DEDICATED TO PASOLINI - Pentedattilo Film Festival

DEDICATED TO PASOLINI

Short Films dedicated to the memory of Pierpaolo Pasolini

The Pentedattilo Film Festival pays homage to Pasolini with the art he most deserves: the short film. And to do this it screens Pierpaolo Pasolini's masterpiece short, "What are the Clouds?", a short film by a young director dedicated to him, and an unpublished interview-trip to Pierpaolo Pasolini's Calabrian places made by the never-forgotten film critic Virgilio Fantuzzi.

 

Che Cosa sono le nuvole

From “Capriccio all’italiana”

20' - 1968

Directed by Pierpaolo Pasolini

The short is the story of Othello revisited as a staging for puppets, with Ciccio and Franco, Totò and Ninetto Davoli playing the puppet- protagonists. The narrative opens with its poster made over Velazquez's painting Las Meninas: before the film even begins, Pasolini invites us into his vision. In fact, like the famous painting, the story has a double staging: on the one hand, the tragedy represented by the puppet-characters, on the other hand, the perspective according to which the "spectator" would only be a falsely privileged observer but who in reality cannot see, nor perceive the dialogues and characters of the puppets/actors, cannot enter the hidden folds, those secret and irrational nuances of meaning, cannot descend into the abyss of the unfolding representation. It is as if Pasolini is inviting us to look as one looks at Las Meninas, that is, finding the "truth" of deception: good in evil, reality in fiction, the important things in the futile. Pasolini in the work continually offers us double planes of reading, starting with the idea of theater in cinema, the elementary separation between the world of fiction and the real world, and ending with a reflection on the meanings of human existence and the relationships between "appearing and being," between life and death. It will be Totò's last film that he will never get to see. As Iago, his character, dies looking at the clouds that give the film its title, here is his last line, "Ah, heartbreaking wonderful beauty of creation." The last line of an extraordinary actor.

 

 

Pipinara

14' – 2017

Directed by Ludovico De Martino

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The Pentedattilo Film Festival is the event of youth and short cinema. That is why to celebrate Pasolini we also chose a short film dedicated to him by a very young director, who had been in the finals in 2018. A director who has since grown, finding success with the film "La belva" so much so that he was later chosen to direct the series "Skam Italia 3."  Pipinara tells the story of two young men in Rome, in a hamlet overlooking the sea, who divide their time between petty theft and soccer games. Their crimes have the lightheartedness and exuberance of childhood games, until an unexpected proposal brings darkness into their lives, and into the history of Italy, with the death of Pier Paolo Pasolini

 

 

Unpublished travel-interview with Virgilio Fantuzzi

Critic Virgilio Fantuzzi was among the founders of the Pentedattilo Film Festival. Gone too soon in2019, his void is difficult to fill, not only for us but for the entire film environment. A Jesuit Father, the historic voice of "Civiltà Cattolica," he had become for all the leading critic and observer on everything that happened on the world revolving around the big screen, a historic figure. From 1975 to 2007 he had taught at the Gregorian University Analysis of Cinematic Language; he was the author of important essays such as Pier Paolo Pasolini (1978), Cinema sacro e profano (1983), Il vero Fellini (1994), Paolo Benvenuti (2004) and not least the recent one, his "spiritual testament" published for Áncora (2018) Luce in sala. He has always sought the divine in cinema, Father Virgilio, he has always sought it even in the village of Pentedattilo.  Pasolini in the summer of 1959 for the magazine "Success," traveled along the Italian coast behind the wheel of a Fiat Millecento to make "La lunga strada di sabbia," an extensive reportage on Italy between change and tradition, bourgeois vacations and remnants of a difficult postwar period. He also arrived in Calabria and Virgilio Fantuzzi in 2008 decided to retrace those places by narrating the great writer and director. An unpublished video document that tells two great souls, that of the master Pierpaolo Pasolini and that of our friend Virgilio Fantuzzi.