42 years ago today, the great filmmaker and intellectual Pier Paolo Pasolini was killed under circumstances that perhaps will never be fully clarified, beaten and then run over by his own car. This will be the first time the anniversary of the tragic and violent...
I'm feeling a bit silly and regretful. If I had my Pasolini watch-through to do over again, I never would have let myself get knocked off course by the impenetrability of his Medea, which made me back up, read the play, and then watch the...
"The best thing in my half of the film—the only part of the film worth saving—is the sequence dedicated to the death of Marilyn Monroe." Let me cut to the chase and skip to the most useful bit of information that I can share—the 83-minute "reconstructed...
The TIFF Pasolini retrospective is over, now; the final screening was last Saturday (Salò, April 12) and though I'm pained to have missed the last 11 screenings, I can count myself lucky for having been in Toronto for the first five. My favourite of the lot was the...
In the Decameron I filmed the way I know how: more than ever in my own style. But while in Porcile and Medea my game was atrocity, now strangely it's happiness. A happy work (made with great seriousness, of course) seems to me to contradict...
Call me crazy but I think I'm starting to get what Pasolini is on about with this film. I'm not sure how many in the audience at last night's nearly-full screening, the third in TIFF's complete Pasolini retrospective, would agree with me...
Tonight I took in the second screening in TIFF's Pasolini retrospective at the Lightbox, and let me just say at the start that the new 35mm print looked great—far better, in fact, than even the fine Masters of Cinema Blu-ray release led me to expect....
The TIFF Pasolini retrospective (Pier Paolo Pasolini: The Poet of Contamination) kicked off at the Lightbox last night with a packed screening of Pasolini's second feature, Mamma Roma. This was my first big-screen viewing of this film and, in fact, only my second theatrical viewing...
On my first attempted viewing of this film, I was reminded of a choice Lem Dobbs line delivered with laconic perfection by Bill Duke in Steven Soderbergh's The Limey. ...
The explicit political content of the film has as its object, as its historical situation, Germany. But the film does not speak of Germany; rather, of the ambiguous relationship between old and new capitalism. Germany was chosen as the extreme instance. The implicit political content of the film is a...