Latest news with #Pasolini
The Guardian
3 days ago
- Health
- The Guardian
‘Sometimes he cast spells over them': the raging beauty of Derek Jarman's black paintings
In recent years, the late artist and film-maker Derek Jarman has been celebrated for his house, Prospect Cottage in Kent, which was saved for the nation in 2020. Visitors flock to its extraordinary garden, in the shadow of Dungeness nuclear power station, in search of solace and relaxation. Yet focusing on this artistic haven threatens to overshadow Jarman's actual work, which was far from tranquil and domestic, and often angry, dark and disturbing. Two examples of this more challenging side of Jarman's output are about to resurface. The first is the publication of a treatment for an unfinished film called The Assassination of Pier Paolo Pasolini in the Garden of Earthly Delights, which Jarman wrote in 1984 as he was struggling to get his film Caravaggio made. Like Jarman, Pasolini was a queer film-maker (and writer) whose work often expressed a cri de coeur against political and sexual repression. 'I think Derek related to Pasolini because he carved his own path and made films in a very singular, distinctive way,' says Tony Peake, Jarman's biographer. 'He was also someone who stuck his neck out.' Pasolini was murdered aged 53 in November 1975, three weeks before the release of his final film Salò, an indictment of fascism and a gruelling depiction of its sadism. A 17-year-old rent boy called Giuseppe Pelosi confessed to killing Pasolini after the director picked him up, and it's this interpretation that Jarman riffs on in his film treatment, a vision of decadence and gay desire leading to doom, inspired by Hieronymus Bosch's painting, which Jarman saw in the Prado in Madrid. Yet since Jarman's death at 52 in 1994, new evidence has come to light suggesting that Pasolini, an outspoken Marxist who often wrote newspaper articles excoriating the Italian government, was killed by a far-right terrorist group working with the tacit approval of the secret services, a possibility Olivia Laing imagines in their compelling forthcoming novel, The Silver Book. Pelosi retracted his confession in 2005 and it's hard to believe that a single teenager could be responsible for the violence that Pasolini suffered in his final moments. He was run over several times by his car and his testicles were crushed, probably with an iron bar. Though Jarman wasn't aware of these horrors, there were plenty of others that oppressed him. On 22 December 1986, he was told that he had contracted HIV, a diagnosis that then meant certain death, and a stigma which Jarman defied by being open about his condition – kicking off the activism that coloured the final years of his life. The following year, the British government's campaign of leaflets and TV ads to warn the public about the danger of Aids brought forth a savage backlash against gay people, cruelly whipped up by the tabloid press. In response, Margaret Thatcher's government brought in Section 28, which banned local authorities from 'promoting' homosexuality and seemed to have work like Jarman's, with its unequivocally queer perspective, in its sights. 'All those things together felt particularly difficult and hostile,' Peake says. 'And he felt that very, very strongly.' Jarman's fear and fury came out in his 1987 film The Last of England, which depicts the nation as a crumbling, authoritarian dystopia, culminating in a scene in which a screaming Tilda Swinton, playing a bride whose husband has been killed, tears off her wedding dress. He also started to make a series of 'black paintings', which are going on show in chronological order at Amanda Wilkinson's gallery in London this week. Wilkinson says that Jarman's companion Keith Collins told her Jarman insisted on total privacy when making the paintings, 'and sometimes he used to cast spells over them. I don't know whether that's true or not.' Thick black oil paint is smeared on to the canvases, into which Jarman has embedded objects ranging from sticks, a pebble and a circular blade in Dead Souls Whisper, to toy cars, barbed wire and broken crockery in Home Counties. Some paintings include text that draws on the formidably well-read director's fascination with psychoanalysis, Shakespeare and alchemy; another, called Strange Meeting includes two wedding rings and a protractor, and alludes to the Wilfred Owen poem in which he descends to hell and meets the German soldier he killed in the first world war. Then, in a second tranche of black paintings, there's Dear God, whose chalked text, laid besides nails and a pressed flower, implores the deity to 'send me to hell. Yours sincerely, Derek Jarman.' The paintings' darkness speaks to a current moment in which LGBTQ+ rights are once again being assaulted around the world, as fair-weather corporate 'friends' take down their rainbow flags for fear of getting on the wrong side of Donald Trump and other authoritarians. It's also apt that the black paintings are being exhibited at the same time as the UK Aids Memorial Quilt being displayed in Tate Modern's Turbine Hall, each homemade panel commemorating a beloved friend, partner or family member whose life was prematurely claimed by the disease in the 80s and 90s. Yet for the modern viewer, there's also something galvanising about Jarman's resourcefulness as well as his rage, his protean creativity, and his determination to live his life and make his work regardless of the forces of repression ranged against it. 'He kept flying through the flak,' Peake says. 'He kept going forward and he was extremely unapologetic about who he was and what he liked to do. Shadowing his work is a great deal of distress and trauma, but you were very seldom aware of it in his company because he was immensely warm, positive and joyful.' Despite his work being unashamedly left-field, Jarman was also a prominent public figure in his later years, in a way that has few – if any – parallels now. I remember him being interviewed on Nicky Campbell's late night show on BBC Radio 1 in the early 90s when I was a teenager, around the time he published his journals, Modern Nature, which had caused tabloid outrage due to sections in which he described cruising on Hampstead Heath (Sun journalists expected gay men with Aids to become celibate). Jarman chose the Rolling Stones' You Can't Always Get What You Want for the DJ to play, but stressed that the title didn't express what he felt about his life. 'I did get what I wanted,' he said. 'Or most of it, anyway.' The Assassination of Pier Paolo Pasolini in the Garden of Earthly Delights is published by Pilot Press on 7 June, £12. The Black Paintings: A Chronology Part 1 are at Amanda Wilkinson, London, 6 June to 11 July. The UK Aids Memorial Quilt is at Tate Modern, London, from 12 to 16 June.
Canberra Times
25-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Canberra Times
In today's bitter and twisted world, Canberra is a mundane miracle
So for example when Pasolini's Jesus (played by an average-looking economics student and a communist activist Pasolini took a shine to) walks on the wind-whipped waters of the Sea of Galilee (a freshwater lake, and in the film looking eerily like Canberra's Lake Burley Griffin on a wintry day) he is not showing off at all. And our view of what he's doing is the amateurish sort of thing one of the amazed disciples might have captured with his iPhone.
The Guardian
10-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
The Return review – Juliette Binoche and Ralph Fiennes bring fierce class to elemental Odyssey adaptation
The film world is on tenterhooks for Christopher Nolan's forthcoming Imax-epic treatment of Homer's Odyssey, but Uberto Pasolini's fierce, raw drama of the poem's final sections, describing Odysseus's traumatised return to Ithaca after the sack of Troy, may well give Nolan something to live up to. Pasolini collaborated on the script with screenwriter John Collee, evidently developed from a draft playwright Edward Bond wrote in the 90s; among other things, this film deserves attention as the final work from Bond (who died in 2024). The Return is an elementally violent movie about PTSD, survivor guilt, abandonment, Freudian dysfunction and ruined masculinity. Juliette Binoche is the deserted queen Penelope, enigmatically reserving her opinions and dignity, refusing to believe the absent king is dead and declining to remarry as the island descends into lawlessness without a clear successor. Ralph Fiennes is Odysseus, enigmatically washed ashore semi-conscious in a way we associate in fact with late Shakespeare rather than Homer; he is reluctant to reveal himself, maybe through shame at having not returned before, at returning now in chaotic poverty and isolation and overwhelmed with his secret knowledge that the glories of war are a shameful delusion. Burdened with this terrible conviction, Odyssey infiltrates the squalid court in the Christ-like imposture of a tramp, though he has a pretty buff physique like a sunburnt, weather-beaten version of Leonardo's Vitruvian man. Charlie Plummer is Odysseus's angry and conflicted son Telemachus and Marwan Kenzari is Penelope's suitor Antinous. The movie is interestingly like one of the classical adaptations by Pasolini's un-related namesake Pier Paolo Pasolini (he is in fact the nephew of Luchino Visconti), a film like Pasolini's Medea or Oedipus; often, interestingly, it has the crowd-pleasing energy of Ridley Scott's Gladiator films. There is real sinew here. The Return is in UK and Irish cinemas from 11 April, and in Australian cinemas now.
The Guardian
28-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘At 60, the bulk of your life is lived. What's left now?' Ralph Fiennes and Uberto Pasolini on their ripped and radical take on The Odyssey
Uberto Pasolini likes to say he has been thinking about adapting The Odyssey for 30 years – 10 years longer than it took Odysseus to win the Trojan war. A nephew of the director Luchino Visconti, the 67-year-old Italian film-maker has lived in London for 50 years. Pasolini, who won a Bafta for producing The Full Monty, first approached Ralph Fiennes to play Odysseus in 2011, after the actor had made his directorial debut with Coriolanus, believing Fiennes might also be able to direct the film. The Guardian's journalism is independent. We will earn a commission if you buy something through an affiliate link. Learn more. They got as far as a location scout in Turkey, where Fiennes, then about to play Prospero in a Trevor Nunn production of The Tempest, practised his 'Such stuff as dreams are made on' speech in an abandoned outdoor amphitheatre at dusk. 'It was me and two goats,' recalls Pasolini over a video chat. 'I get the hair sticking up on the nape of my neck just thinking about it. It was amazing.' Wearing glasses and with a distinguished-looking beard, he comes across like a voluble Italian academic. Returning from the trip, Fiennes told him: 'I can't do both. I'd love to play Odysseus, but I can't also direct.' Undeterred, Pasolini says he kept on 'benignly nagging' the actor about the project whenever they met. Then, in 2022, as Fiennes toured England's regional theatres with a recital of TS Eliot's Four Quartets, Pasolini had dinner with the actor in Plymouth. They again talked about their planned adaptation of The Odyssey. Fiennes thought Pasolini should direct it himself. This time, it was the Italian's turn to demur. 'I can't direct it,' he replied. 'This is much bigger than anything else I've done.' But Fiennes, who had seen Pasolini's films Machan and Still Life, pushed him to take up the reins of the project. 'But what do we do about Penelope?' asked Pasolini. 'It should be Juliette, of course,' said Fiennes. 'Juliette' was Juliette Binoche, Fiennes' co-star in Anthony Minghella's Oscar-winning The English Patient and, before that, Wuthering Heights. 'We have a very deep friendship from those two parts, even though we don't spend that much screen time together,' says Fiennes, also over video call. He delivers thoughtful answers in his soft, limpid cadence, weirdly reminiscent of the fur on a peach, or maybe the plums Binoche fed him in The English Patient. An approach was made to the French actor, then she and Fiennes met in Georgia, where Fiennes was filming The Menu and Binoche was shooting The Staircase for HBO. Fiennes bought Binoche a copy of Emily Wilson's translation of The Odyssey; the pair took a selfie and sent it to Pasolini. Binoche was in. 'I was emotional, actually,' says Fiennes. 'Juliette has very strong instincts about what she will or won't do. So when she said yes, there was a wonderful sense of completion.' The finished film, The Return, was shot in two months in Corfu and just north of Rome for $20m – a fraction of the $250m Christopher Nolan has reportedly got to spend on his version of The Odyssey. The two adaptations are diametrically opposed. Featuring no gods, monsters, sirens, cyclops or six-headed monsters, Pasolini's film compacts the last nine books of Homer's epic poem into a film as lean and sinewy as its hero. Fiennes' Odysseus is a lost soul returning from 20 years of war, who washes up on the shore of his homeland, Ithaca, unrecognisable to his family, deeply ashamed of the 'butchery' he practised on the streets of Troy and carrying guilt that he returns alone, his men all dead. He seems to accept the defacement of his kingdom – where his wife, Penelope, is beset by suitors – almost as a punishment. This is a homecoming as if from the modern theatre of war, be it Vietnam or Ukraine. 'We did do one very specific thing with the script, which is taking out the gods,' says Pasolini, who commissioned a screenplay with the writers Edward Bond and John Collee that was steeped in modern accounts of war. 'It was important to us that the guilt that comes out of the wars and his dead companions, that pain, was his own doing.' It was all there in Homer's poem, where Odysseus cries 'as a woman weeps' when recounting the siege of Troy – but a line in which Fiennes' Odysseus describes Troy as a city that 'could not be conquered, only destroyed' was taken from an American captain describing the destruction of the city of Huế during the Vietnam war. That speech was pivotal for Fiennes, who loves playing men enmeshed in the workings of their own conscience, be they the adulterous Maurice Bendrix in The End of the Affair, or Cardinal Lawrence in Conclave. Even his monsters, like Coriolanus, are moral self-auditors. 'I am probably drawn to roles where [there is a] sort of undecided space in someone, where there's a question mark about who they are and what they're doing,' says the actor. He says his mother read him the adventures of Odysseus when he was a child, but he found the text, particularly in Wilson's translation, had grown with him when he returned to it. 'Is Odysseus good? Essentially, he's gone to war and done terrible things to people, and what I got from this script is he carries that on his shoulders. So, he's not overtly a Greek hero, but he's trying to claim something. I think the key for this is the scene where he talks around the fire about what it was to destroy Troy. I've not been through a war, obviously, but I was 60 when I did this,' says Fiennes, now 62. 'The bulk of your life is lived. I think a sense of fatigue with life, or a sense of: 'Well, what's left now?' comes to us as we get a bit older. 'What does it all mean?' You ask these bigger existential questions and I think all that bled into the imaginative leap I had to make. Even if you haven't been in wars, that sense of the weight of the past – you can intuit that better.' At the same time, there is an unmistakable buoyancy to Fiennes these days. The piercing, icy blue stare is still there, but the 'nimbus of depression and intensity around him' that the playwright David Hare detected 25 years ago appears to have lifted, as demonstrated by the show-stopping dance around a villa to the Rolling Stones' Emotional Rescue in Luca Gaudagnino's 2015 A Bigger Splash. Or his more recent rendition of the influencer Jools Lebron's viral TikTok 'demure' speech ('See my shirt? Only a little chichi out …') for CNN's New Year's Eve broadcast was one of the highlights of the recent Oscar season. 'I started off slightly uncomfortable about the way actors are expected to present themselves repeatedly on the red carpet and at events,' says Fiennes of the three-month stretch from the release of Conclave at the end of November to the Oscars ceremony this month. 'I think maybe I've just got a bit more relaxed about all that.' Italian directors seem to have acted as midwives to the newfound physicality of Fiennes's performances – after the sun-kissed luxuriance of Guadagnino's film, the lean sinew of Pasolini's, for which Fiennes underwent five months of physical training to get the muscular yet wiry frame of Odysseus. 'Uberto was very clear. He didn't want me to have a sort of bulked-up gym body,' says Fiennes, who told his personal trainer, Dan Avasilcai: 'He should look like a bit of old rope.' Then, two and a half months before shooting, he embarked on a regime of weight-training and running and a diet rich in proteins, complex carbohydrates and vegetables to lose pretty much all the fat he had on his body. Pasolini says: 'At the beginning, I have to confess, I was slightly suspicious that there was so much protein going in and so much exercise that we would have a body that looked exercised instead of a body that was consumed, a lived body. There is no gym in ancient Greece.' In Corfu, they found forests of olive trees 30 metres high, with trunks of dark bark, that spoke to the agedness they were after. 'We were very interested in the simplicity of the elements,' says the director. 'So, rain and water and sand and soil and fire and blood. More than anything else, it's a spiritual and psychological journey that he's been on. The physicality that Ralph was able to bring to the film is the physicality of somebody who has suffered and travelled and is scarred and is dried by the sun and consumed by living in a way that maybe 20 years ago would have been more difficult. The guilt and the responsibility of war would have sat on Ralph's shoulders and in his soul and in his eyes in a similar way. But I think we were lucky to make it when we did. He brings more to the role because of the life he's lived.' The scenes with Binoche, in particular, enjoy the resonance of a friendship that spans nearly three decades. Fiennes recalls the first scene they shot together on The Return, where Odysseus and Penelope first meet in a temple. Penelope seems to see through Odysseus's disguise a beggar, but does not confront her husband, so horrified is she by his self-dereliction. 'Juliette was so extraordinary,' he says. 'The depth of remorse and frustration and anguish she suggests were just extraordinary to witness.' They shot the scene over two nights. Pasolini says: 'There was a certain strange tension and emotion on set that had to do with the reconnection of these two individuals who had been away from one another for so long. There was a feeling on the set that there was something very, very special going on that went beyond the script.' And for Fiennes? 'I just found myself very moved,' he says. 'Juliette was so extraordinary in that scene, as it should be between actors when you are really open to one another's energies. But it moved me. It moved me as Odysseus and moved me as Ralph.' The Return is in UK and Irish cinemas from 11 April
See - Sada Elbalad
25-03-2025
- Entertainment
- See - Sada Elbalad
"Gulliver's Travels" TV Series Adaptation in Works
Yara Sameh Oscar-nominated multi-hyphenate Uberto Pasolini – who produced 'The Full Monty' and most recently directed 'The Return,' starring Ralph Fiennes as Odysseus – has embarked on a TV series adaptation of Jonathan Swift's classic satirical adventure 'Gulliver's Travels.' Prominent British writer William Ivory is writing the screenplay for the six-episode project on which Pasolini will serve as showrunner. The high-end show, now in the early stages, is being produced by Italy's Roberto Sessa and Germany's Jan Wünschmann. It will be unveiled to prospective broadcasters during the Series Mania festival in Lille. World sales will be jointly handled by Germany's Beta Film and ZDF Studios. 'What Gulliver allows us to do today is to make something really, really fun,' Pasolini said in a statement. But at the same time – very much like Swift did in his time – to talk about the world around us; to talk about politics; to talk about greed; to talk about the place of the Western man in the world as a whole; to talk about the relationship between man and nature,' he said. Pasolini developed Hallmark's 1996 'Gulliver's Travels' series that scored five Primetime Emmy wins. Though specifics on casting are premature, Pasolini said they have been looking at a British actor for the main role. But, he added, the story is 'telling you that you're entering into different worlds, different cultures, different atmospheres, and those will be reflected in the casting,' he said. Commenting on a recently announced Federation Studios 'Gulliver's Travels' TV series adaptation that is a contemporary reimagining penned by Emmy-winning writer Tom Bidwell titled 'The Gullivers' Pasolini said he did not think it 'makes sense' to bring 'Gulliver's Travels' 'into our contemporary world.' 'To me it feels like fear and not trusting that an audience will recognize themselves in someone who doesn't dress, or move, in worlds that they recognize,' he said. 'I don't think there's a big risk in there being two ['Gulliver's Travels'] projects on the market, especially since they are doing a contemporary adaptation,' said Jan Wünschmann, who heads Intaglio Films, which is a joint venture between Beta and ZDF Studios. Wünschmann said the next step now is to find the broadcasting partners for this project, adding that 'we've already started initial discussions with ZDF, which is our go-to partner.' They are eying an end of 2025 start of production date. Roberto Sessa, who heads Fremantle-owned Picomedia – which has a close rapport with Beta – noted that they are looking to mount the show as a 'potential European co-production,' but also 'have our eyes set on the U.S.' in terms of prospective partners. 'When Uberto first pitched it to me, I thought: 'This is going to be fun. Something for the whole family, that everyone can enjoy,' said Beta head of content and co-production Ferdinand Dohna, noting that 'it's subversive and kids love subversive stories.' Donha also pointed out that the 'Gulliver's Travels' book is still a global evergreen and that Pasolini's expertise, given his involvement in the Hallmark show, is a definite plus. read more New Tourism Route To Launch in Old Cairo Ahmed El Sakka-Led Play 'Sayidati Al Jamila' to Be Staged in KSA on Dec. 6 Mandy Moore Joins Season 2 of "Dr. Death" Anthology Series Don't Miss These Movies at 44th Cairo Int'l Film Festival Today Amr Diab to Headline KSA's MDLBEAST Soundstorm 2022 Festival Arts & Culture Mai Omar Stuns in Latest Instagram Photos Arts & Culture "The Flash" to End with Season 9 Arts & Culture Ministry of Culture Organizes four day Children's Film Festival Arts & Culture Canadian PM wishes Muslims Eid-al-Adha News Egypt confirms denial of airspace access to US B-52 bombers News Ayat Khaddoura's Final Video Captures Bombardment of Beit Lahia News Australia Fines Telegram $600,000 Over Terrorism, Child Abuse Content Lifestyle Pistachio and Raspberry Cheesecake Domes Recipe Videos & Features Bouchra Dahlab Crowned Miss Arab World 2025 .. Reem Ganzoury Wins Miss Arab Africa Title (VIDEO) News Ireland Replaces Former Israeli Embassy with Palestinian Museum News Israeli PM Diagnosed with Stage 3 Prostate Cancer Lifestyle Maguy Farah Reveals 2025 Expectations for Pisces News Prime Minister Moustafa Madbouly Inaugurates Two Indian Companies Arts & Culture New Archaeological Discovery from 26th Dynasty Uncovered in Karnak Temple
