Ahead of the belated Los Angeles release of Abel Ferrara‘s ingenious Pasolini biopic, the American Cinematheque and Luce Cinecittà celebrate the great Italian filmmaker in the program The Passion of Pier Paolo Pasolini.
The director—a radical public intellectual who embraced a vivid cinematic treatment of fable-into-allegory as a means to circulate his poetry to a wider audience—made twelve features before his death at age 53. Nine of them will screen at the Aero, all in 35mm.
Pasolini’s epic “Trilogy of Life” is here—THE DECAMERON, THE CATERBURY TALES, and ARABIAN NIGHTS—as well as his earlier mythology series: OEDIPUS REX, TEOREMA, MEDEA (with Maria Callas), and the rarely screened PIGSTY, starring Pierre Clémenti and Jean-Pierre Léaud.
The retrospective will open with SALÒ—Pasolini’s polarizing take on Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom—and close with perhaps the most straightforward Christ-story ever told, THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO ST. MATTHEW (1964).
Thursday, May 16, at 7:30 pm.
Friday, May 17, at 7:30 pm.
THE CANTERBURY TALES and TEOREMA
Saturday, May 18, at 7:30 pm.
Sunday, May 19, at 7:30 pm.
THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO ST. MATTHEW
Monday, May 20, at 7:30 pm.
Aero Theatre
1328 Montana Avenue, Santa Monica.
Pier Paolo Pasolini, from top: The Decameron; Silvana Mangano and Terence Stamp in Teorema (2); Maria Callas and Pasolini (right) in 1969 on the set of Medea; Pierre Clémenti in Pigsty; Pier Paolo Pasolini, Trilogia della vita, edited by Giorgio Gattei (Bologna: Cappelli, 1975), still from Arabian Nights on the cover, courtesy and © Cappelli; Pasolini as Geoffrey Chaucer in The Canterbury Tales, reading Boccaccio’s Il Decameron; Salò.
