Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922-1975)
I was introduced to the films of Pier Paolo Pasolini when I saw the disturbing Salò (1975) in Paris.
In London, the Scala Cinema (now closed) presented art house films in extended, sometimes all-night programmes. I watched Pasolini’s Accattone (1961), the beautiful Il vangelo secondo Matteo (1964), Teorema (1968), Medea (1969), Porcile (1969), Il decameron (1971), I racconti di Canterbury (1972) and Il fiore delle mille e una notte (1974). I also read his semi-autobiographical novel Una vità violenta (1958) which moved me.
Neo-realist and picaresque, Pasolini was courageous enough to put us in touch with the darker and lighter sides of ourselves, in a living cocktail of the grotesque and the sacred.