Pier Paolo Pasolini Collection – Volume One
Picture Sound Extras Film
Love Meeting (1964) C-
C C
B-
Oedipus Rex (1967) C C C
B-
Porcile (Pigsty, 1969)
D C- C
B
In Italian Cinema, before, during or after their
Neo-Realist movement, no director they ever gave us was bolder than Pier Paolo
Pasolini. From 1961 – 1975, his most
daring work rivaled any director alive, including Stanley Kubrick, Robert
Altman, Arthur Penn and Martin Scorsese.
The Pier Paolo Pasolini Collection – Volume One offers three of
his better films as proof of this.
Love Meeting (Comizi d’amore) is a
documentary from 1964 where Pasolini goes around with his film camera and a
large-headed microphone examining the Italian attitude towards sex and related
issues, breaking it down by class and gender.
The result is a film that is still charming, funny, smart and daring
forty years later. It also reminds us
of a time when people could deal with the subject more seriously before sex
became mediaized, trivialized and over-common.
This is most surprising with the teenagers in the piece. There is also a funny motif about Autocensura
(Self-Censorship) that runs through the latter part of the film. Pasolini is disarming, and manages to get
people to talk about these issues by asking the questions (which are very
thought out in advance and clever) without degrading his interviewees. He manages to get a 90-minutes-long film out
of this, and it offers moment after moment of attitudes captured as few others
have done it. Neo-Realist? Yes, even feeling like a forerunner of the
Rockumentary in some funny way.
Oedipus Rex is the Greek tragedy captured
by writer/director Pasolini, art designer Luigi Scaccianoce, and
cinematographer Giuseppe Ruzzollini in a way never seen before. The body of the film is set in ancient
times, but that is bookended by a modern set of story pieces that are strongly
linked to the centerpiece of the film.
There is no doubt Pasolini was being autobiographical, but it is not to
say that his life happens to fit the myth exactly. Instead, his filming of the myth and the way he presents it
proves his understanding of it, his life, and the world around him. The profound conclusion might go over many
viewers’ heads, but it works. Some
complain that it is too long or boring, but Pasolini is making the film the
longhand way, which turns out to be worth the trip at 110 minutes. Pasolini stars briefly in a cast that
includes Franco Citti, Silvana Mangano, Alida Valli, Carmelo Bene, and Julian
Beck. The influence on films like Julie
Taymor’s Titus (1999) and other recent films that try to combine past
and present in retelling classical works owe a debt to this film.
Il Porcile (Pigsty, and identified simply
as “Porcile” for the video release) is the best film of the set. It too crosses the past and present, but
with different intent and effect. In
the past, wanderers become cannibals to survive, while the present offers a
Nazi industrialist, his group of pigs, other evil men around him, their
mistreatment of others, their evil plans, and the silly son who may have some
special interest in the pigs. If this
sounds somewhat familiar, though not quite, this bashing by Pasolini of working
middle classes who allow Fascism to happen was the basis visually and even
thematically for Ridley Scott’s film adaptation of Hannibal (2001) in so
far as it fit, which goes surprisingly far.
That is more remarkable when you consider Thomas Harris wrote the book
without many of these elements in mind.
That is why when you hear people so surprised that Scott got such an
elegant film out of such a raw book, you now know the source of inspiration was
more than Kubrick, Italy and the arts. Porcile
too is a film with great beauty tainted by great ugliness. Pierre Clementi, Franco Citti, Ninetto
Davoli and Jean-Pierre Leaud co-star.
We have to question how authentic the interest of the son
in pigs was, especially by the end, especially since the son seems to not be all
there. It is as if he is almost
dreaming the past we see, though that also stands as a metaphor for his own
instinctive realization beyond his understanding or comprehension about the
evil that he can sense is true and present.
Yet, he goes around Stan Laurel/Charlie Chaplin-like, while his father
is like Hitler paralleled in some odd way, beyond just a similarity in
look. The film is powerful in its
statement against Fascism, and as in all Pasolini films, you do not get the
full impact until the picture is over.
This is amazing filmmaking.
The images on the three DVDs are not the best, but are
just about watchable. Love Meeting
offers usually 1.66 X 1 letterboxed, black and white footage, but it is full
screen most of the time. It is also on
the grainy side, but that is the nature of documentary filmmaking. Oedipus Rex was originally in
Technicolor and this print looks like an old dye-transfer print with vegetable
inks just on their way to fading, but you can still see the beauty intended in
many spots. At least its letterboxing
of 1.66 X 1 is consistent, which cannot be said for Porcile.
Though the film is likely 1.85 X 1, the letterboxed image
is missing information on the sides, especially the left, where more picture
information is noticeably absent. To
make matters worse, the print is not in the best of shape, the letterboxing
jumps around at different times throughout, and film ends on each reel were
left on during the video transfer! You
can see labels, grease pencil marking, notes, film notations, color tests, and
other technical information between each reel.
That is bad, especially since all Water Bearer, the company classy
enough to release this box to begin with, had to do was edit that out from the
tape source. This would have to happen
to my favorite film in the bunch, but its beauty and darkness still manage to
come through all of that. Cinematographers Tonino Delli
Colli, Armando Nannuzzi & Giuseppe Ruzzollini shot the various segments.
The sound is Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono on all three films,
and on the documentary on Pasolini included on all three DVDs. Porcile has the hum of the projector,
likely from the optical playback, lightly heard throughout, while the
documentary has an old English dub track that was spoken over the original
Italian. The other two films fare best,
but their monophonic tracks are average, including some hiss. When Water Bearer does a High-Definition
format, they will have to go back to the Pasolini foundation and redo these
versions, which are too important and will have to do for now.
Pasolini has been finding new interest on DVD for other
reasons. Early on, Salo or 120 Days
of Sodom (1975) was issued by The Criterion Collection on LaserDisc, then
on DVD, which did not last in print very long.
It was only their 17th DVD release, but the first to be
discontinued, resulting in the value of the DVD being driven up
considerably. A high value it still
holds, which has made those not in the know ask why the film is so
valuable. Fortunately, Water Bearer’s
six Pasolini DVDs are still available, with Volume Two containing three
more films: Accattone, Hawks and Sparrows, and The Gospel
According to St. Matthew. You can
see this set reviewed when we return
- Nicholas Sheffo
