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Pier Paolo Pasolini - the filmmaker, poet, sentimental leftist, and transgressive legend - lived a life marked by curious contradiction and unimpeachable integrity. Sculpted by a nomadic Italian childhood filled with religion, war, Socialism, Facism, and run-ins with the law, Pasolini reconceived, in a prodigious obsessive body of remarkably diverse work, the entire patrimony of post-WWII-Italy as a personal mythology refracted by the urgent demands of modern continental life and contemporary politics in an age of extremes.
Beginning with his first film, Accatone (1961), Pasolini worked in an era in which avant-garde artistic gestures felt still truly dangerous, in which artists retained the power to shock, and in which the imposition of a personal artistic vision felt still like a radical, rather than narcissistic, act. Pasolini made the most of that power, and has become in the decades since an object of personal obsession for thousands of contemporary artists, many of whom offer up here, in a showcase that is as much open-call tribute as it is narrow appreciation, their own idiosyncratic homage to a person who has had an outsized influence on a whole generation enamored of radical gestures in a skeptical, ironic age.
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