the weird artist
In this type of production, where short or medium-length films by various authors were brought together, Pasolini was always “the rare artist”, annoying to the common public and valued only by his followers, who over time imposed his pieces above the rest. This is how they remained, and are still the object of study and praise, “La ricotta”, “The earth seen from the moon”, “What are clouds?” and “The sequence of the paper flower”, respectively inserted in “RoGoPag”, 1963, where the favorite was “El pollo de campo”, a great satire by Ugo Gregoretti against the consumer society, “The witches”, with Silvana Mangano , here seen as “No one cheats on a woman”, 1967, “Capriccio all’italiana”, 1968, and “Amore e rabbia”, 1969. The most interesting, strangely poetic, and the most incompletely seen, is “What are the clouds?”, a sad and philosophical farce with Totó, Ninetto Davoli, both as despised puppets, the comic duo that is not funny here Franchi-Ingrassia, and Domenico Modugno, who sings a song by Pasolini himself while load the puppets towards the dump. Incidentally, “la Mangano” was also a key figure in two other Pasolini films: “Oedipus the King”, 1967, and “Teorema”, 1968. And the song has had new performers, among them, very good, Franco Simone and Stefano Bollani.
More oddities: the film notes of his wanderings in Palestine, 1965 (he was looking for locations for “The Gospel according to Saint Matthew”, which he ended up filming in southern Italy); India, with music by Ennio Morricone; Uganda and Tanzania, 1970, with music by Gato Barbieri (thinking of filming an African version of “La Orestiada”), and Yemen (short “Las pared de Sanaá”, 1971, appeal to UNESCO).
Difficult, almost impossible to find, the film “Appunti per un romanzo sull’immondezza” (Notes for a novel about filth), filmed in Rome, 1970, and not so difficult, although out of print, the book “The Smell of India”, that evokes his first trip, in 1961, when he met Mother Teresa of Calcutta. They were both relatively young then, and still little known. Final fact: it is not yours, but it is very interesting, the short “Pasolini interviews Ezra Pound”, where both poets, one from the left and the other from the fascist, meet, and the Italian reads, in a beautiful way, one of the other’s texts, “Humiliate your vanity (mean is all your hate)”. At that time Ezra Pound was 83 years old, an age that Pasolini was not allowed to reach.
Source: Ambito
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