Teorema (Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1968)

Terence Stamp in Teorema

Cast: Terence Stamp, Silvana Mangano, Massimo Girotti, Anne Wiazemsky, Laura Betti, Andréa José Cruz Soublette, Ninetto Davoli, Carlo De Mejo, Adele Cambria, Luigi Barbini, Giovanni Ivan Scratuglia, Alfonso Gatto. Screenplay: Pier Paolo Pasolino. Cinematography: Giuseppe Ruzzolini. Production design: Luciano Puccini. Film editing: Nino Baragli. Music: Ennio Morricone. 

Is Pier Paolo Pasolini's Teorema artsy fiddle-faddle or a trenchant satire of the bourgeoisie? Yes. It's both. It's a heavy-footed Marxist diatribe and a beautiful display of cinematic technique. If ever a film was caviar to the general, it's Teorema. At this point, I want to recommend that anyone who subscribes to the Criterion Channel go watch Rachel Kushner's commentary on Teorema in her "Adventures in Moviegoing" collection. And if you don't (and even if you do), then read James Quant's essay on the film at the Criterion Collection site. Both of them suggest why Pasolini's film continues to awe and/or annoy viewers. There's a fine line between the pretentious and the provocative, and Teorema has continued to straddle it more than 60 years. For myself, I find it an immensely amusing film, which may be enough for me to recommend it to anyone who has a taste for caviar.  

Medea (Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1969)

Cast: Maria Callas, Massimo Girotti, Lauren Terzieff, Giuseppe Gentile, Margareth Clémenti, Paul Jabara. Screenplay: Pier Paolo Pasolini, based on a play by Euripedes. Cinematography: Ennio Guarnieri. Production design: Dante Ferretti. Costume design: Piero Tosi. Film editing: Nino Baragli.

Pier Paolo Pasolini's retelling of the story of Medea is a challenge to anyone who doesn't already know the story: Pasolini is not interested in conventional movie storytelling, so the film feels shapeless, lurching through some scenes and lingering through others until it ends almost abruptly. What he's interested in is crafting a vision of antiquity, of the age from which the myths and legends came, that's primitive and tribal, not at all the graceful world of marble gods and goddesses we've come to associate with ancient Greece. This is a world in which people scrabble for survival in bleak desert settings, filmed in Turkey and Syria. In Pasolini's film, the Argo, the ship that brings Jason and the Argonauts to Colchis in search of the Golden Fleece,  is a cobbled-together raft. The fleece itself is a somewhat ratty-looking ram's head with gilded horns. It's not exactly a film in which you'd expect to find a diva like Maria Callas, and yet her out-of-placeness somehow fits the character of Medea, a woman who would rise above almost any setting only to be dragged down by it. 

Pigsty (Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1969)

Pier Paolo Pasolini's Pigsty is too much like what people think of when they hear the phrase "art house movie," especially when they have in mind films of the late 1960s. It's enigmatic and disjointed, and has a tendency to treat images as if they were ideas -- significant ideas. There are two narratives at work in the film: One features Pierre Clémenti as some kind of feral human wandering a volcanic landscape in which he finds a butterfly and a snake and eats both, then dons the helmet and musket he finds beside a skeleton. It's some unspecified pre-modern era -- the helmet and the garb of the soldiers and priests he meets later make think 17th century. He kills and eats another man he meets, then begins to gather a group of fellow cannibals. The other story takes place in Germany in 1967 and centers on Julian Klotz (Jean-Pierre Léaud), the son of a wealthy ex-Nazi (Alberto Lionello) who styles his hair and mustache like his late Führer and is pursuing a merger with a Herr Herdhitze (Ugo Tognazzi), who is a rejuvenated Heinrich Himmler, having undergone extensive plastic surgery. Julian, meanwhile, is an aimless youth who resists the urgings of his fiancée, Ida (Anne Wiazemsky) to join in leftist protest movements and to have sex with her. He'd rather spend time with the pigs in a nearby sty. The efforts at satire in the modern section are as heavy-handed as they sound in this summary, especially since Pasolini has chosen to have much of the exposition delivered by the actors in the flat-footed style of a 19th-century melodrama. There are some acting standouts, however, in both sections, especially Léaud, who seems to be having more fun than his role allows; Clémenti and Pasolini regular Franco Citti throw themselves into their feral roles, and Tognazzi is suavely menacing in his. If the whole thing is meant as a satire on dog-eat-dog (or man-eat-man or pig-eat-man) capitalism, it is sometimes too oblique and sometimes too blatant. Pasolini is a challenging, original filmmaker as always, but this one doesn't transcend the often inchoate artistic fervor of the '60s avant garde.  

Oedipus Rex (Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1967)

Seeing Julian Beck as Tiresias in Pier Paolo Pasolini's Oedipus Rex reminded me of an excruciatingly boring evening I spent in Brooklyn in 1968. Some friends had invited me to go with them to see Beck's Living Theatre perform their play Paradise Now, which as I recall featured the semi-naked company, including some pale and pimply dudes in jockstraps, wandering through the audience, yelling at us about our bourgeois complacency. Those who know me will realize that this is not my sort of thing at all. I realize now that Beck and Judith Malina had a tonic effect on theater with their avant-garde productions, and I salute them for that, but I was not receptive to their efforts on that evening. Fortunately, Pasolini's Oedipus, though infused with some of the radicalism of the Living Theatre, is not at all boring. It's sometimes raw and rough-edged, especially by standards of mainstream cinema. The Technicolor camerawork -- the cinematographer is Giuseppe Ruzzolini -- is often very beautiful, with its astonishing images of the Moroccan desert and ancient buildings, but there are some bobbles in the hand-held camera sequences that move beyond shakycam into wobbly-out-of-focuscam. Franco Citti, who made his debut in the title role of  Pasolini's Accattone (1961) and appeared in many of his other films, is a bit out of his depth as Oedipus, but Silvana Mangano is an impressive-looking Jocasta, and Beck is a suitably foreboding Tiresias. Pasolini's screenplay does justice to its Sophoclean origins as well as to the perdurable myth, although the frame story that begins in Italy during the Mussolini era, with the Fascist anthem "Giovinezza" on the soundtrack, and ends in Pasolini's present seems extraneous. But the truly astonishing contribution to the film was made by costume designer Danilo Donati, whose eerie designs, seemingly cobbled together from scrap metal, clay, and leaves and branches, don't belong to any particular era but have the right aura of primitive myth. Some examples:

The Oracle of Apollo in Oedipus Rex

Silvana Mangano as Jocasta

Headdress for a priest 

Accattone (Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1961)

Franco Citti in Accattone

Vittorio "Accattone" Cataldi: Franco Citti
Stella: Franca Pasut
Maddalena: Silvana Corsini
Ascenza: Paola Guidi
Amore: Adriana Asti

Director: Pier Paolo Pasolini
Screenplay: Pier Paolo Pasolini, Sergio Citti
Cinematography: Tonino Delli Colli
Film editing: Nino Baragli

There are times in Pasolini's first feature when he seems to be trying out things that he will accomplish with greater finesse in his later films. For example, there are several walk-and-talk tracking shots in which Accattone and another person walk down a street toward a receding camera. This technique was used with greater force and wit in Pasolini's next film, Mamma Roma (1962), in which Anna Magnani strides down a nighttime street, talking about her life, as various people emerge from the darkness to deliver comments on what she is telling us. We've seen this sort of thing done many times since the development of the Steadicam -- it has become a kind of cliché in films and TV shows written by Aaron Sorkin -- but even though the shadow of the retreating camera rig occasionally creeps into the frame in Accattone, Pasolini and cinematographer Tonino Delli Colli execute it with considerable skill. Skill is not always in evidence in Accattone, which has its rough, raw edges. It's not always easy to follow Pasolini's screenplay, drawn in part from his early novels, when it comes to the relationships between the various characters: I'm not clear, for example, who the young woman with several small children is who shares a room with Maddalena and later Stella. Pasolini had worked with Federico Fellini on Nights of Cabiria (1957) and it's instructive to compare the two films: Fellini's has greater technical finish, but it's also less harsh and more sentimental, which may be why Fellini, who originally planned to produce Pasolini's film, withdrew his support. But the rawness of Accattone is entirely appropriate for a film that evokes the spontaneity and actuality of early Italian Neo-Realism with its non-professional actors and ungroomed settings. And it has at its center a charismatic performance by Citti, an untrained actor who went on to a long career on-screen that included an appearance as Calo, one of Michael Corleone's Sicilian bodyguards in The Godfather (Frances Ford Coppola, 1972).  "Accattone" is a nickname that means "beggar" or "ne'er-do-well" or "layabout" -- the character's given name is Vittorio Cataldi -- and is entirely appropriate for a character who begins as a pimp and, after hitting the skids and even trying work (at which he shudders), winds up as a thief -- a dead thief. Citti's voice was dubbed in the film, but most of the work is done by his extraordinarily expressive face and by a physical commitment to the role. There is, for example, a terrific fight scene between Accattone and the men of his ex-wife's family, which ends with Accattone and his opponent locked together in a struggle in the dirt, neither willing to relinquish hold. Pasolini also emphasizes the dissonance between a world that produces an Accattone and the religious background from which it springs by using excerpts from Bach's St. Matthew Passion on the soundtrack.

The Gospel According to St. Matthew (Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1964)

Sandwiched between two epic versions of the life of Jesus released in the 1960s -- King of Kings (Nicholas Ray, 1961) and The Greatest Story Ever Told (George Stevens, 1965) -- Pasolini's version looks like the most successful today. It is raw and unfiltered through Technicolor and wide-screen processes, unencumbered with movie stars. Its Jesus is not blue-eyed like Jeffrey Hunter or Max von Sydow, but a darkly handsome Spanish economics student named Enrique Irazoqui, who had never acted before. (His voice is dubbed by Enrico Maria Salerno, a professional actor who also dubbed Clint Eastwood's voice in the Italian releases of Sergio Leone's Westerns.) The film takes no liberties with the story as presented in the New Testament Gospel of St. Matthew, following it virtually to the letter. The dialogue in Pasolini's screenplay relies for the most part only on the words actually spoken in the gospel. In fact, those unfamiliar with the narrative presented there may sometimes find the film's story hard to follow. No elaborate sets were constructed: Pasolini filmed on locations in Calabria and Sicily and other parts of southern Italy, enlisting the locals as cast members and extras. Like Carl Theodor Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), it is a film of faces, and seldom handsome ones -- with the exception of the delicately beautiful Margherita Caruso, who plays the young Mary. (The older Mary is played by Pasolini's mother, Susanna.) Irazoqui, with his unibrow, looks strikingly like a figure out of a Byzantine mosaic or a Russian icon. The cumulative effect of the film is of having sat through something plausibly much closer to the actual events than the more conventional dramatizations of them like the Hollywood epics. Pasolini was, of course, an unbeliever, a gay Marxist, and the effect of the film is more intellectual than spiritual. The Jesus of the film preaches love, but he can also be harsh and enigmatic, proclaiming that he comes to bring not peace but a sword and, in one of the oddest moments in the gospel, smiting a fig tree for some unspecified offense. There are moments when, by following the biblical narrative so closely, the film falls apart, as in the interpolation of the story of Salome (Paola Tedesco) and John the Baptist (Mario Socrate), and it's clear that, as he later admitted, Pasolini's heart is not in the depiction of such miracles as the loaves and fishes and Jesus's walking on water. The choice of music to accompany scenes is curiously eclectic, ranging from the obvious, Bach and Mozart, to the derivative, a bit of Prokofiev's Alexander Nevsky score, to the startling, African-American spirituals. But even when Pasolini's film goes awry, it remains a fascinatingly personal response to the source material.

Mamma Roma (Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1962)

Putting a force of nature like Anna Magnani in among the unknowns and non-professionals of the rest of the cast almost upends Pasolini's film, and it reportedly caused some friction between actress and director during the filming. If Pasolini really wanted the naturalistic Magnani of Rome, Open City (Roberto Rossellini, 1948) it was much too late: By then, she had won an Oscar for The Rose Tattoo (Daniel Mann, 1955) and had become the flamboyant, histrionic Magnani who shows up on-screen in Mamma Roma. That said, Pasolini certainly gave her every opportunity to present herself that way, starting with the opening scene in which she herds pigs into the wedding dinner of her former pimp, Carmine (Franco Citti), and culminating in one of the greatest scenes (or rather, pair of scenes) of her career. I mean, of course, the long-take tracking shot in which she walks down a Roman street at night, delivering a monologue on her life, as people appear out of the darkness and recede back into it, serving as interlocutors. It's stunning the first time Pasolini (aided by his cinematographer, Tonino Delli Colli) does it, and even more remarkable when he reprises it after a crisis in her life. I think Mamma Roma is some kind of great film, notwithstanding Pasolini's tendency to be somewhat heavy-handed in his symbolism: witness the staging of the wedding dinner as a parallel to Leonardo's The Last Supper and of Ettore (Ettore Garofalo) strapped to a restraining bed to echo Mantegna's painting of the dead Christ.

Top: Ettore Garofalo in Mamma Roma. Below: Andrea Mantegna, Lamentation Over the Dead Christ, c. 1475-78

The Grim Reaper (Bernardo Bertolucci, 1962)

The Grim Reaper suffers from some inevitable comparisons. Because it's a film in which police investigating a crime are given accounts by people with varying points of view, it's often compared to Rashomon (Akira Kurosawa, 1950), even though Bertolucci claims he hadn't seen that film before making his. Because it's based on a story by Pier Paolo Pasolini, who also worked on the screenplay with Bertolucci and Sergio Citti, and producer Tonino Cervi said he wanted the film made in the style of a Pasolini movie, Bertolucci, who had worked on Pasolini's first hit, Accatone (1961), was judged and found wanting accordingly. And finally, the film doesn't measure up to Bertolucci's later work, such as The Conformist (1970) and Last Tango in Paris (1972). But considering that Bertolucci was barely into his 20s when he made The Grim Reaper, it's an impressive film, with a deft use of unknown actors and atmospheric Roman locations. The episodes in which the suspects are interrogated and we see the events they testify about in flashback are linked by a sudden thundershower in each episode and by sequences in which the victim, a prostitute, gets ready to go out to her fatal assignation. It's not compelling filmmaking, but a significant start to a major career.