produced in conjunction with
Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia - Cineteca Nazionale
It was in the cinema that Pasolini found his unparalleled inspiration for taking reality and showing it as it is. The result was a revolution that turned Italian culture inside out. His movie-making career was a long litany of censorship and trials over the content and style of his visual narrative, always at odds with consumer society, built around the sharo, disturbing rapier thrusts of his art. His poetic vision of the lumpenproletariat was condensed in a series of unforgettable creations: Accattone, Mamma Roma, the various characters played by Totò and Ninetto and all the ragtag heroes from a different world, out of touch with contemporary society, against which the figure of Christ the fighter, the hero of his masterpiece telling the Gospel story, looms large. But his revolutionary approach to film-making wreaked havoc with traditional form as well as substance. He moved beyond Neo-Realism, looking to the masters of the silent era and the painterly tradition stretching from Masaccio to Pontormo, whose unmoving austerity is brought to life by the great musical tradition of Bach and Mozart. In the course of his career, Pasolini gradually developed a mistrust of direct dialogue with his audience's conscience, and his style and vocabulary began to move away from reality towards the world of fairy tale and satire.
After flirting with the world of the down-and-outs, after his early days and his documentaries on the incontaminated areas of the Third World, Pasolini turned to the grotesque to convey his fierce rejection of existence. Dismissing the bourgeoisie beyond all redemption in Theorem and Pigsty, and taking "time out" to sing the praises of sexual freedom in the Trilogy of Life, he plunged into the suffocating inferno of his last work, Salò, in which he tortures his audience's gaze and forces it to take cognizance of the devastating experience of human catastrophe.
Our thanks go to: Centro Studi - Archivio Pier Paolo Pasolini di Bologna, Faso Film, Fondazione Cineteca di Bologna, Alberto Grimaldi, Minerva Pictures, Luce-Cinecittà, Rai Teche, Ripley's Film, La Trincea
Info
Palazzo delle Esposizioni - Sala Cinema
Admission via steps in Via Milano 9a, Rome
ADMISSION FREE WHILE PLACES LAST
Seats assigned from one hour before the start of each screening
Reservations may be made by membership cardholders only