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.

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).

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).