Pasolini Collection: Volume 2

Prints made available by the Pier Paolo Pasolini Foundation of Rome.

Accatone
The Scrounger
The first of Pier Paolo Pasolini's highly acclaimed films, and the winner of numerous film festival prizes. Accatone uses a talented cast to present a vivid picture of the Roman slums. Based on one of the filmmaker/poet's novels, this story of a pimp, his friends, his enemies and his girls is realism at its earthiest. It is brutal, realistic, un-sentimental and bustling with life. Particularly effective is the use of Bach on the soundtrack which provides ironic counterpoint to the world of pimps, prostitutes and street fighters.

The Hawks and the Sparrows
The Hawks and the Sparrows, a wildly comic fable, stars the beloved stone-faced clown Toto as an Italian everyman, the Ninetto Davoli as his good-natured but empty-headed son. Pasolini uses a comic crow, which philosophizes amusingly and pointedly about the passing scene, as a counterpoint to the performers, representing humanity, as they progress down the road of life. Pasolini presents a tragic fable which shows two delightful innocents caught, like many Italians, between Church and Marxism.

The Gospel According To Saint Matthew
The birth, life, teachings and death on the cross of Jesus Christ presented almost as a cine-verite documentary. Pasolini's second feature seemed a strange choice for such a revolutionary director, but it is an attempt to take Christ out of the opulent church and present him as an outcast Italian peasant. Applying Neo-Realist methods, the director shot the film in Calabria, using the expressive faces of non-professionals including that of his mother as the Virgin Mary. The Gospel According to Saint Matthew is considered the greatest screen version of the 'greatest story ever told' and this freshly re-mastered version brings the film to life in a way that has never been seen before.