Pasolini’s Last Words

Part of the series
Pasolini: Politics & Poetry
Curated by Ara H. Merjian and Mila Tenaglia
On the 50th anniversary of the death of Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922-1975)

In conjunction with the exhibit
Pasolini: Durations

Screening
Pasolini’s Last Words
(2012, 61 min.)

Directed by
Cathy Lee Crane

Dialogues by
Pier Paolo Pasolini

Starring
Lee Delong, Bochay Drum, Amanda Setton

Introduction by the director followed by a poetry reading by
Stacy Szymaszek, author of The Pasolini Book (2022)

In ENGLISH

Pasolini’s Last Words is an elegiac essay that explores the year leading up to Pier Paolo Pasolini’s murder in 1975. Through staging scenes from his last, unfinished novel, to exploring his polemical essays, and his first and last film, this experimental biography documents the final words of one of the most important filmmakers of the 20th century.

Cathy Lee Crane is a filmmaker who has been charting a speculative history on film since 1994. She received the Guggenheim Fellowship (2013) for her lyrical re-combinations of archival and staged material. Her body of work enjoyed its first survey as part of American Original Now (2015) at the National Gallery of Art. Crane’s award-winning films –including experimental biographies Pasolini’s Last Words (2012), and Unoccupied Zone: The Impossible Life of Simone Weil (2006)– have screened at Viennale, San Francisco International Film Festival, Festival du Nouveau Cinema (Montreal), Cinematheque Francais, BFI, and Arsenal/Berlin and are distributed by Canyon Cinema, Lightcone, Video DataBank and Films Media Group. Her first feature-length fictional hybrid The Manhattan Front (2018) premiered at SFIndie Fest with a profile in Filmmaker Magazine.
​
Stacy Szymaszek is a poet, editor, and teacher whose work explores language, identity, and collective memory. Former Executive Director of The Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church (2007–2018), she is the author of several acclaimed books including The Pasolini Book (2022). Based in New York’s Hudson Valley, she continues to write, mentor emerging poets, and engage in projects connecting literature, ecology, and community.

Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimò presents Pasolini: Politics & Poetry, on the fiftieth anniversary of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s death. The artist endures as a figure of controversy and contradiction, yet this milestone demands more than commemoration: it calls for a critical interrogation of his literary and cinematic oeuvre—vast, fractured, and unruly—alongside the political and intellectual commitments that continue to resist facile categorization. Curated by Professor and author Ara H. Merjian and creative producer Mila Tenaglia, the program runs from November 3 to 14 and pursues a multidisciplinary engagement with Pasolini’s work, traversing the languages of music, cinema, theater, and scholarly inquiry. Rather than merely honoring his legacy, the initiative seeks to restore the vitality and provocation of his thought and poetics, with particular attention to how contemporary artists and scholars have reinterpreted, contested, and claimed his intellectual and artistic inheritance. Pasolini: Politics & Poetry extends beyond screenings of Pasolini’s films—drawn from cinetecas, the Criterion Collection, and the Archivi Luce—to embrace works by directors and filmmakers who have discovered in his vision a wellspring for creative dialogue. This convergence of past and present positions the initiative not as a nostalgic ritual but as a living encounter with one of the twentieth century’s most formidable intellectuals, enriched by performances, a video installation exhibition, conversations, and academic interventions. Pasolini’s death—among the most notorious and contested episodes in Italian history—was not simply the murder of a homosexual man, but an event in which politics, literature, and society collided in ways that remain unresolved.