Pier Paolo Pasolini

Pier Paolo Pasolini (1995) was co-written and directed by Ivo Barnabò Micheli. It runs for just 58 minutes, but they are 58 long minutes.

Director Micheli tries to give us on overview of Pasolini, based on his own words and some clips of film footage. The problem is that Pasolini's words, in subtitles, didn't make much sense to me. I could understand each word, but I couldn't understand what his meaning was.

Yes, he was gay, but everyone knew that at the time. Yes, he had some weird thing going with mother/son relationships, but if you watch Mama Roma, you can see that. Yes, he made three pornographic films at the end of his career, and then "repudiated" them. (How do you repudiate a film--it's there, and always will be.)

We saw this movie as an extra on the Criterion version of Mama Rosa. I don't think it's worth watching. However, if you decide to watch it, don't see it before Pasolini's "La Ricotta." The key scene from "La Ricotta" is shown in this movie. Watching this film will ruin that scene for you.

This must be said: as I'm writing these words I haven't seen any of Pasolini's films yet. But got interested in his persona after hearing and reading bits of his life and work. This documentary proved to be a good summary of his relationship with cinema and how he used it's language and tools to represent his ideas (on everything: life, death, poetry, morality, power, sex, etc). I believe that regarding the spoilers of his films that it might contain it's a perfect material to understand his vision as an artist.

This is not Pasolini's biography. Only a documentary about his transition from poetry to cinema and about his evolution (and the evolution of his ideas) a movie at a time.