Accattone

Accattone

Directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini • 1961 • Italy
Starring Franco Citti, Franca Pasut, Silvana Corsini

Poet and painter turned filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini courted controversy with his very first feature by using Catholic iconography and liturgical music to render a plaintive, brutally beautiful portrait of a shiftless Roman pimp and thief (then-nonprofessional Franco Citti, in a revelatory performance) whose life of petty crime turns increasingly desperate when the woman who supports him is imprisoned. Melding a hardscrabble neorealist milieu with classical influences, Pasolini offers a vision of underclass struggle as a kind of modern sainthood.

Accattone
  • Accattone

    Directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini • 1961 • Italy
    Starring Franco Citti, Franca Pasut, Silvana Corsini

    Poet and painter turned filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini courted controversy with his very first feature by using Catholic iconography and liturgical music to render a plaintive, brutally beautiful p...

Extras

  • Pasolini on Pasolini

    In this program, produced in 2023, actor Tilda Swinton and writer Rachel Kushner read from Pasolini’s personal essays and journal entries, in which he reflects on the meaning of cinema in his life and his journey to becoming a maestro of the craft.

  • Pasolini on “Cinéastes de notre temps”

    This intimate portrait of Pasolini, dubbed “the enraged” in the program’s subtitle, aired on French television on November 15, 1966, and was directed by Jean-André Fieschi. It features wide-ranging conversations with the director as well as interviews with the actors and collaborators who helped ...