Angels and demons

Diving into the filmic world of Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922-1975) leads to the discovery of angels and demons, saints and martyrs, and plenty of thieves who are often in cahoots with each other. If you’re a fan of the legendary filmmaker, whose death on a beach in Ostia has even been the subject of a film, and you’re wondering where he took inspiration for his one-of-a-kind ideas, you’ll find the start of an answer in an unexpected place: Monaco.

Guillaume de Sardes

At Villa Sauber to be precise, one of the two spaces belonging to the Nouveau Musée National de Monaco. Here, curator Guillaume de Sardes is staging a remarkable exhibition and a very thorough catalogue that establishes a dialogue between art and Pasolini’s cinema. The subject has been explored in Italy in the past and an exhibition in 2022 in Rome at the Galleria d’Arte Moderna even revealed the director’s painterly side.

Roberto Longhi

It’s worth saying that Pier Paolo studied art history with one of the most eminent specialists on the subject in Italy, Roberto Longhi. Renaissance painters form part of his vocabulary. The exhibition opens with a sequence from Mamma Roma (1962) in which a young man is lying down, tied to a wooden board.

Pier Paolo Pasolini

The angle of the shot of the figure is identical to the one used by Mantegna (1431-1506) in his “Lamentation of Christ”. In Accatone (1961) the young boy puts on a hat while playing that strangely resembles the one worn in “Portrait of a Young Man with a Book” by Bronzino (1503-1572). Clearly not all the artworks that served as sources of inspiration are here.

Pontormo/ La Ricotta

Pontormo

But Guillaume de Sardes has for example secured the loan of a Saint Sebastian by Pontormo (1494-1557) which looks like a youth who featured in the short film “La Ricotta” from 1963. You have to hold on to watch the scene from Salò in which a pure young blonde girl kneels, not far from copies of futurist canvases by Giacomo Balla.

Teorema/ Francis Bacon

Pieter Claesz

The curator found the original canvases, on display here. The link between the final scene of Teorema (1968), in which the great bourgeois character walks naked through the desert shouting at the top of his lungs, with a canvas by Francis Bacon showing a screaming pope, “Head”, works even better since in the same film two of the protagonists flick through the British painter’s catalogue raisonné.

Pier Paolo Pasolini

William Kentridge

William Kentridge

The other side of the exhibition demonstrates the fascination the great poet of moving images holds for other artists. There is a long list of thirty-odd names, not all equal in interest. The South African artist William Kentridge has erected a kind of giant mausoleum to him, designed in black and white, which shows him lying on the beach after his murder ( See here my last interview of William Kentridge).

Marlene Dumas

Marlene Dumas

Coincidentally, another South African, Marlene Dumas, portrays the filmmaker in a blurry diptych, almost liquified, along with his mother. The tribute is made explicit: it belongs to the series from 2014, “Great Men”, depicting figures persecuted for their homosexuality ( See here my interview of Marlene Dumas).

Jenny Holzer

And the American artist Jenny Holzer, who takes words from those she admires, has engraved four lines by the Italian on a marble bench. As a final bow: “Passive as a bird that sees all, in flight, and carries in its heart, rising in the sky, an unforgiving conscience.”

Francesco Vezzoli

Until 29 September 2024. www.nmnm.mc/