LE NOTTI DI CABIRIA, 1957 - NIGHTS OF CABIRIA (co.sc., uncredited, dir. by Federico Fellini)
ACCATTONE, 1961 - Pummi
MAMMA ROMA, 1962 - Mamma Roma
ROGOPAG, 1963 (with Rosselini, Godard, and Gregoretti, the episode 'La Ricotta')
LA RABBIA, 1963
COMIZI D'AMORE, SOPRALLUOGHI IN PALESTINA (1964)
IL VANGELO SECONDO MATTEO, 1964 - THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO ST. MATTHEW - Matteuksen evankeliumi
LE STREGHE, 1966 - THE WITCHES (ep. LA TERRA VISTA DALLA LUNA)
UCCELANI ET UCCELINI, 1966 - HAWKS AND SPARROWS - Haukat ja varpuset
EDIPO RE, 1967 - OIDIPUS REX
TEOREMA, 1968 - THEOREM - Teorema
CAPRICCIO ALL'ITALIANA, 1968 (ep. CHE COSA SONO LE NUVOLE?)
AMORE E RABBIA, 1968 (ep. LA SEQUENZA DEL FIORE DI CARTA)
PORCILE, 1969 - PIGSTRY - Sikol?tti
MEDEA, 1970
IL DECAMERON, 1971 - THE DECAMERON - Decamerone
RACCONTI DE CANTERBURY, 1972 - THE CANTERBURY TALES - Canterburyn tarinoita
12 DICEMBRE, 1972
LE MURA DI SANA'A (1973)
IL FIORE DELLE MILLE E UNA NOTTE, 1974 - ARABIAN NIGHTS - Tuhat ja yksi y?t?
SALò O LE CENTOVENTI GIORNATE DI SODOMA, 1975 - SALO OR THE 120 DAYS OF SODOM, based on Marquis de Sade's novel

Biography for Pier Paolo Pasolini

Pier Paolo Pasolini achieved fame and notoriety long before he entered the film industry - a published poet at 19, he had already written numerous novels and essays before his first screenplay in 1954. His first film Accattone (1961) was based on his own novel, and its violent depiction of the life of a pimp in the slums of Rome caused a sensation. He was arrested in 1962 when his contribution to the portmanteau film Ro.Go.Pa.G. (1963) was considered blasphemous, and given a suspended sentence. It might have been expected that his next film, Vangelo secondo Matteo, Il (1964) (The Gospel According to St.Matthew), which presented the Biblical story in a totally realistic, stripped-down style, would cause a similar fuss, but in fact it was rapturously acclaimed as one of the few honest portrayals of Christ on screen (its original Italian title pointedly omitted the Saint in St. Matthew). Pasolini's film career would then alternate distinctly personal (and often scandalously erotic adaptations of classic literary texts) Edipo re (1967/I) (Oedipus Rex), Decameron, Il (1971), Racconti di Canterbury, I (1972) (The Canterbury Tales), Fiore delle mille e una notte, Il (1974) (Arabian Nights) with his own more personal projects, expressing his controversial views on Marxism, atheism, fascism and homosexuality, notably Teorema (1968) (Theorem), Pigsty and the notorious Salò o le 120 giornate di Sodoma (1976) (Salo, or The 120 Days of Sodom), a relentlessly grim fusion of Mussolini's Fascist Italy with the Marquis de Sade which was banned in Italy (and many other countries) for several years. Pasolini was murdered in still-mysterious circumstances shortly after completing the film.

Overview

Director:Pier Paolo Pasolini

Writers:Pier Paolo Pasolini (novel)
Pier Paolo Pasolini (screenplay)

Release Date:7 September 1968 (Italy) more
Genre:Drama more
Tagline:There are only 923 words spoken in "Teorema" - but it says everything!
Plot Summary:A strange visitor in a wealthy family. He seduces the maid, the son, the mother, the daughter and finally the father before leaving a few days after... more
Plot Synopsis:This plot synopsis is empty. Add a synopsis
Plot Keywords:Sex / Miracles / Family Crisis / Male Nudity / Factory more
Awards:1 win & 1 nomination more

Additional Details

Also Known As:Theorem
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Parents Guide:Add content advisory for parents
Runtime:105 min / Finland:99 min (cinema release) (1971) / Australia:104 min / Germany:97 min
Country:Italy
Language:Italian / English
Color:Black and White / Color (Eastmancolor)
Aspect Ratio:1.85 : 1 more
Sound Mix:Mono

Synopsis

A strange visitor in a wealthy family. He seduces the maid, the son, the mother, the daughter and finally the father before leaving a few days after. After he's gone, none of them can continue living as they did. Who was that visitor ? Could he be God ? Written by Yepok (See here)

Fewer than 1,000 words of dialogue are spoken during the film. That actually sounds like a lot, but the average person speaks at a rate of 280 words per minute (probably more in Italian). That translates to less than four minutes of dialogue during the film's 98-minute running time.

The rest of the film is composed of long landscape pans and abrupt moments of action -- because there's a story here, of sorts. Terence Stamp plays a nameless stranger (with four minutes of dialogue, there's no time for names) who suddenly appears on the scene of an Italian mansion, then proceeds to seduce every member of the household. He doesn't have to do much to get them in bed: A cocked eyebrow or just lazing on the lawn seems to do the trick.

First comes the maid (followed by an attempted suicide), then the son, the daughter, mom, and dad. Later, the daughter ends up catatonic, and the maid turns into a sort of Christ-like character who can levitate and cure the sick. For some reason, Pasolini would face obscenity charges for the film, though it is lacking even the briefest of nudity. Perhaps the courts were more offended that he turned a spinster housekeeper who tries to suck on a gas line into a saint.

That's a little bit of the way that I feel. Pasolini -- whose work ranges from difficult to impossible -- is defrauding us out of something in Teorema, but its spareness makes you work to figure even that fact out. I'm not afraid of a little abstraction or obtusity. Film can be an art form just like a box of Warhol Brillo pads or a slashed Fontana canvas.

Is the spare, chatter-free -- even story-free -- format of Teorema an artistic statement, or is it just a gimmick tossed off by a man who simply didn't know what to say? The truth is probably somewhere in between. It's an earnest experiment, but it's simply too obtuse to be a success, and too undercooked (not to mention sloppily put together) to make much of an impact with any but the most devoted Pasolini hanger-on. (Reviewer: Christopher Null, more)

By VINCENT CANBY
Published: April 22, 1969

PIER PAOLO PASOLINI'S "Teorema," which opened yesterday at the Coronet, is the kind of movie that should be seen at least twice, but I'm afraid that a lot of people will have difficulty sitting through it even once. At least there were some who had that problem Friday night when the film was given an unannounced preview at the Coronet, supplementing the regular program, headed by "The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie."It was a disastrous combination. "Baby Love" is a straightforward, skin-deep narrative movie that elicits conventional responses to familiar stimuli. "Teorema" (theorem) is a parable, a movie of realistic images photographed and arranged with a mathematical precision that drains them of comforting emotional meaning. For the moviegoer whose sensibilities have been preset to receive "Baby Love"—or just about any other movie now in first run here—"Teorema" is likely to be a calamitous and ridiculous experience.

The laughter the other night didn't really bother me—although that sort of laughter always surprises me, the way I'm surprised by audiences who go to all the trouble of getting into a Museum of Modern Art screening of, say, "As You Desire Me," and then giggle at some perfectly respectable but archaic 1932 movie convention. "Teorema" is a cranky and difficult film made fascinating by the fact that Pasolini has quite consciously risked just the sort of response he was given by the Coronet patrons.

To the extent that it has a coherent narrative, "Teorema" is the story of an upper middle-class Milanese family that is suddenly visited by a beautiful young man (Terence Stamp) who systematically proceeds to make love to everyone in the family — father (Massimo Girotti), mother (Silvana Mangano), daughter (Anna Wiazemsky), son (Andres José Cruz Soublette) and even the maid (Laura Betti), in roughly the reverse of that order.

Having provided each member of the household with an apparently transcendental experience, the young man departs, leaving each to collapse in his own way. Because they are materialistic, rich bourgeoisie, their collapses are elegant and terrifying. The daughter withdraws into a catatonic state; the son withdraws into his painting, determined to set up his own rules of esthetics that are so mysterious he cannot be judged; the mother and father seek to repeat their experiences with counterfeits of the young man. However, the maid, the good, decent, believing peasant woman, becomes sanctified.

"Teorema" is not my favorite kind of film. It is open to too many whimsical interpretations grounded in Pasolini's acknowledged Marxism and atheism, which, like Bunuel's anticlericism, serve so well to affirm what he denies. Pasolini has stated that the young man is not meant to represent Jesus in a Second Coming. Rather, he says, the young man is god, any god, but the fact remains that he is God in a Roman Catholic land.

Unlike Tennessee Williams, who toyed with a variation on this theme in much more simplistic terms in "The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore" ("Boom" went the movie), Pasolini doesn't load this film with little capsulated messages of purple prose. There is very little dialogue in the movie—923 words, say the ads (but I'm not sure whether this refers to the Italian dialogue or the English subtitles). Even though Pasolini is a talented novelist and poet, the film is almost completely visual. The actors don't act, but simply exist to be photographed. The movie itself is the message, a series of cool, beautiful, often enigmatic scenes that flow one into another with the rhythm of blank verse.

This rhythm—one of the legacies of the silent film, especially of silent film comedy—was impossible for the Coronet audience to accept. The seductions are ticked off one after the other with absolutely no thought of emotional continuity. So are the individual defeats, which are punctuated by recurring shots of a desolate, volcanic landscape swept by sulphurous mists.

There is also a kind of rhythm within the images. Someone seen in right profile is immediately repeated in left profile. An action that proceeds to the left across the screen may be switched 90 degrees, directly away from the camera, or into the camera. Early scenes are in black and white. Later scenes are so muted they almost look like the old Cinecolor process, only to go monochromatic again at the end.

"Teorema" is a highly personal, open-ended movie, and one that is much more interesting to me than Pasolini's earlier "Accatone" and "The Gospel According to St. Matthew." Not the least mysterious thing about it is why the Roman Catholic Church's film reviewing body, the Office Catholique International du Cinéma, originally saw fit to give it a prize, which it later regretted. "Teorema" is a religious film, but I think it would take a very hip Jesuit to convert it into a testament to contemporary Roman Catholic dogma. (More)

Overview

Director:Pier Paolo Pasolini

Writers:Giovanni Boccaccio (novel)
Pier Paolo Pasolini (writer)

Release Date:1971 (France) more
Genre:Comedy / Drama more
Plot Summary:An adaptation of nine stories from Bocaccio's "Decameron": A young Sicilian is swindled twice, but ends... more
Plot Synopsis:This plot synopsis is empty. Add a synopsis
Plot Keywords:Painter / Cesspool / Flower Pot / Horse / Female Rear Nudity more
Awards:1 win & 1 nomination more

Additional Details

Décaméron, Le (France)
Decameron (West Germany)
Decamerone (West Germany)
The Decameron (USA)
more
Parents Guide:Add content advisory for parents
Runtime:112 min
Country:Italy / France / West Germany
Language:Italian
Color:Color (Technicolor)
Aspect Ratio:1.85 : 1 more
Sound Mix:Mono

Synopsis

An adaptation of nine stories from Bocaccio's "Decameron": A young Sicilian is swindled twice, but ends up rich; a man poses as a deaf-mute in a convent of curious nuns; a woman must hide her lover when her husband comes home early; a scoundrel fools a priest on his deathbed; three brothers take revenge on their sister's lover; a young girl sleeps on the roof to meet her boyfriend at night; a group of painters wait for inspiration; a crafty priest attempts to seduce his friend's wife; and two friends make a pact to find out what happen= s after death. Pasolini is up to his old tricks satirizing the Church, and throwing in liberal doses of life and love. Written by Philip Brubaker {coda@nando.net}(See here)

By VINCENT CANBY
Published: October 5, 1971

Pier Paolo Pasolini, the Italian director, has always been something of a puzzle for American critics, not simply because we have to reconcile his announced Marxism with what appears to be a kind of reformed Christianity (as reflected by the neo-realistic "The Gospel According to St. Matthew," as well as by the austerely allegorical "Teorema"), but because he forces us to keep shifting critical gears. No three Pasolinis are ever quite alike. At best, they come in pairs, like "Oedipus Rex" and "Medea," neither of which have yet been released here.

There is, however, a peculiar kind of romanticism throughout all of his films. It is a middle-class romanticism that idealizes the spiritual and emotional freedom that Pasolini sees in what we used to call The Common Man, who, in slightly more straightforward, class-conscious Europe, is still The Peasant. As if he were some medieval maiden locked in a tower, Pasolini seems to long for the freedom to do what the simple folk do, which, to Pasolini, evokes sexual liberation as much as anything else.

In none of his films has this been more apparent than in his marvelous new work, "The Decameron," which is as close to being uninhibited and joyful as anything he's ever done.

Taking 10 tales out of the 100 in Boccaccio's "Decameron," Pasolini has created one of the most beautiful, turbulent and uproarious panoramas of early Renaissance life ever put on film. It is also one of the most obscene, if obscene defines something that is offensive to ordinary concepts of chastity, delicacy and decency, although I'd hardly call the film offensive to morals.

Pasolini's "Decameron" is faithful to the original texts, but it is not Boccaccio's. This is not because Pasolini has dispensed with Boccaccio's frame, which has seven women and three men, refugees from the plague that settled on Florence in 1348, each tell one story a day for the 10 days they are marooned in country villa. Pasolini uses no frame except a single setting, Naples, where the stories grow one out of the other as do the scenes in a frieze.

Rather, the difference between the two works has to do with the difference between the two works has to the delicate euphemisms of Boccaccio's storytellers become the blunt unequivocal images of filmed reality. The difference also has to do with Pasolini's conscious recreation of a world that is as strange and bizarre as that of the pre-Christian "Fellini Satyricon," which Pasolini's film recalls by its pagan beauty, and by its concern with life as art, if not by its comic temperament.

In his "Satyricon," Fellini contented himself by playing God, the artist, off screen. Pasolini is not quite so modest. About halfway through "The Decameron" he himself shows up as Giotto, one of the founding fathers of the Renaissance. Thereafter we see him periodically, surrounded by his students, at work on a giant fresco, the holy faces of which are those of the thieves, whores, merchants, nuns, friars, rubes, deceived husband and not-so-virginal lovers, whose stories we've been watching.

When his work is finally completed, Giotto is spent, drained, empty of feeling. "Why produce a work of art," he says to himself, "when it's so nice to dream about it?"

Pasolini's dream is composed of the tales he tells us, takes as its theme a frenzied Giotto nightmare, in which the artist's religious visions are overwhelmed by the more attractive visions of a pagan orgy.

With the exception of Franco Citti, Ninetto Davoli and Silvana Mangano (who appears in an unbilled cameo), the cast is mostly composed of amateurs, for Pasolini, like Giotto, is fascinated by the truth of unprepared faces. They are all either extraordinarily beautiful or extraordinarily ugly, as if they were different classes of beings. There is, however, something about their awkwardness and self-consciousness that gives a special dimension of truth to the film itself.

I must say that, at the beginning of the movie, I feared we were in for another one of Franco Zefferelli's rather fruitily lush, medieval window displays. However, because Pasolini is a sterner poet than Zefferelli, "The Decameron" becomes an epic, instead of just another unruly and inverted fashion show.

The film, which was shown last night at the New York Film Festival at the Vivian Beaumont Theater, will be released commercially later in the year.

THE DECAMERON, directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini; screenplay (Italian with English subtitles) by Mr. Pasolini; director of photography, Tonino Delli Colli; produced by Alberto Grimaldi; distributed by United Artists. Running time: 101 minutes. At the Vivian Beaumont Theater, New York Film Festival, Lincoln Center.
Ciappelletto . . . . . Franco Citti
Andreuccio da Perugia . . . . . Ninetto Davoli
Peronella . . . . . Angela Luce
Glotto . . . . . Pier Paolo Pasolini (More)