Pasolini today – screenings during the conference

Two films will be screened during the conference, La Passione di Pasolini (2015, USA/Italy, 15’) by Hisham Bizri (Brown) and Pasolini’s Last Words (2012, USA, 61’) by Cathy Lee Crane (Ithaca College). The program will start at 7.30, at the Whitney Humanities Center.

PASSIONE_Maria4

La Passione di Pasolini by Hisham Bizri is a psalm for Pier Paolo Pasolini’s cinema, for his poetry, his Marxist politics, and for his shifting Catholicism. The psalm is ultimately a meditation on the Shakespeare’s idea that “All the world’s a stage”. We see the director Pasolini filming children enacting an old play, two actresses auditioning in a garden, the staging of the passion, and the funeral of Palmiro Togliatti, the long-time leader of the Italian Communist Party, among other changing faces of the world in relation to the reality behind it: the one-thing-next-another (juxtaposition) and the one-thing-after-another (succession).

PASOLINISLASTWORDS

Pasolini’s Last Words by Cathy Lee Crane: combining staged and archival material, this elegiac essay considers Pasolini’s brutal murder in 1975 alongside the texts he published or left unfinished during his last year. For more information about this film, please read this interview/review.

The screenings will be followed by a Q&A with both directors, moderated by Daniel Fairfax (Yale).

Curator’s Forum Series with Dennis Lim, March 5

Before introducing and discussing Salò, or the 120 days of Sodom on March 5th, Dennis Lim will participate in an informal meeting organized with Yale Film Colloquium as part of their Curator’s Forum series. The meeting will take place on Thursday, March 5th, at 5:30pm, in WHC 208 and there will be a light dinner.

If you would like to join us for this informal dinner and discussion with Dennis about his curatorial work (among other things) please RSVP to kirsty.dootson@yale.edu.

Dennis Lim is the director of programming at the Film Society of Lincoln Center, where he also serves on the selection committee for the New York Film Festival, as the co-director of New Directors/New Films, and as co-curator of annual programs including Art of the Real and Projections. The film editor at The Village Voice from 2000-2006, and a regular contributor to The New York Times from 2006-2013, he has also written for Artforum, Cinema Scope, and The Los Angeles Times, among other publications. Currently a visiting lecturer in the Department of Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard, he has also taught in the Cultural Reporting and Criticism graduate program at New York University’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. His book David Lynch: The Man From Another Place will be published by Amazon/New Harvest in 2015.

Workshop – Pasolini and the neo-avant-garde

The last workshop leading to the conference will take place on Monday, February 23rd, 4pm, at the Beinecke Library, Room 39, it will be led by Anna Marra and it is co-organized with the Postwar Culture Working Group.

There are three suggested readings. The first one is a short essay by Pasolini on the avant-garde, the second is a good introduction on the subject and the last pages talk specifically about Pasolini, and the third one is in Italian but very short. Please email us at pasoliniatyale@gmail.com if you wish to participate.

1) “The end of the avant-garde” (in Heretical Empiricism)

2) The Neoavanguardia and the Theoretical Debate (in The new Avant-Garde in Italy)

3) Pasolini e la neoavanguardia (in Lo sperimentalismo tra Pasolini e la neoavanguardia)

“Gramsci-Pasolini: ashes to ashes”, a lecture by David Forgacs

Join us on Wednesday, February 18th, 2015, 12:00 pm, at Whitney Humanities Center,Room 208
Light lunch will be served Please RSVP: gramsciworkinggroup@gmail.com

Forgacs posterDavid Forgacs teaches in the Department of Italian Studies at New York University, where he holds the Zerilli-Marimò Chair of Contemporary Italian Studies. Before that he held (1999-­2011) the Panizzi Chair of Italian at University College London. His previous appointments were at Royal Holloway, University of London, where he was Reader in Film Studies (1997-99), the University of Cambridge, where he was a Fellow of Gonville and Caius College (1989-97), and the University of Sussex (1978-89), where he was Lecturer in Italian and European Studies. In 2006-09 he was Research Professor at the British School at Rome. In 2005 he was awarded the honor of Grande Ufficiale dell’Ordine della Stella della Solidarietà Italiana for services to the promotion of Italian culture abroad

His main research area is Italian cultural and media history since 1800. His publications include Italian culture in the industrial era 1880-1980 (1990; also in an expanded edition in Italian, 2000), Mass culture and Italian society from Fascism to the Cold War (with Stephen Gundle, 2007, also in Italian), Italian cultural studies (with Robert Lumley, 1996), Rethinking Italian fascism: capitalism, populism, culture (1986), The Antonio Gramsci Reader (1998, 2000). On cinema his work includes studies of Antonioni (essays 2011, 2007, 2000), Pontecorvo (2007), Rossellini (2 books, 2000), popular cinema under Fascism (2002), migration in film (2001), memories of fascism in cinema of the 1960s and 70s (1998), as well as full-length commentaries on the DVDs of Ossessione, The Leopard, Red Desert and The Conformist. His latest book is Italy’s margins: social exclusion and nation formation since 1861 forthcoming from Cambridge University Press in 2014.

Screening of La Dolce Vita

La Dolce Vita will be screened this Friday at 7pm at WHC Auditorium, introduced by Millicent Marcus (Yale). See the poster attached.

This is first event of “The Legacy of Pasolini – a conference and series of events on Pier Paolo Pasolini”.

The screening is dedicated to the memory of Anita Ekberg (1931-2015). dolcevita_img

The Legacy of Pier Paolo Pasolini

PPP_NY04Call for papers

Yale University
Whitney Humanities Center
March 6-7, 2015

Keynote Speakers:     
Karen Pinkus (Cornell)
Ara H. Merjian (NYU)

Closing Round Table:
Francesco Casetti (Yale)
Giuseppe Mazzotta (Yale)
David Ward (Wellesley)

 

2015 marks the fortieth anniversary of the death of Pier Paolo Pasolini, the renowned Italian essayist, novelist, filmmaker, and poet. The conference offered by the Department of Italian at Yale aims to explore the development of scholarship and critical discourse on Pasolini. Today the work on Pasolini goes beyond literature and film, and covers a broad range of disciplines, from music to philosophy, from political science to environmental studies. Recent events worldwide have highlighted various aspects of Pasolini’s career. A film retrospective at the MOMA in New York in 2012 and 2013 screened his entire filmography, and in the last years four European capitals hosted the exhibition “Pasolini Roma.” Each year new books on Pasolini are published in multiple languages.

In 1980 Yale commemorated the fifth anniversary of his death with a conference that attracted a wide range of scholars and intellectuals from the U.S. and abroad, including Alberto Moravia and Umberto Eco. The growth of scholarship and events about Pasolini’s legacy begs the question not only of what has happened in the last thirty-five years, but also of what will happen in the next thirty-five: what is the future of critical discourse and academic research on Pasolini?

Because of the wide breadth of topics embraced by Pasolini scholarship, we invite papers from all disciplines. We will be particularly interested in papers that encourage dialogue across disciplines. Please send abstracts (250-300 words) to pasoliniatyale@gmail.com by December 20, 2014. Acceptances will be sent out in early January 2015.

Conference participants will include: Ida Dominijanni (Cornell), Ron Gregg (Yale), Millicent Marcus (Yale), Paolo Russo (Oxford Brookes), Christy Wampole (Princeton), and Evan Calder Williams (writer and artist). The conference will open on March 5th with a screening of Salò, or The 120 Days of Sodom (35mm), introduced by journalist and curator Dennis Lim.

The conference will be preceded by a series of events, including a film retrospective, workshops, and guest lectures. For more information, go to https://campuspress.yale.edu/pasoliniatyale/. The conference and correlated events are organized by Luca Peretti and Karen Raizen, in collaboration with Yale students and faculty. Download the call for papers: PPP call for papers pdf.