Directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini • 1968 • Italy
Starring Terence Stamp, Silvana Mangano, Massimo Girotti
One of the iconoclastic Pier Paolo Pasolini’s most radical provocations finds the auteur moving beyond the poetic, proletarian earthiness that first won him renown and notoriety with a coolly cryptic exploration of bourgeois spiritual emptiness. Terence Stamp stars as the mysterious stranger—perhaps an angel, perhaps a devil—who, one by one, seduces the members of a wealthy Milanese family (including European cinema icons Silvana Mangano, Massimo Girotti, Laura Betti, and Anne Wiazemsky), precipitating an existential crisis in each of their lives. Unfolding nearly wordlessly in a procession of sacred and profane images, this tantalizing metaphysical riddle—blocked from exhibition by the Catholic Church for degeneracy—is at once a blistering Marxist treatise on sex, religion, and art and a primal scream into the void.
Up Next in Directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini
-
Porcile
Directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini • 1969 • Italy, France
Starring Pierre Clémenti, Jean-Pierre Léaud, Alberto LionelloOne of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s most startling works, PORCILE (“Pigsty”) explores humanity’s capacity for barbarism through two parallel stories. In the first, Pierre Clémenti stars ...
-
La ricotta
Directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini • 1962 • Italy
Starring Orson WellesPier Paolo Pasolini’s contribution to the omnibus film RO.GO.PA.G casts Orson Welles as a director attempting to make a film of the crucifixion of Jesus—all while he, the cast, and crew behave in the most un-Christlike ways ima...