Tag Archives: Arabian Nights (Pasolini)

FERRARA’S PASOLINI

“I am a form, the knowledge of which is an illusion.” — Pasolini

From the distance of nearly forty-five years since his murder at the hands of a young Roman hustler, the public life and times of Pier Paolo Pasolini subsist like an Italian noir. The country’s “Years of Lead” from the late 1960s through the ’80s were marked by economic precarity, political savagery, and—for the urbane author and filmmaker—personal depression.

“To scandalize is a right. To be scandalized is a pleasure.” — Pasolini

In Abel Ferrara‘s elegiac PASOLINI—finally released after a five-year delay—Willem Dafoe is an uncanny visual analog for his subject. Burdened by presentiments of intellectual futility and struggling to find beauty in lost causes, Pasolini/Dafoe composes editorials, visits friends, gives interviews, and cruises the streets around Termini Station for company. A sense of defeat hangs thick in the air, and in the end the artist’s sense of aesthetics fell through the abyss. (Pasolini’s final film was Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom.)

The other side of Ferrara’s film is his partial creation of the movie Pasolini didn’t live to shoot: Porno-Teo-Kolossal. These sections star Ninetto Davoli, Pasolini’s muse and goofball stud from Arabian Nights, The Canterbury Tales, Teorema, Oedipus Rex, and The Hawks and the Sparrows.

PASOLINI

Through June 6.

Laemmle Glendale

2017 North Maryland Avenue, Glendale.

Willem Dafoe in Pasolini. The fllm co-stars Maria de Medeiros, third from top. Images courtesy Kino Lorber.

PASOLINI AT THE AERO

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).

SALÒ and PIGSTY

Thursday, May 16, at 7:30 pm.

THE DECAMERON and OEDIPUS REX

Friday, May 17, at 7:30 pm.

THE CANTERBURY TALES and TEOREMA

Saturday, May 18, at 7:30 pm.

ARABIAN NIGHTS and MEDEA

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.