POP-UP NUMBER 4: PASOLINI

(Did You Sleep With the Models?)

Send Me a Man Who Reads

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Although I am not a great admirer of Pasolini’s films, I honor him for starring the great Maria Callas in Medea, his version of the Greek tragedy by Euripides. In so doing, he made the only full-length film version of Callas in anything. How could the opera world have been so shortsighted? Medea is not a great film, but for me it grows in stature each time I see it.

I find things to admire also in Pasolini’s The Gospel According to St. Matthew (1964), so unlike pious biblical epics of Hollywood. But then there’s Salò, The 120 Days of Sodom (1975), his final film as director. If you’re repelled by the 21st century motif of on-camera vomiting, which stupid directors find so fashionable, you should probably avoid Salò. Among its many indelicacies is the scene of a character eating feces off the floor with a spoon.

I saw it in 1977 at a screening in New York with Pauline Kael and John Alfred Avant, a good friend and author of the following book review. I’ve blotted out most memories of the film, but I recall Pauline giggling nervously several times during the more outrageous scenes. She never wrote about the picture, but I’m told that in a later interview she said watching it was like a bus tour of hell. Agreed.

Pasolini at the tomb of Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci, 1970

Maria Callas in Pasolini’s Medea, 1969; the two during filming in Turkey; and in Monaco for the film’s opening, 1970

Pasolini in the 1960s; John Waters at Pasolini’s tomb

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