Pier Paolo Pasolini’s films had the huge merit of not resembling anything or anyone, possibly because Pasolini was not just a director, he was also a novelist, poet, playwright and essayist. The flat sequences in black and white on the hovels and close-ups of the marked and hieratic faces of a Rome reminiscent of the Third World could not help but influence future filmmakers bent on exploring the places and the bodies of the underclasses, natural stages of hope and damnation in a peasant world that was gradually being shattered by the “economic boom”. Thus we can detect similarities in the work of such filmmakers as Mauro Bolognini, Ettore Scola and Pasolini’s friend and collaborator Sergio Citti. The closed world of the down-and-outs was translated across the Atlantic into decaying urban settings by the Warhol – Morrissey partnership in such films as Trash, which was dubbed in Italian under the guiding hand of Pasolini and Dacia Maraini. While the brilliant idea of combining mythology, apocalyptic apology and fable in Oedipus Rex, Pigsty, Medea and The Arabian Nights influenced the aesthetics and ethics of much of the Cinema Novo’s output on the one hand and of the desertlike visions of Jodorowsky on the other. Derek Jarman’s trangressive revisitation of certain historical eras and characters (Caravaggio) owes a debt to the Canterbury Tales and to La ricotta. In fact Jarman himself played the role of Pasolini in Julian Cole’s short entitled Ostia. In line with the aesthetic of the “borgatari” novels and of Accattone, we find Claudio Caligari’s Toxic Love and Don’t Be Bad, which capture not only the social decay of the poorer bidonvilles but also the tragedy of drugs. Closer to a nihilistic aesthetic, on the other hand, is the cynical work of Ciprì and Maresco, who owe a debt both to Ferreri in his more apocalyptic mood and to the despair of Pasolini in Pigsty and in Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom. And lastly, it was Pasolini’s earliest work, tracking Rome’s underclasses, that had the deepest impact on such filmmakers as the D’Innocenzo brothers, Matteo Garrone, Matteo Botrugno and Daniele Coluccini, without forgetting the “Vesuvian” Antonio Capuano and Pappi Corsicato.


Our gratitude goes to: ABKCO, Arrow Films, Centro Studi - Archivio Pier Paolo Pasolini di Bologna, Fondazione Cineteca di Bologna, Kimerafilm, Maria Iorio e Raphaël Cuomo, Luce Cinecittà, Minerva Pictures e RaroVideo Channel, Morel Film, Notorius Pictures, Rai Teche, Ripley’s Film, Viggo


Info

Palazzo delle Esposizioni - Sala Cinema

Admission via steps in via Milano 9a, Rome

ADMISSION FREE WHILE PLACES LAST – RESERVATIONS ARE REQUIRED

Reservations may be made on this website from 9:00 am on the day before the chosen performance until one hour before the performance is due to begin. If for any reason you are unable to come, please remember to cancel the reservation in your basket so that someone else can book the place you’re freeing up. Please show up at least 10 minutes before the performance starts, otherwise your reservation will no longer be considered valid and your place will be given to the first person waiting in line at the entrance.