Sunday, June 9, 2013

PASOLINI AT CCCB


Next stop - the Centre for Contemporary Culture Barcelona, CCCB.

In conjunction with Cinémathèque Françcaise in Paris, Azienda Palaexpo-Palazzo dell Esposizioni in Rome and the Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin, and financed by the European Commission, CCCB Barcelona is presenting the exhibition 'Parsolini Roma', looking at the life of the writer and filmmaker  Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922-1975).



Pasolini's adult life, as he projected it, is seen here by examining (in a brilliantly curated exhibition of his writings, poetry, cinema, politics, sex, loves, and friendships) his particular relationships with Rome and both Pasolini and Rome are on show here.

Starting with Pasolini fleeing with his mother to Rome in 1950 (the darkened first room fronts a large 50's railway carriage window, with Pasolini's collaged life clacketty-clacking past outside), through the 60s, 60s in Rome, it ends abruptly, as he did, in 1975 with the discovery of his dead body near Ostia. Poverty, sex, boys, films, whoring, novels, travel to India and the third world, the Rome Trilogy, Anna Magnani, scandal, blasphemy, libel, court cases (33 cases attempts to silence him), The Gospel According to Matthew (dedicated to John Paul XXIII), love, loss and depression, Paris, Callas, New York and finally some property outside Rome to where he could withdraw with his lover Alberto and where between a football stadium and the sea he was murdered, aged 53.

I make note of all this simply as a record of a quite startling, and it's fair to say unique, exhibition the likes of which are most unlikely to pop up in our corner of the woods, unless it be of interest to someone like David Walsh at MONA.




Ninetto Davoli, who left Pasolini to marry ..



Pasolini in Mali; African music would influence his soundtrack to Medea ..



Directing Laurent Terzieff, the Centaur in Medea ..



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