Pier Paolo Pasolini was one of the most complex auteurs of 20th-century cinema. In Italy, the scandal-ridden filmmaker (a defendant in court no less than 33 times) is considered a poet first and foremost. Poetry animated, haunted, and cross-contaminated Pasolini’s pursuits throughout his life. He theorized a “cinema of poetry,” brought the language of filmmaking into his poems, probed his own life and psychology in verse, and lived his defiant and conflicted poetic passion on nightly trips cruising among the ragazzi di vita—his spiritual, aesthetic, sexual, and cultural obsession. For Pasolini, poetry was the pursuit of “a language closer to the world.” In honour of his 101st birthday, the Criterion Collection is releasing Pasolini 101, a box set of his first nine features. Pasolini stated that he made these early…
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Cinema Scope (Digital) - 1 Issue, Issue 95 - Summer 2023