Teorema
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.
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Teorema
Directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini • 1968 • Italy
Starring Terence Stamp, Silvana Mangano, Massimo GirottiOne 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 ...
Extras
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Rachel Kushner on TEOREMA
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Pier Paolo Pasolini on TEOREMA
In this brief interview, first broadcast on February 8, 1969, director Pier Paolo Pasolini responds to questions from journalist Cécile Philippe about his film TEOREMA.
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John David Rhodes on TEOREMA
In this interview, shot by the Criterion Collection in 2019, scholar John David Rhodes, author of Stupendous, Miserable City: Pasolini's Rome, discusses TEOREMA.
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English-Dubbed Version
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Queersighted: Breaking Taboos
This new conversation between critic and programmer Michael Koresky and film critic K. Austin Collins, discussing the films in Queersighted: Breaking Taboos, was recorded in 2021.
