Pier Paolo Pasolini: The Poet of Contamination: Porcile Review - NP Approved

Porcile (1969)

Cast: Pierre Clémenti, Jean-Pierre Léaud, Alberto Lionello
Director: Pier Paolo Pasolini
Country: Italy | France
Genre: Drama
Official Site: Here

Editor’s Notes: The following review is part of our coverage for TIFF’s Pier Paolo Pasolini: The Poet of Contamination which runs from March 8th to April 12th at TIFF Bell Lightbox. For more information on upcoming TIFF film series visit http://tiff.net and follow TIFF on Twitter at @TIFF_NET.

Cast out the rich and powerful liars, opportunists and all varieties of swine in the world to be eaten and ultimately prove useful as nothing more than nutrition for the genuine and righteous. Pasolini takes us into an industrial hog farm with all of its daily filth and ugliness, traits that civilized societies go to great lengths to conceal as older generations live in a perpetual cycle of having the wrong priorities and possessing outmoded ideals. The rich and bourgeoisie of Porcile live in mansions far off on the horizon while the poor live on the black rocky slopes of an active volcano subsisting on butterflies, beautiful castoffs that got lost on their way back to the flower rich lands of the upper class.

The rich and bourgeoisie of Porcile live in mansions far off on the horizon while the poor live on the black rocky slopes of an active volcano subsisting on butterflies, beautiful castoffs that got lost on their way back to the flower rich lands of the upper class.

A young man born into the black lands of hardship and sulfur looks off into the dunes and sees a Seventh Seal procession reminding him of the certainty of his death. The privileged whistle while they admire works of art on their wall and worship comfortable gods, both luxuries that only the affluent have the time or resources to entertain. Inside the “Italianized villa” on the horizon, Jean-Pierre Leaud is engaged in a Godardian display of bourgeoisie intellectualism, oblivious to the games of savage survival that are carrying on off past the horizon while he is afforded the comfort to make his ideals known by pissing on the Berlin wall.

Poor damned souls die naked among the black lava stone, brutally beaten and shot while the rich eat in grand halls filled with unappreciated intricacies that adorn every surface with impractical exhibitions of wealth. It takes the young intellectuals a significant portion of the film’s runtime to get from their extravagant dining halls to the front door, passing through vast corridors of lavish columns. Primitive forms of crucifixion are taking place on the prehistoric slopes of the poverty stricken. A messianic figure laments the course of his life and confesses to the killing of his father, the eating of human flesh, and the quiver of joy that only comes with sexual acts that the poor are secretly taught to demonize out of the self-interest driven coercion of the affluent.

While Pasolini’s poetic metaphors will not all make themselves immediately apparent when viewing Porcile, his ideologies and playful sense of satire are abundantly clear. 

While Pasolini’s poetic metaphors will not all make themselves immediately apparent when viewing Porcile, his ideologies and playful sense of satire are abundantly clear. There are many groups that have been assigned the label of “pig” and didn’t deserve it and other pigs that avoided their warranted label through acts of barbarism and intimidation. Whoever the pigs are, in Pasolini’s world the subversives and undesirables that find themselves in the world of the rich will eventually find themselves in the belly of those pigs so the rest of high society can fatten their bellies and engage in acts of cannibalism by proxy. It still seems like it would be more desirable to live in the mansions on the horizon despite its populace of murderers, perverts, and wannabe cannibals; these lava rocks are poky and hot.