- Mamma Roma
This week, the Gene Siskel Film Center’s 12-film retrospective of Pier Paolo Pasolini concludes with a screening of his notorious final film, Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom. Similar to David Lynch and Jacques Tati, Pasolini didn’t initially set out to be a director. Before he made his first film in 1961, he was an accomplished journalist, novelist, poet, and political commentator, and he drew heavily from his experiences in these fields when he started working in cinema. Subsequently, his work tends to feel like it was made by someone whose interests lie outside the form itself, which isn’t to say Pasolini was somehow indifferent toward cinema, only that his conceptions of film image, sound, and story stemmed from outside sources. Many of his compositions, for instance, were modeled after famous paintings, and many of his narratives have a lyrical, allegoric quality—others, like the one in The Gospel According to St. Matthew, are deliberately objective. His filmography, despite its relative brevity, is varied and intriguingly incongruous, fueled by his discordant interests and professions. No two films are exactly alike, but each is deeply personal.
- Oedipus Rex (1967) His most poetic film, and perhaps his most personal. The film is entirely removed from the Greek milieu of Sophocles’s text, but similar to Pasolini’s The Gospel According to St. Matthew, the material is treated with stark objectivity, creating a semiotic tension befitting of the director’s structuralist tendencies. The masterful prologue, set in 1922, relates the Oedipus story to both modern times and Pasolini himself, who had a complicated relationship with his father; he called the film a “metaphoric autobiography.”
