Pasolini: Porcile (Pigsty) (1969)

None of Pasolini’s films play so parsimoniously to his strengths as Pigsty – it’s equally poetic, cinematic and schematic, refusing to draw any distinctions between his vocations as writer, director and theorist. In part, that’s because it occupies a pivotal position in his career – it was his last original screenplay, and the last film before his literary adaptations of the 1970s. At the same time, it culminated the formal experimentation of his earlier work, to the extent that it plays as a piece of criticism as much as cinema – specifically, as an experiment in theorising, through cinema, how cinema might transform bourgeois canons of literature and language, by dialectically incorporating two quite different narratives and worlds. The first is silent, primordial and mercurial, following a young man through a volcanic waste, where he gradually turns to rape, pillage and cannibalism for survival and, eventually, for pleasure. The second is clotted with speech and symmetrical compositions, following another young man who turns to bestiality to flee his bourgeois father’s business negotiations with an ex-Nazi. As might be expected, a great deal of the film’s beauty and ingenuity comes from the transition between these two registers, especially the way Pasolini cuts between the ritualistic phonemes of the first world and the denuded, mechanical speech of the second. In both cases, there’s a haunting sense that language has been hollowed out by visuality, whether through the ingenious compositions of the first world, which tap into the same premythological flux as Medea and Oedipus Rex, or the hyper-conventional compositions of the second world, which overwhelm bourgeois conversation with the cinematic structures that are supposed to to support it. As they're visually eroded, these primal tics and bourgeois flourishes converge on something like a class molecule, the smallest possible complex of class allegiance or anatagonism, dynamic and synaesthetic enough to ensure that it can only be heard at the fleeting interface between visual regimes, and can only be seen at the fleeting interface between sonic regimes. In other words, a unit of measurement that can only emerge once bourgeois conversationalists step into the pigpen and concede that they can speak to swine - or once pigs themselves start to converse with industralists. In either case, it's a grotesque, hilarious recipe for how Pasolini might mix cinema and literature most effectively, or dialectically, over the next decade – namely, by treating every utterance hallowed by bourgeois taste as a dark comedy, drawing out its hidden horrors in hope of a happier ending to history than its current horizons allow.