FASSBINDER CONNECTIONS Pier Paolo Pasolini retrospective
From 13 September to 17 October, Berlin’s Arsenal cinema is screening a comprehensive retrospective of the films of Pier Paolo Pasolini. The retrospective is being accompanied by an exhibition in the Martin Gropius Bau which will run until 5 January 2015 and focuses on the Italian director’s relationship with Rome.
The exhibition and retrospective also offer the opportunity to explore the biographical and artistic parallels between Pasolini and Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Both were controversial figures who did not shy away from criticizing prevailing political and social realities or from bringing to bear a brutal honesty in their engagement with the dark, fascist pasts of their homelands. Particularly in the early work of the two filmmakers, we often encounter outsiders who have to assert themselves in a pitiless, bourgeois society. Like Fassbinder, Pasolini did not allow himself to be restricted by genres or aesthetic dogmas; Pasolini’s oeuvre also includes reflection on the process of filmmaking (“La ricotta”) and engagement with major literary works from his homeland (“Decameron”). Like Fassbinder in Germany, he remains one of the key figures of Italian cinema against whom later generations must measure themselves.
For those interested in the connections between Fassbinder and Pasolini, we can recommend the 2010 anthology “Pasolini, Fassbinder and Europe: Between Utopia and Nihilism.”
More information
http://www.arsenal-berlin.de/en/arsenal-cinema/current-program/single/article/5030/2796.html
http://www.cambridgescholars.com/download/sample/59912
Photo left: Film still from Accatone (Director: Pier Paolo Pasolini, Italy 1961), © Arsenal – Institute for Film and Video
Photo right: Pier Paolo Pasolini, © Arsenal – Institute for Film and Video