura Betti. “The images are often bewitching, with Tonino Delli Colli’s colour photography and Dante Ferretti’s art direction. Among the few studio interiors, for instance, the set for Geoffrey Chaucer’s study is given the determined exploratory perspective of a medieval painting by the use of a chequered floor and other convergent, geometrical forms. Mostly, however, the film uses actual locations, selected with no scholarship about period, but with a flair which gives exciting new aspects to familiar places” (David Robinson, The Times, June 15, 1973). In Italian; English subtitles. 123 min.
Sunday, December 23, 2012, 2:30 p.m., Theater 1, T1
.±.Il fiore delle Mille e una notte (The Arabian Nights)
1973–74. Italy. Directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini. With Franco Merli, Ines Pellegrini, Ninetto Davoli, Franco Citti.“The film offers itself as the prototype of ‘pure’ narration: that is, of narratives that live off of one another, that are embedded in one another to such an extent that it is often impossible to determinate the containing tale from the contained. Il fiore will reproduce the image of the self-generating tales of the original text, and yet its expulsion of the original frame-tale, the story of Scheherazade, is a function of Pasolini’s refusal to trace a possible outer limit to narration within the film itself” (Patrick Rumble, “Stylistic Contamination in the Trilogia della vita: The case of Il fiore delle Mille e una notte,” in Pier Paolo Pasolini: Contemporary Perspectives, 1994). In Italian; English subtitles. 148 min.
Sunday, December 23, 2012, 5:30 p.m., Theater 1, T1
.±.Salò o le 120 giornate di Sodoma (Salò or the 120 Days of Sodom)
1975. Italy. Directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini. With Paolo Bonacelli, Giorgio Cataldi, Uberto Paolo Quintavalle. Salò “derives its powerful impact largely from its literalness: staging the tortures of de Sade’s The 120 Days of Sodom point by point, detail by detail, even though Pasolini enforces a kind of shotgun marriage between this novel and a relatively recent historical phenomenon by situating all his simulated atrocities in the last stronghold of Italian Fascism.... Like it or not, Salò is a realized work that accomplishes a good deal of what it sets out to do—to appall us with the spectacle of our own worst capacities, and to confront us with the even more disturbing and conflicted responses that this may elicit in us” (Jonathan Rosenbaum, The Soho Village News, June 4, 1980). In Italian; English subtitles. 114 min.
Thursday, December 27, 2012, 8:00 p.m., Theater 1, T1
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"Pagine corsare", blog dedicato a Pier Paolo Pasolini - Autrice e curatrice: Angela Molteni Autori associati: Alessandro Barbato, Claudio Rampini, Marco Taffi le notizie contenuti in oltre dodicimila documenti dedicati a Pier Paolo Pasolini |
