Heretical Epiphanies The Cinematic Pilgrimages of Pier Paolo Pasolini
November 28 – December 4, 2007
Heretical Epiphanies is part of the celebration Pier Paolo Pasolini–The Ashes Poet, organized by the Italian Cultural Institute of New York and Fondazione Aida in collaboration with Cineteca di Bologna, Fondazione Cinema per Roma and Fondazione Musica per Roma. The main sponsor of the celebration is Consorzio per la Tutela dell’Asti.
Pier Paolo Pasolini was many things––a poet, a provocateur, a devout Catholic, an ardent Marxist, an openly gay man: in essence, an “inconvenient guest,” as he put it, at the ongoing party known as modern society. He was also a filmmaker, unlike any other before or since. He began his career in movies as a screenwriter for Mauro Bolognini, Luciano Emmer and Federico Fellini, among others. When he directed his first film –– Accattone, in 1961 –– he more or less reinvented cinema from the ground up. The links to neorealism and New Wave modernism were there, but Pasolini’s hieratic moviemaking felt like no one else’s: imagistically and linguistically exacting (no one knew Roman slang better than Pasolini), unflinching in its vision of society’s castaways and human refuse, yet radically tender. Pasolini’s cinematic pageants of abjection, humiliation and fury were based in the devotional humanism of early Renaissance painting. From Accattone through the notorious updating of Sade’s "120 Days of Sodom" that he completed just before his murder on the outskirts of Rome in 1975, his body of work amounted to nothing less than a cry of anguish at what he saw as the horrors of progress, and a plea to return to the more humane rhythms of existence in a pre-industrial world. Pasolini stood alone, proudly and defiantly, and he stood for the common man. You can see it in every frame of every film in this retrospective.
For a listing of the films in Heretical Epiphanies go to Program Overview.
Click on
Calendar to view the schedule, film descriptions and to purchase tickets online.
Our special Series Pass ($40 for the public, $30 for Film Society members) admits one person to five titles in the series. The pass is available for purchase (cash only) at the Walter Reade Theater box office.
Click here for information about Accattone in Jazz: An Homage to Pier Paolo Pasolini, a one-of-a-kind concert and reading with Valerio Mastandrea (voice), Roberto Gatto (drums) and Danilo Rea (piano), at 9pm on Tuesday, December 4 at the Walter Reade Theater. Please note: this special event is not included in the Heretical Epiphanies series pass.
