The year 2025 marks the mournful fiftieth anniversary of the death of Pier Paolo Pasolini. After Pasolini’s murder on 2 November 1975, Jean-Paul Sartre wrote a passionate plea for the Italian filmmaker, writer and poet. In it, he warned against the posthumous moralisation and simplification of his oeuvre, which he considered a threat to the radical complexity of his work and his person. “Do not pass judgement on Pasolini,” he wrote, “do not render harmless what was never meant to be harmless.”
Teorema (1968) is a work that embodies this complexity par excellence. The film starts from a simple premise: a mysterious young man arrives at a bourgeois family in Milan, spends a short time with them, and departs as suddenly as he came. Each family member is touched by the elusive figure in a different way, and after his departure the family falls apart. Teorema can be seen at once as a political indictment, a mystical revelation, an erotic tale and a philosophical experiment. The film resists unambiguous interpretation. Pasolini called himself a pasticheur – someone who consciously brings together styles and elements from different sources. In contrast to the rationality and the artificial organic whole he associated with bourgeois culture, he chose instead to assemble fragments, objects and stylistic forms from here and there, in an attempt to evoke the clamour of the world. The film was promptly censored and criticised, but remains a focal point in Pasolini’s oeuvre.
The screening of Teorema is part of a broader focus on Pasolini’s work at the RITCS School of Arts in Brussels, and coincides with the launch of the Sabzian publication WHO IS ME, a text Pasolini wrote during a visit to the New York Film Festival in 1966. Shortly after his death, the document was found in his study: thirty-two typewritten sheets full of corrections and additions, described by Pasolini as a “bio-bibliographical poem”. In the text, he declares that he “no longer wishes to be read as a poet” and opts instead for “the language of film and of life as it presents itself”, although the text remains rich in poetic moments and intertextual references. In WHO IS ME, he also announces the story that two years later would become Teorema, both as a book and as a film. Sabzian now publishes the text for the first time in Dutch, in a translation and with an introduction by Piet Joostens.
The screening of Teorema will be preceded by Agnès Varda’s film Pier Paolo Pasolini (1967).
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