ARABIAN NIGHTS aka IL FIORE DELLE MILLE A UNA NOTTE

Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1974

Starring: Franco Merli, Ines Pellegrini, Ninetto Davoli, Franco Citti

Pasolini’s adaptation of the anonymous collection One Thousand and One Nights foregoes the popular framing story — Scheherazade telling her new husband the king story after story so that he doesn’t kill her — in favor of some of the more obscure stories about young lovers, murder, loss, and much more. As a framing story, Pasolini selected that of Zumurrud, a headstrong, beautiful young slave who choses her new owner, Nur Ed Din, a handsome young man. They fall in love, but are soon parted when Zumurrud is kidnapped. She escapes and finds her way to a far off kingdom, where they mistake her for a man and, thanks to a prophecy, crown her king. She is determined to use her new power to reunite with her lost love.

While it’s easy to see the Trilogy of Life as a ribald celebration of humanity and sexuality — and that’s certainly what I remembered it to be — it actually marks a somewhat obvious progression towards Pasolini’s notorious final film, Salò. While The Decameron is lighthearted and whimsical, it doesn’t shy away from humanity’s weaknesses, which it exposes without judgment. But The Canterbury Tales is steeped with images of death, torment, and the inherent faithless and unpredictable nature of romantic relationships. Arabian Nights, the actual title of of which translates to “The Flower of the Thousand and One Nights,” is the grimmest and most defeated of the three, though it is still spectacularly beautiful and full of the depictions of nudity and sexuality that marks the trilogy as a whole.

Arabian Nights, the slogan of which is “Truth lies not in one dream but in many,” is essentially an anthology of tales all about jealous and/or heartbroken lovers who are mourning the loss of their love objects. This is the only film of the trilogy in which Pasolini did not appear, but it is arguably his most autobiographical of the three. The story of Aziz and Aziza is particularly heart-rending. One of Pasolini’s regular actors, the sunny Ninetto Davoli, plays Aziz, who on the eve of his wedding to Aziza, falls in love with another woman. Though heartbroken, Aziza stands by him and gives him advice on how to woo the new young woman. When he eventually wins over the new love, Aziza kills herself. His new partner declares that he must build a marble temple to Aziza, but when he goes on a quest to make that happen, he falls in love with a third woman. He is eventually castrated for his troubles.

In a story that somewhat mirrors that of Aziz, Davoli, who met Pasolini when he was just a teenager, was the great love of the director’s life and the two lived together as a couple (and then as platonic companions) for many years. But in the early ‘70s, Davoli met the woman who would soon become his wife. Though he remained Pasolini’s close companion until his death, it is impossible to ignore this subtext of heartbreak and betrayal. I’ve never read any interview with Davoli that specifically address this role in terms of his relationship with Pasolini, but it must have been painful for actor and director alike.

The stories are far less humorous than the first two films of the series and the majority of the film’s characters have at least one scene where they shed tears and the violence is more extensive than in the rest of the trilogy. For example, Aziz is castrated and in another tale, Pasolini regulars Franco Citti stars as an improbably red-haired demon (with giant earrings) who hacks a female lover to pieces and then transports her boyfriend through the air and turns him into a chimpanzee. In another tale, a young man swims out of the sea and comforts a frighten child. The two quickly bond and frequently embrace, but then he stabs the boy in the back in the night, killing the child as he was prophesied to do.

Despite this, there are some whimsical elements and some humor. Thanks to Walerian Borowczyk’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Miss Osbourne, I’m a little obsessed with cult films that feature use of a bow and arrow. Arabian Nights has not one, but two instances of someone shooting a golden bow and arrow. The first time, in the Aziz segment, is a real doozie where Aziz symbolically shoots a golden, penis-shaped arrow (!) into the woman he has fallen in love with as a symbol for their first sexual encounter.

The film is especially worth watching because it is one of the most beautiful in Pasolini’s output — though that’s not saying much, as most of them are visually spectacular — and Ennio Morricone yet again provided another wonderful score. Pasolini removed Arabian Nights from the Western studio set interpretations of Middle Eastern life so familiar to anyone who has seen either version of The Thief of Baghdad or even Disney’s animated Aladdin. Instead, he set the film in the villages, palaces, ancient temples, and deserts of the Middle East itself — a vision that spans three continents. Based everywhere from Iran and Yemen to India, Nepal, and Ethiopia, the extras are real-life locals, as was Pasolini’s custom, and the film represents an impressive breadth of landscape. For anyone who thinks that A Thousand and One Nights, the source material, is solely Arabian, it’s actually a collection of medieval stories from the Middle East and Asia, which I think Pasolini is alone in representing cinematically.

Of course Arabian Nights comes highly recommended, particularly the Criterion box set, which is one of their best recent releases. This is Pasolini at his most tender, romantic, and melancholic, and it’s particularly hurtful to know that this would be his second to last film before his death.

MEDEA (1969)

Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1969

Starring: Maria Callas, Laurent Terzieff, Massimo Girotti

The young hero Jason is charged with retrieving the legendary golden fleece from a foreign land, an animal pelt infused with magic powers. When he arrives, he meets Medea, a princess and priestess of the fleece. She falls quickly in love with the handsome, charming Jason, and decides to help him steal the fleece, betraying her father and brother at the same time — she actually kills and dismembers her brother to keep her father from following Jason, herself, and the Argonauts, all fleeing with the fleece. She and Jason settle into marriage and have children, though Jason later decides to abandon her in favor of a new bride, which will result in a favorable partnership with the Corinthian king. In retaliation, a heart broken Medea kills Jason’s bride to be as well as their sons, before burning their house to the ground.

A companion piece to Pasolini’s earlier Oedipus Rex, Medea bears much in common with the former. Like Oedipus Rex, it is a beautifully mythic film from its costumes and dialogue to its cinematography. And like Oedipus Rex, as well as several of Pasolini’s other films, including Accattone, Mamma Roma, Teorema, and Porcile, it is closely concerned with difficult family relationships and familial violence. But this is far more abstract than Oedipus Rex — with hardly any dialogue — and, in a way, more menacing and violent. A key early scene includes an elaborately staged human sacrifice, where a young man is crucified and then Medea and her countrymen drink his blood and eat his flesh. 

The centaur in the film’s opening segment is the key to understanding Pasolini’s anti-religious, post-Freudian, post-Marxist themes. Played by the beautiful Laurent Terzieff (Milky Way, Kapò), he explains to the young Jason that acts of magic and belief in gods is fundamentally irrational and almost childlike. Pasolini’s changes to Euripides’ play Medea, the film’s source material, revolve around this point. In the play, Jason cannot attain the fleece without Medea’s help and her magic and her violent, sacrificial acts are crucial to his success. Here, it seems that these acts don’t have any basis in reality and she is just delusionally convinced of her own importance and of the effectiveness of her religious rituals. I interpret these scenes in two ways: either Pasolini is depicting her belief in the supernatural and the religious as being all in her head, or magic is only real in her homeland — sort of a version of believing in a thing it makes it reality.

In this way, Medea provides an interesting parallel to Lady Macbeth, another woman who relies on violence to support her husband’s ambitious acts. While Lady Macbeth doesn’t directly practice witchcraft, her most powerful soliloquy is a plea to the spirits to strip her of her feminine attributes and prepare her for murder and violence. She literally summons Hell to aid her. In Act I Scene V she delivers her famous speech that could easily have come out of the mouth of Medea:

“Come, you spirits

That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here,  

And fill me from the crown to the toe top-full  

Of direst cruelty! make thick my blood;  

Stop up the access and passage to remorse,  

That no compunctious visitings of nature

Shake my fell purpose, nor keep peace between  

The effect and it! Come to my woman's breasts,  

And take my milk for gall, you murdering ministers,  

Wherever in your sightless substances

You wait on nature's mischief! Come, thick night,

And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell,  

That my keen knife see not the wound it makes,  

Nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dark,  

To cry 'Hold, hold!'

Maria Callas, of course, made her fame playing both of these characters and she remains one of the greatest opera singers to attempt Verdi’s Macbeth. In 1953, in the early years of her career, she allegedly learned the part for Cherubini’s Medea in just a few days, one of her great successes, and I can’t help but wonder if this contributed to Pasolini’s casting decision. The two were great friends and Callas only outlived Pasolini by two years, dying young of a heart attack. The Greek Callas also had dramatic, striking looks which match perfectly with the alluring, aloof, and mystical Medea. This was her only film role and was undertaken during a stressful time in her career, but it’s a powerful testament to her stage presence. Thanks to my grandmother, an opera singer herself, I grew up with a thorough education in opera, particularly Callas’s classics, and when I found out about this film, it was like worlds collided in the best way possible.

The success of Medea lies not only in Callas’s moving performance, but also in Pasolini’s choice of landscape, imagery, and powerful use of colors (particularly gold, black, and green). It makes me wish Pasolini had taken on an adaptation of Dune. With shooting in Italy and Turkey, many of the ritual scenes were filmed in the early Christian church ruins of Göreme, a history region of Turkey. Pasolini, who typically used nonprofessional actors, rounded out his cast with extras from North Africa who give a palpable foundation for Medea’s later profoundly isolated state as a foreigner in a Greek court. The amazing score, full of world music and eerie chanting, is one of the best in any of Pasolini’s films.

The score and the landscape serve to support Pasolini’s anti-religious themes, which make Medea out to be a sympathetic, yet hysterical figure of religious paranoia. Chiron, sometimes a centaur, sometimes Jason’s human teacher, says she is in the midst of a “spiritual catastrophe,” a “reverse conversion” that she has never recovered from. It is this sense of trauma, violence, and abandonment that allow her later actions to make sense. Calling her a woman scorned is too belittling for the sense of justice, revenge, and absolute violence that Pasolini instills in her. 

Medea will not be for everyone, but it comes highly recommended, partially thanks to this sense of gravity. Unlike Oedipus Rex, Medea is not a case of inevitable doomed fate, but the tragedy comes at the thoughtless decisions of men. Find this astounding modern rendition of one of the Mediterranean’s most violence ancient myths on joint Blu-ray and DVD from the BFI.

PORCILE aka PIGSTY

Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1969

Starring: Pierre Clémenti, Jean-Pierre Léaud, Marco Ferreri, Franco Citti

“We have decided to devour you for your disobedience.”

A quiet man wanders a foreboding, volcanic landscape, willing to go to any lengths for survival. He attacks a soldier and cannibalizes the body. Later, he teams up with another man and they attack a wagon carrying female slaves. Eventually he is arrested and executed. Before dying, he states, "I killed my father, I ate human flesh and I quiver with joy." Meanwhile, in postwar Germany, a powerful industrialist, Herr Klotz, is trying to convince his son Julian to marry a young woman. But Julian’s dark secret is that he’d rather spend time with the family pigs, which his father’s nemesis, Herdhitze, discovers. The two industrialists team up — Klotz blackmails Herdhitze to keep the latter’s Nazi activities quiet — and dispose of Julian.

One of Pasolini’s most difficult films, but also one of his greatest triumphs, Porcile is at the center of a fascinated web that connects the director’s cinema as a whole. It strikes a fine balance between the mythic works like Oedipus Rex, The Gospel According to St. Matthew, and Medea. Like Oedipus Rex, it is concerned with polluted lands, patricide, and crimes against the family. Like the later Salò, this is one of Pasolini’s few films overtly about the devastating effects of WWII, and also like that last, greatest of his films, it is comprised of a mix of storytelling and highly intellectual language. This is closely related to the bourgeois satire found in Teorema, but here Pasolini exchanges sex and religious epiphany for violence and discussions of the Holocaust. 

I’ve read that his satire of the bourgeois industrialists in Porcile is too heavy handed, but if you assume that Pasolini always knew what he was doing — and was always in complete control — he provides a nasty, blackly comic tale of pervasion and murder. The contrast between the two stories is where the crux of Porcile lies. Pasolini’s choice to blend the two together may seem jarring at first; roughly every ten minutes or so he cuts back and forth between them with some obvious noise (black screens with a soundtrack scratch) at the end of each reel. Pasolini often spoke of “disinterested cinema” and included references to Brecht in Porcile. Brecht was a German playwright known for his “alienation effect,” a theatrical technique meant to distance audiences from a story’s sense of artifice and melodrama so that they could gain a deeper appreciation of political and allegorical themes at play. While Brecht sought for an experimental break with realist cinema, I believe that Pasolini also sought this kind of separation from neorealism at this point in his career.

But Porcile is not as experimental as it seems and provides two coherent stories. The parallel between the two is both incisive and terrifying, as Pasolini conflates a seemingly medieval tale of human sacrifice, pre-modern terror, cannibalism, and savagery with Germany’s economic miracle (known as the Wirtschaftswunder). Ultimately he shows us that little has changed with a chilling, casual discussion between Klotz and his right hand man. The latter states, “In various shipments the prisoners were driven into the gas chambers, naked. The crystals were placed in the pipe. The pipe was closed with a plug. The plug had a metal tube, which sprayed the crystals. The prisoners breathed for 30 seconds and fell to the floor, covered with excrement. The corpses arrived at the Institute still warm, their eyes wide, glistening.” This exposition is accompanied by harp music (Klotz, who has a very intentionally placed Hitler mustache, is literally playing the harp in this scene), while he goes on to explain the autopsy and dismemberment process. It seems Herdhitze, Klotz’s rival, developed quite a collection of the bodies of Holocaust victims and it is this discussion of getting rid of the doctor’s “prize collection” — the corpses — that inspires the men to get rid of the pig-loving son with Herdhitze’s assistance.

I haven’t written much about the parallels between Pasolini and the younger German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder, whose career I covered in depth earlier this year, but the similarities are many. Two of Europe’s most towering cinematic intellects, both men made films deeply critical of life in postwar Europe. While Pasolini lived through the war, Fassbinder was born in its last year. Though fundamentally leftists, they were both ostracized by the political left (and right). They were highly controversial and often in the media spotlight in their own countries. They were prolific with output that included much more than directing. They were gay (loosely bisexual in Fassbinder’s case), had difficult relationships with their absent fathers, but close relationships with their mothers (who both men cast in their films), and they both died tragically young. 

More than these personal similarities, their films contain overlapping themes: a rejection of realism and explorations of postwar trauma — while Fassbinder made many films (and one of the most incredible television series in history) directly about or with references to WWII, Pasolini will be forever remembered for Salò — combined with aggressive barbs directed at capitalism and bourgeois Europe; discussions of the family and sexuality; and a certain romantic idealism about crime, poverty, and prostitution. Many of their protagonists possess a sense of irresponsibility and a certain disregard for the rules; they also embody the German concept of Sehnsucht, a sense of profound longing or craving, a search for what is often indescribable. 

This hungry, ravenous searching is literally embodied by Pierre Clementi’s angelic cannibal. Like Fassbinder, Pasolini was often dead-on with his casting and Clementi — one of Europe’s most underrated actors — carries his half of the film magnificently. For my money, he is the ultimate symbol of European art house cinema and I wish that Pasolini had worked with him more (and that Fassbinder had worked with him at all). 

Porcile comes with the highest recommendation. You can find it on region one DVD, though I recommend the superior Masters of Cinema UK disc. Hopefully it will soon find a home on Blu-ray. I can’t understand why it doesn’t have a wider audience, and anyone weighing whether or not to watch (or re-watch) Salò would do well to dive in here first.

AMORE E RABBIA aka LOVE AND ANGER

Carlo Lizzani, Bernardo Bertolucci, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Jean-Luc Godard, Elda Tattoli, Marco Bellocchio, 1969

Starring: Ninetto Davoli, Julian Beck, Nino Castelnuovo, Tom Baker

I just wrote in my review of Capriccio all’italiana, an anthology film from the previous year that Pasolini also contributed to, how sick I am of European art house anthologies, but Amore e rabbia was blissfully the last of these. When these anthology films weren’t completely self-indulgent, like The Witches, they tended to focus on the fraught political situation of the late ‘60s. Marked by protests, strikes, and government-wide shut downs, this period was the closest Europe has come since 18th century France to attaining revolution. 

While the US was home to the Civil Rights Movement and anti-Vietnam demonstrations, French students nearly overthrew their own government, Italy had a major anarchist conference, and Czechoslovakia underwent the Prague Spring, etc. Without understanding the political climate of the period, it’s almost impossible to absorb everything going on in Amore e rabbia, which is made up of five clips from six directors. 

Carlo Lizzani, one of neorealism’s foremost screenwriters and a prolific director in his own right, kicked off the anthology with “L’indifferenza" aka “Indifference,” the most effective segment of the film. In the courtyard of an apartment, a woman is attacked while onlookers ignore the crime to listen to a sporting event (based on the true story of Kitty Genovese, who was raped and stabbed to death just outside her apartment complex), and elsewhere people refuse to help an injured man and woman trying to get from a car accident to the hospital. This latter tale would be more effective if I hadn’t already watched a more comical version in The Witches, which this much more somber retelling closely mirrors. Still, its implications are chilling and there is an almost Cronenbergian feel to the hostility and violence of the city.

Bernardo Bertolucci’s “Agonia” aka “Agony,” on the other hand, is really an acquired taste. A man is passing away and his death is accompanied by a troupe of dancers who form body sculptures (like something you might see at Cirque du Soleil), spout pseudo philosophical nonsense, and otherwise guide the man to his death in the most ‘60s European counterculture way possible. Put together by The Living Theatre and with a performance from the company’s founders Julian Beck and Judith Malina, you really have to know the background to get this one. It might be nice to watch after checking out Fassbinder’s documentary on experimental theater, Theatre in Trance (1981).

Next up is Pasolini’s segment, "La sequenza del fiore di carta” aka “The Sequence of Paper Flowers,” which is surprisingly short and simple. His regularly star from this period, the irresistibly likable Ninetto Davoli plays an innocent young man who wanders the streets in utter harmony with the world, sometimes carrying a large paper flower. These images are contrasted with clips of atrocities and historically important moments and the youth is eventually struck dead, as if the heavens are outraged by his innocence and gaiety. This one would be unlikable if it weren’t for an infectious performance from Davoli, whose sunny personality shines through. It’s easy to see why he become one of Pasolini’s most used comic actors.

The little dialogue in “La sequenza del fiore di carta” is more than made up for with the dialogue-heavy story from the film’s only non-Italian director, Jean-Luc Godard. His “L’Amore” aka “Love” is a fascinating companion piece to some of his films that revolve around relationships — such as Contempt and A Woman in a Woman — as it follows a couple who sit around and argue. Their discussions of love and politics are underlined by the fact that she is Jewish and he is Arabic and they are contrasted with another couple who discuss the actions of the central couple.

Marco Bellocchio and Elda Tattoli segment, "Discutiamo, discutiamo” aka “We Tell, You Tell,” is the last and will probably feel as relevant as the first segment to contemporary viewers. It follows a group of politically-minded students who don’t take any action, but sit around preaching ideas of Marxism and anarchism that they all already agree on. Essentially their discussion is about whether it’s possible to change things from within the system or whether the system should be destroyed and rebuilt. It’s not the best of the short films, but the discussion feels fresh and some of the themes haven’t changed at all.

Overall I can only recommend Amore e rabbia to Pasolini and Godard completists, or to anyone with an interest in or knowledge of ‘60s history. You can surprisingly find the film on DVD, in a nice-looking edition from NoShame. It’s definitely worth watching at least once and I would be fascinated to hear some feedback from viewers totally ignorant to the events of the late ‘60s.

CAPRICCIO ALL’ITALIANA aka CAPRICE ITALIAN STYLE

Mario Monicelli, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Mauro Bolognini, Steno, Pino Zac, Franco Rossi, 1968

Starring: Totò, Franco Franchi, Ugo D'Alessio, Regina Seiffert

After Ro.Go.Pa.G and The Witches, also produced by Dino de Laurentiis, this is the third anthology film Pasolini took part in. While he’s not typically remembered as a director of comedies, he made a fair few, most of them either anthology films and/or starring the great Italian comedian Totò. This includes “La ricotta” from Ro.Go.Pa.G, the feature-length Uccellacci e Uccellini with Totò, and “The Earth as Seen From the Moon” from The Witches, also with Totò. “Che cosa sono le nuvole?”, his segment in Capriccio all’italiana, is the last of these and the last film Totò appeared in; it was actually released after the actor’s death.

Crowded with segments despite its 95-minute running time, there are six segments divided between six directors. Mario Monicelli, director of Big Deal on Madonna Street, helmed “La Bambinaia” aka “The Nanny,” about a nanny who tells unsettling stories to the children she has been hired to mind. The second segment, “Il mostro della domenica” aka “The Monster of Sunday,” was directed by the prolific Steno (An American in Rome, Execution Squad). He frequently worked with Totò, who appears here as a grumpy old man stuck in his bourgeois ways, determined to get revenge against the young people he hates.

The third segment, “Perché?” aka “Why?”, was directed by Mauro Bolognini, who also directed an adaptation of one of Pasolini’s novels. In “Perché?”, frustration comes to a head as a couple is stuck in traffic in the middle of Rome and the wife encourages her husband to get them out of it by whatever means necessary. The fourth episode is Pasolini’s “Che cosa sono le nuvole?” aka “What are Clouds?”, which I’ll examine in depth shortly. The last two segments include Pino Zac and Franco Rossi’s (who also worked on The Witches but was uncredited here) “Viaggio di lavoro,” where the Queen of England’s trip to Africa goes horribly wrong, and Mauro Bolognini’s second entry, “La Gelosia” aka “Jealousy,” another story about a troubled husband and wife.

I’m not going to lie. At this point, I’m already pretty burned out by European anthology films, which is perhaps odd because I absolutely love British horror anthology efforts like Tales from the Crypt and Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors. For whatever reason, they were all the craze on the European art house scene in the ‘60s, including films like Love at Twenty (1961), The Seven Deadly Sins (1962), The Most Beautiful Swindlers (1963), Six in Paris (1964), The Oldest Profession (1964), and my favorite, Spirits of the Dead (1969), an Edgar Allen Poe themed anthology featuring works by Fellini, Louis Malle, and Roger Vadim.

Pasolini’s “What are Clouds?” is undisputedly the best film in Capriccio all’italiana. A group of puppets (actually real-life actors like Totò, Laura Betti, Ninetto Davoli, and Franco Franchi) are involved in an adaptation of Othello, Shakespeare’s tragedy about a husband’s paranoia and violent jealousy taken to extremes. While waiting between acts, they discuss the events unfolding on stage. For example, though the puppet played by Ninetto Davoli (one of Pasolini’s regulars) has been cast as Othello, he recognizes him to be a flawed and negative character and he’s upset that he has to repeat this performance over and over.

The best moments of “What are Clouds?” are echoed in Pasolini’s other comedies: the presence of Totò (here playing puppet Iago with hilarious results), and a healthy blend of comedy and intellectual material. Criterion released Mamma Roma with Pasolini’s short “La ricotta” as a special feature and I would love to see Uccellacci e uccellini  released on Blu-ray with the other comedies shorts accompanying. Though I loved the short, I can’t recommend Capriccio all’italiana. It frustrated that there is no unifying theme and British horror definitely spoiled me with their customary use of a framing device: a central story in which different characters tell their own stories, which make up the short films, and at the end, the characters are reunited and experience the conclusion together. I don’t believe this is available on DVD for English-speaking audiences and it’s also a job to track down online.

TEOREMA

Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1968

Starring: Terence Stamp, Laura Betti, Silvana Mangano, Massimo Girotti

“You seduced me, God, and I let myself be seduced.”

A bourgeois Italian family receive a visit from a mysterious stranger. He proceeds to seduce and have sex with all the members of the family -- the religious maid, the somewhat effeminate son, the repressed mother, the shy daughter, and eventually the uptight, businessman father. He speaks very little, gives himself to them completely, and asks for nothing in return. Then he disappears, throwing them all into a state of spiritual upheaval and emotional chaos. Each member of the family is profoundly changed and they have remarkably different reactions to his sudden absence. The daughter becomes catatonic, the son takes up painting, the mother becomes a sex addict, and the maid returns to her village and begins performing miracles. The father, most interestingly of all, becomes a sexual prowler who has some sort of religious epiphany and strips off all of his clothes in a train station.

Teorema (aka Theorem) is a weird little film that fits in with the mid-period of Pasolini’s career in the sense that he was past the early religious allegories set in Roman slums (Accattone, Mamma Roma, La ricotta), past the Marxist-leaning documentaries (La rabbia, Comizi d’amore), and almost finished with his mythic period (The Gospel According to St. Matthew, Oedipus Rex, while Medea would a year after Teorema). This period of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s — before the Trilogy of Life and his final film, the death-obsessed Salò — Pasolini made a number of allegorical parables that define the sort of post-Marx, post-Freud, postwar world that defines his body of cinema in general.

Like Pasolini’s early works, religious and/or sacred themes are continued here — the family’s servant (Laura Betti) is profoundly religious and tries to commit suicide because of the desire she feels for the guest. He rescues and comforts her, giving in to her sexual needs in the process. An echo of Pasolini’s simple yet idealized Italian villager (or slum citizen), she leaves the family’s mansion at the end of the film and returns home to her village, where she performs miracles. The father (Massimo Girotto) has a similar experience and becomes a new twist on Pasolini’s frequently used messiah character, who are both prophets and sacrificial lambs.

Through the father’s character, this is also a blatantly Marxist parable. A wealthy, successful businessman, he gives away his extensive factories — signing them over to his workers — in the beginning of the film. Though the film treats the entire family unit as a sort of collective protagonist, it is essentially a story about their attempts to transition after the father’s retirement, after his active abandonment of the capitalist machine. The film has little dialogue, so the father’s decision is not addressed in depth, but he claims to be sick and compares himself to Ivan Ilyich, Tolstoy’s novel about an ambitious capitalist ladder-climber who has an accident and finds himself inexplicably terminal. He realizes the divide between what he describes as authentic and artificial life, a concept at the heart of many of Pasolini's films.

Teorema is also Pasolini’s first film with an abundance of sex and nudity, though neither are used in a gratuitous way. Like Salò, naked flesh and sexuality are tied into themes of mortality and the horror of bourgeois life. All of the members of the family are ashamed of their own sexuality, but unable to resist their attraction to the guest, who openly, almost innocently returns their affection. The brief sex scenes culminate in one of the best and most honest depictions of sexual repression and human vulnerability in cinema. While in Salò sex is about power, dominance, and violence, rather than sensuality, here it is a rite of communion. The visitor’s sexual acts serve to set each of the family members free from their bourgeois prison, but this isn’t entirely positive or care free — Pasolini in no sense gives the idea that the film has a happy ending. The visitor could be seen as God or the Devil, or merely as a force of profound change — a living epiphany.

The nameless guest is played by British actor Terence Stamp, who was at the height of his acting powers around this time. His career began just a few years earlier with Billy Budd (1962) and became increasingly more interesting with The Collector (1965), Modesty Blaise (1966), and Far from the Madding Crowd (1967), though I find his two Italian appearances — in Teorema and Fellini’s masterly Toby Dammit (1968) — to be the most fascinating. I should also add that Terence Stamp is one of the most beautiful men I've ever seen. I could probably watch him peeling potatoes for two hours and be happy.

Highly allegorical, Teorema will not be for everyone. It will either profoundly move you or bore you into incomprehension. The minimal dialogue and plot that is at once simple and complex might be too much (or not enough) for a lot of people. Aside from the sexual content being criticized by the Catholic Church, Teorema received mostly positive critical reception. It's a special and rewarding film. You can find it on Blu-ray from BFI, though I’d love to see it released in the giant Pasolini box set of my dreams alongside Pasolini’s own novel, published after the film was released.

In this movie, everyone willingly kneels before Zod. (Sorry Pasolini.)

OEDIPUS REX aka EDIPO RE

Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1967

Starring: Silvana Mangano, Franco Citti, Alida Valli, Carmelo Bene, Julian Beck, Luciano Bartoli

Pasolini’s adaptation of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex follows a young couple in Italy in the years before the war. They have a child, but the husband is jealous and has a servant take the baby boy to the desert to kill him. Unable to go through with the task, the boy is abandoned in the brush. The film transitions to an ancient, mythic time, where the baby is found in Corinth and adopted by the joyous King Polybus and his wife, Queen Merope. They name him Oedipus and he grows into an energetic young man. After a playmate taunts him about his parentage, he goes to the oracle of Apollo and learns there’s a prophecy saying he will kill his father and marry his mother. Dejected and miserable, he refuses to go home, setting in motion a chain of tragic events.

A bridge between The Gospel According to St. Matthew and Pasolini’s later films like The Decameron, Oedipus Rex is marked by a dramatic visual sense and use of color that would continue throughout the second half of Pasolini’s career. It also provides an interesting precursor to Salò, as the film is consumed with anger about the actions of previous generations, those that began WWII. Like many of Pasolini’s works, this can be seen as a meditation on the effects of WWII and the postwar world. The film’s opening takes place in modern day — the 1920s — with Oedipus’s father, Laius, garbed in military uniform, the kind worn by men who would soon before part of the fascist movement.

This choice belies one of the film’s deeper themes: Pasolini’s investigation of his own complicated relationship with his mother and his father. While he had a very close relationship with his mother, who he lived with for his entire life and who was even cast as Jesus’s mother in The Gospel According to St. Matthew. His father, on the other hand, was an Italian soldier not unlike Laius. With a gambling problem and an arrest record, he was in and out of the young Pasolini’s life and ultimately abandoned his son. Anxiety about fathers being usurped by their sons is a common theme in Greek myth. For example one of the founding myths is that Zeus, the father of the gods, rises up against his own father, the Titan Cronus, who has consumed all his children and imprisoned them within his stomach. 

Crimes against the family are also often at the heart of Greek tragic myths — Zeus’s murder of his father is only heroic because the foundation myth is about the gods overthrowing the Titans, while the story of Orestes (who murdered his mother after she murdered his father after he murdered their daughter) is perhaps the most famous of the Greek tragedies. These crimes against blood are directly related to a concept of plague and miasma that follows an offense against the gods, where a lands animals and humans suffer and die, disease spreads, and wells dry up. With this element, Pasolini both references postwar turmoil and gives a nod to his earlier, more fervent Marxism with the citizens’ plea for Oedipus to solve their plight — with the high priest character played by Pasolini himself.

Many of these myths are initially caused by one character’s hubris, excellent conveyed by Franco Citti who had a similar role in Pasolini’s first film, Accattone. While the Greek gods are always punishing people for excessive pride and hubris, Pasolini also captures how maddeningly cynical this is. Oedipus only leaves home because of the prophecy that he will kill his father and marry his mother — mistakenly believing that Polybus (an endearing Ahmed Belhachmi) and Merope (a beautiful, pre-Suspiria Alida Valli) are his biological parents — but it is this exodus that causes him to accidentally kill his father Laius (Luciano Bartoli) and set in motion a chain of events. Like so many tragic tales, this irritatingly boils down to a failure of communication — the events arguably could have been avoided if Oedipus went home and had a talk with his adopted parents — but Oedipus Rex captures a profounder sense of damning irony and nihilistic fate.

Oedipus Rex is essentially one of Pasolini’s more neglected masterpieces. It captures a sense of awe and wonder, while also effectively being a neorealist sword and sandal film. The Moroccan setting is almost a character in and of itself, while Pasolini captures spectacular performances from some professional actors (including the enigmatic Silvana Mangano in one of her best roles despite a disturbing lack of eyebrows) and nonprofessionals alike. There is dreamlike, surreal sense thanks to the costumes and nonsequitors and Pasolini finds a perfect balance between stark intellectualism and a certain comic campiness that doesn’t take away from the film’s impact but perhaps contributes to it.

The film comes highly recommended, though you should pick up the UK Masters of Cinema DVD/Blu-ray over the US-friendly Water Bearer Films’ DVD. It makes a fascinating double feature with either The Gospel According to St. Anthony or the later, similarly-themed Medea. It is worthy of far more acclaim and should be counted among Pasolini’s masterpieces.

THE WITCHES aka LE STREGHE

Mauro Bolognini, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Vittorio De Sica, Luchino Visconti, Franco Rossi, 1967

Starring: Silvana Mangano, Totò, Ninetto Davoli, Clint Eastwood, Alberto Sordi, Massimo Girotti

After Ro.Go.Pa.G. and the controversy surrounding Pasolini’s heretic short film, “La ricotta,” he dove back anthology films a few years later with The Witches. The beautiful Silvana Mangano, wife of producer Dino de Laurentiis who organized the anthology, stars in each of the film’s five segments. I feel like I should warn you now that there aren’t actually any witches in the film (much to my great disappointment). Like Ro.Go.Pa.G., the different segments were helmed by well-known directors, including Luchino Visconti, Franco Rossi, Pasolini, Mauro Bolognini, and Vittorio De Sica. Surprisingly, the shorts vary considerably in length, which means that the film moves at a decent clip at never feels sluggish, as is sometimes the case with anthology films trying to make each segment equal to its fellows. 

Luchino Visconti’s The Witch Burnt Alive

This lengthy first short stars Mangano as a famous actress who takes a day off from her busy shooting and publicity schedule to travel to an old friend’s wintertime resort. Her friend is throwing a party for a wealthy, middle aged group and the actress is somewhat ostracized. Obsessed with her elaborate beauty routine and the paparazzi waiting outside, the actress is bordering on hysteria. The women are jealous and judgmental of her, while most of the men want to have sex with her. Ultimately she faints and falls ill and it is revealed she is pregnant. She sulks off after a fight over the telephone with her controlling husband. 

This film has a lot of potential and an unnerving tone, but doesn’t quite get off the ground. I think it actually would have been more enjoyable as a feature-length work. It is unclear if the actress is just vain and selfish, or if she is really fragile, overworked, and at the breaking point. Visconti suggests the women’s predatory nature — they remove the actress’s hat, wig, false eyelashes, and some of her makeup when she passes out — and the actress almost has an affair with her friend’s husband, but these scenes don’t go to the extremes that they perhaps should. Mangano would go on to better work with Visconti in films like Death in Venice and Conversation Piece. Keep your eyes peeled for a naughty cameo from a very young Helmut Berger.

Mauro Bolognini’s Civic Sense

In this quick short, Mangano plays a rushed woman held up in traffic because of an accident. The driver of a truck has been injured, but she offers to take him to the hospital so that he doesn’t have to wait for an ambulance. The confused, concussed, bleeding man asks her nonsensical questions, but wonders about her frenzied driving and becomes concerned when she passes a series of hospitals. Ultimately she arrives at her destination and drops him off by the side of the road, where he collapses. Bolognini is lesser known that some of the greats on The Witches’ directorial roster, but he helmed The Big Night (1959) with a script from Pasolini and The Inheritance (1976). This quick episode is amusing but is sort of an afterthought compared to the other segments.

Pier Paolo Pasolini’s The Earth As Seen From The Moon

The comic crown jewel of the anthology is this film that reunites Pasolini with comic legend Totò, Pasolini’s ex-lover and close friend Ninetto Davoli, and composer Ennio Morricone. This whimsical film follows a vibrantly red-haired father and son as they search for a new “mama” after their matriarch has passed away. After a number of false starts, they encounter the beautiful Assurdina, a mute and deaf woman with greenish hair and a generous spirit, who agrees to join the little family. She fixes up their tiny shack, but accidentally dies when her new husband cooks up a scheme to earn them enough money to buy a house.

Similar to Pasolini’s previous absurdist fairy tale, The Hawks and Sparrows, which also starred Ninetto and Davoli, this is both funnier and more absurd. It lacks the pedantic moral element of the former film and is a funny, endearing romp that pokes fun at the human quest for advancement. I think this is the best of the five films and Mangano also at her most compelling and this was the start of a multi-film collaboration between she and Pasolini that includes many of his mid-period films like Oedipus Rex and Teorema. And if you think death by slipping on a banana peel is hilarious, then this is definitely the film for you.

Franco Rossi’s The Sicilian Woman

This penultimate segment from Franco Rosso, a lesser known director who made a number of anthology films and The Counterfeiters (1953), is another brief but amusing glimpse at Mangano. She plays a scorned woman who admits to her father after much cajoling that a man flirted with her and then rebuffed her. In response, he father kills the man and his entire family, while a hysterical Mangano protests his deeds. I enjoyed this one a lot more than Civic Sense, but its sole purpose is really to serve as a palate-cleanser between Pasolini’s film and the final episode.

Vittorio De Sica’s An Evening Like the Others

This might actually be tied with The Earth As Seen From The Moon as my favorite film in the anthology. Mangano stars as a bored house wife who is frustrated that her successful businessman husband is always tired or distracted. While doing the dishes after dinner, she begins to fantasize about how things could be different — she sees him in a number of roles, such as lover, jealous husband, and villain. Though he promises her he will work at renewing their romance, he falls asleep and snores loudly. This wonderful short effortlessly shifts between fantasy and reality and feels very much like a musical without songs as it graduates into more and more elaborate fantasies. There’s a wonderful ending sequence where the wife, trying to prove to her husband on a grand scale how sexy she can be, performs in a stadium full of hundreds and strips away layers and layers of ball gowns. 

Allegedly the reason why The Witches is so obscure is because United Artists purchased the film and kept it out of theaters because the actor who co-starred as the boring husband — Clint Eastwood — was on the rise to fame as an action star in the US. I’m not entirely sure why, because he’s both funny and charming in the role and it’s definitely nice to see another side of Italy’s favorite American gunslinger. The above picture of Mangano as some sort of sci-fi villainess is from one of the wife's fantasies and is such a tease that I wish some of the segments had been more horror/cult-focused.

Overall I would recommend The Witches thanks to the segments from Pasolini and De Sica. Certainly anyone with a passion for the weird trend of European art house anthologies, Mangano, Pasolini, De Sica, Visconti, and Clint Eastwood will find a lot to enjoy in this pleasant way to pass two hours. Luckily United Artists have relaxed their death grip and you can find the film on DVD.

THE HAWKS AND THE SPARROWS aka UCCELLACCI E UCCELLINI

Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1966

Starring: Totò, Ninetto Davoli

Totò and his son Ninetto travel around the Roman countryside, having adventures until they meet with a wise crow. He tells them the story of two friars, Ciccillo and Ninetto, who are tasked by St. Francis to teach a message of love to the nearby hawks and sparrows. A frustrating task, they manage to communicate to the two bird species separately, but can’t convince them to love each other. After the crow is finished his story, he tags along on Totò and Ninetto’s journey through the country, where they have run ins with some violent men, a poor family, actors, and more.

Literally meaning Ugly Birds and Little Birds, this difficult comic parable was allegedly Pasolini’s own favorite among his films, but will likely divide viewers. This is essentially a tale of inherently innocent, naive characters caught up between Marxist (as represented by the crow) and Christian ideals. Nearly all of Pasolini’s early films — Accattone, Mamma Roma, La ricotta, The Gospel According to St. Matthew, and even the documentary Love Meetings — reflects this debate and contains religious themes. The Hawks and Sparrows would serve as something of a warm, humorous farewell to that as Pasolini moved on to more mythic films after this. Like those early works, this is also one of his last films where the majority of the characters are poor or working class, another theme that obsessed Pasolini’s early years.

There are a number of things that I genuinely loved about Hawks and Sparrows. For starters, there’s an excellent, whimsical score from Ennio Morricone, which includes the film’s hilarious opening song. Vocalist Domenico Modugno sings the credits — including all the names of everyone involved — as they roll across the screen. While the humor is a little difficult — in the sense that I think some of it is topical and language-based — the first half of the film is funny and endearing with some physical comedy that seems to be borrowed from Chaplin. It’s hard to even look at Totò, one of Italy’s most beloved comic actors, and not be absolutely warmed down to my toes. He has a fabulous presence in everything I’ve seen and he’s great here.

His son is played by Ninetto Davoli, a teenage non-professional actor in his first-ever role. He’s also surprisingly strong in the film and went on to be the great love of Pasolini’s life. Though they only had a sexual relationship for a few years and Davoli eventually got married, he was Pasolini’s frequent companion until the director’s death nine years later. Maybe it’s just Totò’s finesse, but they have wonderful chemistry together — and also with the stuffy, pedantic crow. The latter actually turns out to be a delightful character and I wish I saw more of that in life action films (sans the CGI, please). Totò and Ninetto also appear in the framing story and the tale of two frustrated monks, who are the film’s most charming characters.

In a strange way, it reminded me of a much more whimsical version of Alejandro Jodorowsky’s surreal Fando and Lis (1968), which concerns a couple on a series of terrifying, humorous, and erotic adventures. Both films have an episodic feel — The Hawks and Sparrows follows the father and son past encounters like a field of young men dancing, a woman giving birth, the father demanding money from a very poor woman, and through a field where they’re shot at — and both have very Dantesque references to Hell and existential torment. 

But like Salò, the film’s intellectualism is self-conscious and it sometimes gets in the way. I can’t really decide if this is something I should recommend or not — you’ll love it, hate it, or maybe have no idea what’s going on — but if a moral parable in the form of an intellectual, absurdist comedy sounds up your alley, then definitely pick up the Masters of Cinema DVD. And if you think you can resist Totò, then you haven’t seen him in action yet. Like Leonard Nimoy, he’s the pretend grandfather that everyone wishes they had.

THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO ST. MATTHEW aka IL VANGELO SECONDO MATTEO

Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1964

Starring: Enrique Irazoqui, Margherita Caruso, Susanna Pasolini

“I am an unbeliever who has a nostalgia for a belief.” — Pier Paolo Pasolini

Closely following the Gospel of Matthew, Pasolini relates the life of Jesus Christ from his birth, childhood in Israel, and the early years of his teachings. The stern young man relates moral lessons through parables, traveling throughout the countryside. The film is divided into two parts and in the first half he preaches, finds apostles, and performs miracles. In the second half, his controversial teachings eventually reach the local Jewish elders, who plot against him and have him arrested, tried by Pontius Pilate, and crucified, which he had earlier foretold would occur. 

This Italian-French coproduction is perhaps a surprising work for Pasolini — an intellectual, Marxist, homosexual, and atheist — but it can be seen as the natural conclusion to his early Catholic themes in films like Accattone, Mamma Roma, and La ricotta. If all three of those early works follow a poor, Christ-like figure who is ultimately destroyed by the bourgeois world, The Gospel According to St. Matthew examines the biblical Christ directly. It tells us perhaps as much about Pasolini as it does about the historical religious figure, who is here depicted with a sense of gravity, presence, and austerity. Christ is is no longer a passive spiritual icon but a fervent, determined revolutionary figure. This is essentially a Marxist parable about a righteously angry poor man who wanders the land preaching against greed, corruption, and wealth.

I have to admit that I came to this film with some doubts and personal resistance — like Pasolini, I’ve spent most of my life as an atheist, though I was raised by a Catholic family. Unlike Pasolini, I have no “nostalgia for belief,” though I do have an appreciation for the sacred, the divine, and the unexplainable. I have to admit that I don’t find the biblical Christ to be an overwhelmingly interesting figure, but Pasolini takes a fascinating approach. Once I was able to get past the religious themes and look at this as a new work, it’s not really that far from the magical realism of someone like Jodorowsky — albeit more restrained. Though Christ performs miracles — he heals a facially disfigured man, walks on water, and transforms loaves into fishes — these events are presented at face value and met with little fanfare. An early scene showing the massacre of the babies is probably the most disturbing and surreal. It was primarily shot from a distance to depict screaming mothers and their dead babies flying through the air.

There is very little dialogue, most of which is lifted from the fairly straightforward Gospel of Matthew. The proceedings have a Brechtian sense of distance and alienation and the film is populated with strangely flat and alien characters that give The Gospel According to St. Matthew an allegorical feeling — though there are some scenes where Christ treats his followers with warmth and affection and Pasolini accomplishes much with dialogue-free close ups of faces. The only really sentimental moments surround Mary, both as a radiant young mother concerned for her child and later as a beatific old woman, played by Pasolini’s own mother, Susanna, with whom he had an incredibly close relationship. 

One of his most overtly poetic films, this was inspired more by Renaissance art than any clear sense of religion. The incredibly powerful cinematography from Tonino Delli Colli is among the film’s high points, as is the unusual soundtrack with selections from Bach and Jewish religious chants to soulful popular music, such as “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child.” The cinema verite elements are enhanced by some very careful editing. For example, some of Christ’s preaching has a documentary feel and the facial close ups of his preaching the Sermon on the Mount are incredibly claustrophobic.

 As was his custom, Pasolin used non-professional actors from the area where he shot the film — not at all in the Middle East, but in the Mediterranean countryside of Southern Italy — a location he discovered while shooting his previous film, the documentary, Love Meetings. Played by Spanish student Enrique Irazoqui, Jesus is a little Gothic-looking with his black cloak, dark under-eye circles, an abundance of facial hair (though he isn’t quite bearded), and an air of brooding. Other cast members included writers and intellectuals like Enzo Siciliano, Alfonso Gatto, and Natalia Ginzburg.

Allegedly, Pasolini had the idea to make this film thanks to a trip to Assisi in the early ‘60s. He went there at the Pope’s invitation to meet with a panel of non-religious artists and writers that the Pope personally organized. Stuck in a hotel room, Pasolini read all four gospels and decided to make a film — arguably the last project anyone at the time would have expected from him — and he eventually won the support of the Church. Though Pope John XXIII died a year prior to the film's release, Pasolini dedicated it to his memory.

This award-winning film is certainly no walk in the park, but it’s a rewarding, moving experience. There is something non-spiritual and non-sentimental about this rendition that ultimately allowed me to enjoy it far more than I thought possible. It would be an interesting exercise at some point to compare it to other works about leftist revolutionary personalities. The figure of the brave outcast and the defiant outsider is a constant not only throughout Pasolini’s work, but in some of my favorite films and I think if you approach The Gospel According to St. Matthew with that perspective, you’ll get a lot more out of the film. Sadly, there are no great region one releases, and the UK Masters of Cinema Blu-ray is absolutely the finest available so far.

LOVE MEETINGS aka COMIZI D’AMORE

Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1965

Starring: Pier Paolo Pasolini, Alberto Moravia, Giuseppe Ungaretti

In 1963, Pasolini directed his first documentary, La rabbia, a political examination of what is wrong with the postwar world. While it’s a worthwhile experiment, I can’t help but prefer this follow up, which I think shows Pasolini at his most endearing. He hit the streets and interviewed dozens of citizens all over Italy about their views on sex, marriage, love, divorce, prostitution, homosexuality, and related topics. Pasolini himself appears in crowds of curious onlookers to calmly ask a series of relatively controversial questions. He prods where necessary — asking further questions, confronting contradictions, or seeking clarification about the answers he receives — but is never openly judgmental about the quite varied responses.

He is, however, judgmental when he leaves the crowds. These interviews are contrasted with some brief analytic discussions between Pasolini and his friends, Italian intellectuals like Alberto Moravia (novelist and writer of The Conformist, which Pasolini’s protege and frequent assistant director Bernardo Bertolucci would soon adapt), psychologist Cesare Musatti, and poet Giuseppe Ungaretti. I can’t help but wonder if Pasolini began with his conclusions or came to them gradually over the course of the interviews. Love Meetings essentially expresses the belief that Italy in general is made up of conservatives and people who are ignorant, have a strong desire to stay that way, and who don’t want to see any change in their country.

Pasolini’s interview subjects represent a wide range of Italian citizens — young, old, soldiers, prostitutes, middle class, poor, conservative, and more liberal — though it seems he was limited by who he found in open public squares, which are by and large the primary settings for the different interviews. Primarily younger people are willing to speak with him and it certainly feels like many Italian voices are absent, though he was obviously going for the mood of the general public. Because he’s conducting the interviews in public, in crowds, and on film, it’s not only about what Italians think of sex, but what they think they’re allowed to say in front of their peers. Conformity is a major theme.

The subjugation of women is another common topic and he asks a number of men and women — including girls, young ladies, mothers, and older women — what they think of the country’s treatment of women. Most seem to agree that men are given more freedom and many express the opinion that that’s the way it should be. Italy’s famous divide between virgin, mother, whore is discussed, with some of the younger women admitting that they want the same sexual freedom men have. Divorce is another important element of this theme. While some younger people admit that divorce is a necessary right that allows couples that don’t get along to separate, others think it would allow women to do whatever they want and that murder and violence is preferable to this loss of feminine honor — a truly appalling moment.

“The problem of sex” is frequently discussed but never defined, leaving things a bit murky for much of the proceedings. In part of the interviews, it seems to be perversion or homosexuality and these latter scenes where he asks about homosexuality are painful. Totally unaware that their interviewer is gay, people give responses ranging from sympathy to revulsion. Obviously Pasolini confronted these issues every day — and it didn’t stop him from living his life as mostly un-closeted — but it would have been interesting to see his face during this segment of the documentary. He also asks a number of young couples if they think marriage will solve sexual “problems,” which I assume to mean the desire for sex outside of love. Many of them say yes, though a fair number acknowledge that sex is independent of love or marriage.

Despite the more frustrating elements, such as blatant prejudice and misogyny, a rampant lack of sexual education, and the mass desire to remain silent, the subjects of Love Meetings are also frequently warm and humorous. Pasolini is particularly sweet with the children in the opening scenes; he asks them where babies come from and the responses are hilarious. He also gets some surprising answers from an army squadron, who he asks about Italian machismo. Male sexuality is often discussed as being negative — bestial and unwholesome — but inevitable, which is why prostitution and other sex work is necessary.

Overall Love Meetings is a fascinating 90-minutes that flies by. Pick up the DVD from Water Bearer films and I think you’ll be shocked how relevant the documentary remains. It’s oddly similar to recent Youtube short films and news segments asking citizens (often children) about such sexual subjects as gay marriage and transgendered people. It’s also a fascinating contrast to Kinsey’s report, as his interviews were all held in private and the subjects remained anonymous, while Pasolini is equally as concerned with individual and group responses. There are a number of scenes where subjects censor themselves by muting out a sentence or two of their responses, presumably after Pasolini completed the film, and it would be fascinating to have these scenes restored.

LA RABBIA aka RAGE

Pier Paolo Pasolini, Giovanni Guareschi, 1963

Starring: Giorgio Bassani, Renato Guttuso, Gigi Artuso

Pasolini’s first documentary is this fascinating project, La rabbia, or Rage, which is a two-part essay on modern life, split with his political opposite, Giovanni Guareschi. Pasolini was known to be a controversial leftist and Marxist, expelled from the Communist Party and demonized because of his homosexuality. He regularly lambasted the Church, though his most frequent target was capitalism and its effects in the post-Industrial Revolution, which he saw as exploitative and incredibly destructive. He glorified the past, rural life, and the working poor, all of which beliefs are reflected in La rabbia, though this is an interesting look at his thoughts on other countries and cultures.

Pasolini’s views are contrasted with those of Guareschi, known to be equally controversial and brilliant in their day, though obviously outside of Italy, Pasolini is remembered while Guareschi is not. A journalist, cartoonist, and satirist by trade, his two enduring creations are characters in an ongoing series of stories: Don Camillo, a hard-headed priest (based on a real-life partisan who was imprisoned in concentration camps), and Peppone, an equally hard-headed Communist mayor in a rural town in northern Italy. Like Pasolini, Guareschi was frequently set apart from those in the right wing that shared his political beliefs, so he’s something of a fitting counterweight to Pasolini.

Conceived by producer Gastone Ferranti, who worked with Pasolini from Accattone and the early days of his career, the two intellectuals attempt to answer why human life is full of discontent, anguish, and fear. Both directors rely on footage from WWII to the ‘60s, including shots of revolution, murder, regal coronations, war, beauty pageants, and protests. A mix of cartoons and still photographs are included, though it is mostly a fascinating collection of newsreels and older archival footage, which includes clips of everyone from Charles de Gaulle and Eisenhower to Ava Gardner, Marilyn Monroe, and several popes. One of my biggest disappointments is that you don’t hear directly from Pasolini (whose speaking voice I love) or Guareschi; their words are read by narrators. Painter Renato Guttuso and writer Giorgio Bassani (The Garden of the Finzi Continis) read Pasolini’s responses, while Gigi Artuso, and Carlo Romano are responsible for Guareschi’s half.

Pasolini’s responses are a mixture of social commentary and poetry and are pretty typical for anyone who knows his political leanings. He explains how capitalism (and American democracy) is the world’s true villain, because it inherently subjugates all civilizations and peoples. His section is actually incredibly nihilistic and depressing and — as many of his works — remains relevant today. He discusses revolution, the glorification of peasant culture and the pre-Industrial past, and Marilyn Monroe’s death and the disappearance of beauty, among many other things. Much is made of racial conflicts, refugees, prison camps, and if you feel removed from the bulk of the 20th century, this is definitely worth watching. Pasolini occasionally slips into the pedantic, but this is a nice visual look at some of his philosophical and critic writing.

Guareschi’s section is more hopeful, but far more problematic. Some of Guareschi’s observations were fascinating, particularly idea that the world is doomed because of the foundations built at the end of WWII. He remarks that new countries and cultures were built on revenge and describes it as an evil that while the Nazis were punished and many executed, the perpetrators of Katyn (a stand-in for Soviet atrocities in general) and the two atomic bomb drops in Hiroshima and Nagasaki sat on the judges’ benches. This is perhaps an obvious observation, but one I’ve never thought of quite in those terms (and I’ve been writing a lot about WWII in the last year, thanks to the book I’m working on). In hindsight, it’s easy to see the villains and victors of the war, but I think this insight of Guareschi’s is a reminder that it’s worthwhile to view things from a different perspective.

Ultimately, both arguments are flawed — Pasolini is worshipping at the altar of Marxism, while Guareschi on one hand abhors the actions during WWII but then justifies later atrocities against Algeria, as well as the Vietnam war. Overall though, I think the concept of La rabbia is a brilliant one and is something we could desperately use now, in a time (at least in the US) where the left and right will likely need another world war to even have a civil conversation. The film’s production history is also fascinating, Pasolini’s section was cut from 100 minutes to about 50 minutes in order to make more room for Guareschi. In 2008, Giuseppe Bertolucci (the brother of Pasolini’s protege Bernardo and also a filmmaker in his own right) spearheaded the restoration project. This version premiered at the Venice International Film Festival, though I’m not sure it’s available for home viewing.

The best way to see La rabbia is through Raro Video’s special edition DVD release. I sing their praises pretty frequently on this blog, but they’ve done a fantastic job with this release. Put out in 2011, it includes trailers, Pasolini’s short film The Walls of Sana’a, and a wonderful feature length documentary on La rabbia that explains the different versions of the film and includes some great insight on Pasolini and Guareschi from their close collaborators. Guareschi’s segment, which had all but disappeared in the decades after the film’s release, does suffer from racism and dates the film pretty solidly, but it’s fascinating to see the two pieces side by side. Nothing like this is really produced today, but in a way I’d love to see a similar experiment as a series of brilliant Youtube videos. The idea of collecting and curating historical content and providing context and commentary is a dying art, but an important one, and I think the only person who does anything like this is Zizek. Pasolini, as always, was ahead of his time.

RO.GO.PA.G.

Roberto Rossellini, Jean-Luc Godard, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Ugo Gregoretti, 1963

Starring: Orson Welles, Laura Betti, Rosanna Schiaffino, Gianrico Tedeschi, Ugo Tognazzi, Edmonda Aldini

Also known as RoGoPaG, this art hours anthology film is named after the abbreviated names of its directors: Roberto Rossellini, Jean-Luc Godard, Pasolini, and Ugo Gregoretti. With the catch phrase, “Let’s Wash Our Brains,” this satirical, political exercise combines one established director — Rossellini — with the three newcomers. It’s an interesting slice of the early ‘60s and also has some excellent moments of comedy, even if it is flawed at times and has some troubling sexual politics. Pasolini’s film, one of the longest entries in the anthology, is the crown jewel of the piece and remains the reason that Ro.Go.Pa.G. is still relevant.

Roberto Rossellini’s Illibatezza

Rossellini’s Chastity follows an attractive flight attendant (played by the producer’s wife, Rosanna Schiaffino), who receives some annoying attention from a male passenger when they both land in Bangkok. She makes 8mm videos for her fiancé in her spare time and tries to escape the passenger’s attention, though he follows her everywhere. She gives herself a blonde bimbo makeover and adopts a new, sexually aggressive persona, which gets rid of him in the end. While the sex comedy would become a staple of Italian cinema and many of Rossellini’s earlier films have (at least implied) sexual content, seeing an erotic farce by way of the master of neorealism is jarring at best and flagrantly misogynistic at worst.

It’s standard fare to imagine someone (of course it’s a drunk American here) harassing a beautiful stewardess, Rossellini sort of contradicts himself. The man throws himself at Anna, the stewardess, drunkenly groping her and even trying to rape her. When she wears more provocative clothing, dyes her hair blonde, and comes on to him, he disgustedly calls himself a fool and her a whore and rapidly falls out of love with her. What? Anna’s need to film everything (which she ships to her boyfriend who then watches them back home) could have been a fascinating addition to this tale, but feel like a wasted opportunity.

Jean-Luc Godard’s Il nuovo mondo

Godard’s The New World is the only segment made by a Frenchman and is perhaps fittingly set in Paris. A young married couple tries to adjust to life after the explosion of an atomic bomb over Paris. Though there is no noticeable physical damage, the citizens, including the young wife, Alexandra, begin to act strangely and a riff appears in the once happy marriage. Sort of Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) by way of Godard, I really enjoyed this sci-fi twist on the French New Wave, but I’m sure a lot of viewers will find it pretentious. 

The husband (Jean-Marc Bory) spends a lot of time alone in hotel rooms talking to himself, brooding gallicly, and copying down his disturbing observations in a notebook. This is a pleasant reminder of Godard’s dystopian sci-fi triumph Alphaville (1965), which followed a few years later. And like almost all of Godard’s films from that period, the central dramatic tension in Il nuovo mondo is a disintegrating relationship between a man and a woman — a topic he would revisit more profoundly the same year with Le mepris aka Contempt. 

Pier Paolo Pasolini’s La ricotta

Ricotta is easily the centerpiece of this film and was so controversial that Pasolini was taken to court for his troubles. This hilarious, irreverent work is perhaps the culmination of what Pasolini meant when he said that cinema is a language in and of itself. Here he follows a filmmaker (brilliantly played by Orson Welles; I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall for their conversations), who is directing a movie about the crucifixion. Pasolini focuses on one of the bit players, a man playing a thief who will hang on one of the crosses next to Christ, and his struggles with food. He gives his daily rations to his family and steals a second helping. A dog eats this while he’s filming a scene, so he sells the dog to buy himself a huge helping of ricotta cheese and bread. He gorges himself and then dies — while again filming up on the cross.

Pasolini cleverly mocks so many things in such a short amount of time, including himself. He makes fun of his use of classical art as a way to set up shots, and his Marxism; the director calls a reporter a conformist and read from a book version of Pasolini’s Mamma Roma. Deftly capturing both the grotesque and carnivalesque in a way not seen in his previous films (Accattone and Mamma Roma) the film switches back and forth between black and white and color — the latter when the film within a film is in action — and has an almost inappropriately jazzy score. There are some very “Yakkity Sax”-like fast-paced moments that I couldn’t help laughing at where Stracci runs down the road to a sped-up harpsichord ditty. But Pasolini also reminds us that we’re laughing at the expense of a starving man desperate to find food after providing for his family.

As all of Pasolini’s early works, this film examines Italian’s disenfranchised, poor urban and rural populations. Through the character of Stracci (Mario Cipriani), he mocks the exploitative nature of both capitalism and religion. As it would again appear in his later films, food becomes emblematic of humanity — in particular, the ill effects of human suffering and human greed. Stracci basically dies of a stomach ache when he has consumed too much bread and cheese and, like the male protagonists of Accattone and Mamma Roma, he becomes something of a martyr, tied to a literal cross. This is a fascinating bridge between the controversial street drama of Accattone and the mythic, sacred subject matter of one of his immediate follow up films, The Gospel According to St. Matthew (1964).

Ugo Gregoretti’s Il pollo ruspante

Ugo Gregoretti’s Free Range Chicken is the least of the shorts, primarily because it’s the least subtle. This too literal satire about the evils of capitalism looks particularly awkward after Pasolini’s masterpiece. It contrasts the spending addiction of a bourgeois family — who are suckered into buying a house, toys, an unnecessarily large meal — while a professor with a robot-like voice lectures about how capitalism is ultimately an exploitative system. After their numerous purchases and silly social posturing meant to make them look impressive to complete strangers, they die in a car crash. 

Director Ugo Gregoretti’s name is almost completely unknown to modern audiences. Though he made a few feature-length films and returned to the anthology medium (with Godard, Claude Chabrol, Roman Polanski, and Hiromichi Horikawa) for The World’s Most Beautiful Swindlers (1964), he primarily directed shorts, documentaries, and TV movies. Though Il pollo ruspante is not an entirely successful effort, it still has it’s interesting moments and I’d like to see some of Gregoretti’s TV work on day.

Ro.Go.Pa.G. remains a curio, something really only of interest to diehard fans of European art house cinema, but I think it’s worth a watch. Pasolini’s segment comes highly recommended and you can find it as an extra on the Criterion Mamma Roma disc. The complete film is available in an average, but kind of disappointing Pasolini box set with some of his other early films and one of his early novels, or in the fantastic Masters of Cinema Blu-ray of Ro.Go.Pa.G.