Directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini • 1968 • Italy
Starring Terence Stamp, Silvana Mangano, Massimo Girotti
One of the iconoclastic Pier Paolo Pasolini’s most radical provocations finds the auteur moving beyond the poetic, proletarian earthiness that first won him renown and notoriety with a coolly cryptic exploration of bourgeois spiritual emptiness. Terence Stamp stars as the mysterious stranger—perhaps an angel, perhaps a devil—who, one by one, seduces the members of a wealthy Milanese family (including European cinema icons Silvana Mangano, Massimo Girotti, Laura Betti, and Anne Wiazemsky), precipitating an existential crisis in each of their lives. Unfolding nearly wordlessly in a procession of sacred and profane images, this tantalizing metaphysical riddle—blocked from exhibition by the Catholic Church for degeneracy—is at once a blistering Marxist treatise on sex, religion, and art and a primal scream into the void.
Up Next in Directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini
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Porcile
Directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini • 1969 • Italy, France
Starring Pierre Clémenti, Jean-Pierre Léaud, Alberto Lionello“I killed my father. I ate human flesh. I quiver with joy.” Provocateur Pier Paolo Pasolini is at his most incendiary in PORCILE (“Pigsty”), a double-edged allegory on fascism, co...
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La ricotta
Directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini • 1962 • Italy
Starring Orson WellesPier Paolo Pasolini’s contribution to the omnibus film RO.GO.PA.G casts Orson Welles as a director attempting to make a film of the crucifixion of Jesus—all while he, the cast, and crew behave in the most un-Christlike ways ima...
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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.
