Other People’s Films
From the late 1950s, before he began making films but when he was already well-known as a poet, novelist and scriptwriter, right up to his death in 1975, Pier Paolo Pasolini wrote occasional film criticism for Italian newspapers and magazines, articles which are translated into English here for the first time. In his inimitably frank style, Pasolini describes his tastes as a film-goer but also his views as a public intellectual. He discusses both Italian cinema—from neo-realism (Rossellini, Visconti) to those who came in its wake (Fellini, Antonioni)—and foreign cinema (Truffaut, Eisenstein, even Stanley Kramer and Pillow Talk), with insightful comments ranging from behind-the-scenes peeks at the film production process to an ideological analysis of comedy in Italian film.