Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922–1975) was one of the most important Italian intellectuals of the post–World War II era. An astonishing polymath—poet, novelist, literary critic, political polemicist, screenwriter, and film director—he exerted profound influence on Italian culture up to his untimely death at the age of fifty-three.
Join us on February 6th for a rare screening of Che cosa sono le nuvole? (What are clouds?), one of the six shorts featured in Capriccio all’italiana, directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini and starring Ninetto Davoli, Toto’ and Domenico Modugno. What are clouds? revolves around a performance of Shakespeare’s Othello as a marionette theater—with the marionettes played by actors on strings questioning both their roles and their actions, eventually rebelling against the narrative and the puppeteer.
Barth David Schwartz, author of Pasolini Requiem, an acclaimed book based on extensive interviews that chronicles the life of Pasolini, will comment the screening and provide a riveting account of the life and works of Pierpaolo Pasolini, one of the twentieth century’s most controversial, ever-present iconoclasts.
LOCATION
Embassy of Italy
3000 Whitehaven Street NW
Washington, DC 20008
Barth David Schwartz
On the evening of November 1, 1975, the night that Pier Paolo Pasolini was murdered on the Ostia beach outside Rome, Barth David Schwartz was a junior attorney working in a San Francisco law firm. Schwartz, who then did not know Italian, read of the murder in the local and national newspapers the next day. At the time, his knowledge of Pasolini was only that he was a filmmaker, though references in the obituaries made it clear that Pasolini was a polymath of importance and a key figure in the culture of post-World War II Europe. It was then that Schwartz began his ten-year research and writing project, which resulted in the 1992 publication of Pasolini Requiem, and shortly thereafter in its Dutch, Italian, and Swedish editions. In addition to his work on Pasolini, Schwartz was also the director of special projects at Scientific American, as well as the founding editor-in-chief of Scientific European. He received his BA (1969) from Harvard College, was a Rhodes Scholar (Magdalen College, Oxford, 1969), and received his JD (1974) from Yale Law School. He was also a visiting professor of journalism at the University of Missouri, the University of Tunis, and Indiana University, among other institutions, as well as a Fulbright fellow in journalism in Kuala Lumpur, where he was a financial and economic news division advisor to the Malaysian national press agency. His articles as a freelance journalist appeared in Town and Country, Travel and Leisure, the Wall Street Journal magazine, the San Francisco Chronicle Sunday magazine, the New York Times business section, the Christian Science Monitor, the New Republic, and Connoisseur, among others. He was also a contributing reporter from Rome for both the Time and The New York Times magazines.