The Documentary Cinematheque of the Bpi (Bibliothèque publique d’information) at the Centre Pompidou in Paris is celebrating the work of Italian film-maker Pier Paolo Pasolini. From April 1st to June 21st a season of documentaries will make 20 of his films available online, together with a selection of Italian films from the 1980’s to the present “all containing echoes, connections and affinities with Pasolini.”
An artist defending the right to “scandalize”
Born in 1922 in Bologna, the novelist, poet, journalist, screenwriter and director became famous for his provocative films. Communist-inspired, he shook up post-war Italian society. Openly opposed to fascism, he also attacked the rising bourgeois and consumer values in the country. Criticized by the authorities of the time, his murder in November 1975 on a beach near Rome has never been explained.
A retrospective on the artist’s “appunti”
The retrospective is organized around Pier Paolo Pasolini ‘s “appunti”, visual notebooks of unfinished films which he used when working on his books and his films. “Films for a film in the making” as Hervé Joubert-Laurencin, film-maker and translator of Pasolini, described these appunti on France Culture. The Bpi cycle shows us this “parallel, almost ghostly filmography”.
Two films were shown online on April 10th and will be repeated online or in Paris cinemas on May 19th: Pasolini’s own “Pasolini e….la forma della città” in which “the film-maker decries the offensive devastation of urban planning and the property market, taking the example of Orte, a small town in Lazio” and Alain Bergala’s “Pasolini, la passion de Rome”. All the films on the programme can be found here.
In 2019, France Culture broadcast several programmes about Pasolini’s poetry and his philosophical and autobiographical works. Those programmes can be found on franceculture.fr.
For more information on the audiovisual news in Italy, click here.
Sources: film-documentaire.fr, agenda.bpi.fr, franceculture.fr
