Adrift in Pasolini’s Rome

Pasolini and Crane both refer to practices of melding different styles and traditions in order to produce fresh and unusual aesthetic experiences. The discussion focused on the importance of physical locations and the specificity of geography in their work. Place was a heuristic for Pasolini’s practice and politics as it is for Cathy Lee Crane. The conversation also engaged with Pasolini’s concept of ‘Cinema of Poetry’ and the stylistic freedom and intensity that it proposes. It grounded the viewing of Crane’s film Pasolini’s Last Words on 26 September 2014 in the Pasolini retrospective at the Cinema Arsenal in the context of the Pasolini Roma exhibit at the Martin-Gropius-Bau.

Cathy Lee Crane has been making hybrid films on 16mm since 1994. Her first feature Pasolini’s Last Words (2012) was supported by a grant from the New York State Council on the Arts in 2010 and a 2009 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Film, and premiered at Festival du Nouveau Cinema in Montreal as a ‘gem of world cinema’. She received the prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship in 2013 for her lyrical re-combinations of archival and staged material. Currently she is associate professor in the Department of Cinema, Photography, and Media Arts at Ithaca College.

John David Rhodes is a university lecturer in film studies in the Department of Italian, University of Cambridge. His research focuses on cinema’s engagement with other aesthetic forms and on the mutual implication of theory and material history. He is he author of Stupendous, Miserable City: Pasolini’s Rome (2007) where he places the city of Rome at the center of this in-depth examination of the work of Pasolini.

Manuele Gragnolati (Oxford University/ICI Berlin) is professor of Italian at Oxford University and Fellow of Somerville College. His latest book is entitled Amor che move. Linguaggio del corpo e formal del desiderio in Dante, Pasolini e Morante (2013). He is the associate director of the ICI Berlin.