So instead of having a party and drinking and such, I thought I'd see in the new year by watching two offerings from Pasolini, Le Mura di Sana / The Walls of Sana'a (1964) and Porcile (1969).
There are DVD versions out there which have scenes from Porcile in the wrong order, so, at the time of writing, if you want to see Porcile properly you have to have the Region 2 UK Tartan Pasolini box-set.
Porcile, I will say, is a great film. There are two stories that are played alongside each other. Pierre Clémenti is a... well... who knows, a sprite perhaps, in a barbarous medieval setting. It's clear Pasolini has chosen him because he has a hard-on for him, he looks like he's come straight out of a Caravaggio painting. Our sprite and some buddies run around the black slopes of Etna being mad, it's very entertaining, and almost wordless. You can't really believe what you're seeing, it appears that Etna is actually active when they're on it, there is black smoke spewing forth, and the actors run past the most awesomely evil sulphurous cave you've ever seen. So you get to see some fornication, cannibalism, volcanism, and our sprite throwing a human head into the aforementioned evil hole. It's the most purely primal thing I've ever seen, and I've watched Matthew Barney films.
The other half of the movie is set in an Italianate villa in Germany, it concerns on the one hand Mr Klotz and Mr Herdhitze, two industrialists vying with each other for superiority, and on the other hand Julian (playde by Jean-Pierre Léaud), Herr Klotz's son. Julian is portrayed as withdrawing from the human race almost entirely, this is shown to be down to his parents, who self-describe themselves as the type of people who would be painted as pigs by George Grosz, an elitist, although entirely accurate and most wondrous piece of scriptwriting. Julian has no concept of the joy of living or of functional human relationships at all, and so this child of the rich takes to copulating with pigs. Who can blame him as he has only the example of his parents' ruinous and obscure preoccupations, specifically the pursuit of wealth. At one point Julian describes a dream where he walks along a road searching for something at night, the road is filled with shining puddles, and then a little piglet comes a long and playfully bites four of his fingers off, and it doesn't hurt, they come off, as if they were made of rubber. At one point Julian's mother and his girlfriend stand opposite one another describing him, as if he were two completely separate people. And yet he's both. This shows how ideology and prejudice only allow you to see someone, as if through murky water.
