print Summer 2014

PERSISTENCE OF VISION: THE FILMS OF PAOLO GIOLI

After the history of the rectangle in film, we’ll have

to write a history of the meaning of darkness in

the cinema.

—Paolo Gioli

IN HIS DE ANIMA, Aristotle identifies the human being as a blinking animal—at once capable of vision but also, and more importantly, able to close his eyes, to choose not to see, and therefore able to reflect. “[Human eyes have a certain superiority] over those of hard-eyed animals,” the philosopher observed. “Man’s eyes have in the eyelids a kind of shelter or envelope, which must be shifted or drawn back in order that we may see, while hard-eyed animals have

print January 2013

A CINEMA OF POETRY: THE FILMS OF PIER PAOLO PASOLINI

PIER PAOLO PASOLINI first visited New York City in late 1966, and what he found there surprised him: In the heated context of the antiwar movement and the struggle for civil rights—which he characterized forcefully as a “civil war”—the forty-four-year-old Italian poet and filmmaker rediscovered a spirit of political and cultural renewal that he had experienced only once before, during the last months of World War II, when the Italian partisans rose up against Nazism and Fascism in what was itself largely an internecine conflict—one that had claimed his brother’s life.

In America,

film December 13, 2012

A Cinema of Poetry

PIER PAOLO PASOLINI first visited New York City in late 1966, and what he found there surprised him: In the heated context of the antiwar movement and the struggle for civil rights—which he characterized forcefully as a “civil war”—the forty-four-year-old Italian poet and filmmaker rediscovered a spirit of political and cultural renewal that he had experienced only once before, during the last months of World War II, when the Italian partisans rose up against Nazism and Fascism in what was itself largely an internecine conflict—one that had claimed his brother’s life.

In America,

previews September 2005

Pier Paolo Pasolini

Pasolini was twentieth-century Italy’s most important and provocative cultural figure. A writer, filmmaker, playwright, and painter, he focused his oeuvre on sexuality, politics, religion, and revolution. One of Italy’s first no-globals, he was also among its last romantic visionaries. Murdered in 1975, Pasolini’s last years were spent denouncing political corruption and making aesthetically astonishing work, such as the infamous film Salò (1975), which attacked transnational consumer capitalism. The thirtieth anniversary of his assassination (which

Patrick Rumble