Pier Paolo Pasolini, one hundred years of extraordinary shocks

Do you know what i tableaux vivant? They are also called living pictures and they are a genre that cyclically returns to fashion. Every now and then some museums also launch a competition on Instagram to see who can best reproduce a famous painting by impersonating this or that other character.

Pier Paolo Pasolini on this idea of ​​living paintings staged by real people he built a large part of his filmography between the sixties and seventies (which is really dense: the unmissable Beggar, Mom Rome, The Gospel according to Matthew, Uccellini uccellacci, Decameron). There Cineteca of Bologna has made a commitment and in Pier Paolo Pasolini – Figurative electrocutions (in the underpass of Piazza Re Enzo, until next October 16) has managed to set up one of the most interesting exhibition projects in circulation dedicated to PPP, exactly one hundred years after birth (on 5 March 1922, precisely in Bologna).

There are really many books fresh from the press and events dedicated to Pasolini, given the important anniversary, but this exhibition has a special flavorbecause it tells the visceral passion for art of the intellectual killed on November 2, 1975 on the coast of Ostia, in circumstances not fully understood. We would have had a Beggarone Medeaone Mom Rome different if PPP had not fed, right from the benches of the University of Bologna and thanks to the lectures of Professor Roberto Longhi (the “king of art critics” of the time) of medieval, Renaissance and Baroque art?

Longhi was a tough teacher and had invented a whole new method for teaching art history to his students: he took a few and selected ones, took them to via Zamboni 33 and projected on a screen in a small classroom some slides that reproduced details of some works of art. The children’s eye had to focus only on that particular: only in this way would they learn to recognize the hand and style of each author. It was the early 1940s and PPP was blown away by those lessons. Twenty years later, those memories will re-emerge more and more vivid when she decides to try her hand at cinema, after having written her first novel in ’55. Life boys, and already being one of the best known (and least approved) intellectuals in the country.

On the big PPP screen, he reports those slides that Longhi had shown him, those fragments of realitythose details that make the scene unique: «Each Pasolini film is progressively the construction of a beauty that plunders large areas of Italian or European art to restore expressive dignity to what would not have it. THE his films draw a history of art in the form of cinema»(The words of Marco Antonio Bazzocchi, who signs the introduction to the exhibition catalog say it all).

There is no art form that hasn’t intrigued PPP. In his films there is the roughness of Caravaggiothe drama of El Grecothe harmony of Giottothe colors of Pontormothe forms of Piero della Francescathe reds of Florentine red and then theethnic art and even the contemporary one.

The exhibition is extensive (what a «figurative Babel» PPP had in mind!) and it makes no sense here to reveal the whole path, built on continuous comparisons between reproductions of works of art and still images of Pasolini’s films. In front of the photographic reproductions of the Brancacci Chapel Of Masaccio juxtaposed to some frames of Beggarin front of the image of the Deposition by Rosso Fiorentino and the same scene in films such as The ricotta you stay really dazzled (look at the pictures to believe).