Pasolini, 11/23.

"Poet, playwright, screenwriter, filmmaker, Communist, Christian, moralist, pornographer, populist, artist: 32 years after he was murdered by a teenage hustler (who later tried to recant his confession), Pier Paolo Pasolini remains, perhaps above all, a subject for furious argument," writes AO Scott in the New York Times. "No single institution, art form or political tendency could contain his angry, exquisite energies, so it makes sense that a New York retrospective of his work would be spread around the city, encompassing concerts, performances and exhibitions as well as film screenings. The program, called Pier Paolo Pasolini: Poet of Ashes and organized by the Italian Cultural Institute, continues through Dec 18. The heart of it - an 11-film program at the Film Society of Lincoln Center called Heretical Epiphanies - opens next Wednesday with a screening of Mamma Roma."

Updated through 11/29.

"Pasolini's shadow hangs over much of contemporary European art cinema," writes Steve Erickson in Gay City News. "Directors like Catherine Breillat, Gaspar Noé and Michael Haneke, who've combined sexual provocation with a grim view of consumerist culture, owe a great deal to him. Indeed, Haneke put Salò on a list of his favorite films for Sight & Sound magazine in 2002. He claims that his first viewing made him physically ill for weeks; he owns it on DVD but has yet to work up the courage to watch it again."

The Passion of Pasolini series runs on through December 1 at the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley and the East Bay Express blurbs The Canterbury Tales and The Arabian Nights.

Update, 11/27: "A kindred spirit of Luis Buñuel, with an inferior sense of humor but more palpable existential compulsions, Pier Paolo Pasolini perpetually rebelled against moral hegemony, commiserating with outcasts and creating and dying as one." In the Voice, Ed Gonzalez walks us through the films slated for screening.

Update, 11/28: "No other major filmmaker from the 60s continues to seem as strikingly contemporary," Film Society of Lincoln Center program director Richard Peña tells Bruce Bennett in the New York Sun. Thanks, Jerry!

Update, 11/29: The series "summarizes how Pasolini went against the classical conventions of Italian cinema (heresy) and innovated ways to find the sublime in the lowest, meanest aspects of social experience (epiphanies in the sense of transcending ordinary Italian Neorealism)," writes Armond White in the New York Press.

Posted by dwhudson at November 23, 2007 7:35 AM