Pier Paolo Pasolini

Teorema

Teorema

One of the iconoclastic Pier Paolo Pasolini’s most radical provocations finds the auteur moving beyond the poetic, proletarian earthiness that first won him renown and notoriety with a coolly cryptic exploration of bourgeois spiritual emptiness. Terence Stamp stars as the mysterious stranger—perhaps an angel, perhaps a devil—who, one by one, seduces the members of a wealthy Milanese family (including European cinema icons Silvana Mangano, Massimo Girotti, Laura Betti, and Anne Wiazemsky), precipitating an existential crisis in each of their lives. Unfolding nearly wordlessly in a procession of sacred and profane images, this tantalizing metaphysical riddle—blocked from exhibition by the Catholic Church for degeneracy—is at once a blistering Marxist treatise on sex, religion, and art and a primal scream into the void.

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Film Info

  • Italy
  • 1968
  • 98 minutes
  • Color
  • 1.85:1
  • Italian
  • Spine #1013

Special Features

  • New, restored 4K digital transfer, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray
  • Alternate English-dubbed soundtrack featuring the voices of actor Terence Stamp and others
  • Audio commentary from 2007 featuring Robert S. C. Gordon, author of Pasolini: Forms of Subjectivity
  • Introduction by director Pier Paolo Pasolini from 1969
  • Interview from 2007 with Stamp
  • New interview with John David Rhodes, author of Stupendous, Miserable City: Pasolini’s Rome
  • New English subtitle translation
  • PLUS: An essay by film scholar James Quandt

New cover by Nessim Higson

Purchase Options

Special Features

  • New, restored 4K digital transfer, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray
  • Alternate English-dubbed soundtrack featuring the voices of actor Terence Stamp and others
  • Audio commentary from 2007 featuring Robert S. C. Gordon, author of Pasolini: Forms of Subjectivity
  • Introduction by director Pier Paolo Pasolini from 1969
  • Interview from 2007 with Stamp
  • New interview with John David Rhodes, author of Stupendous, Miserable City: Pasolini’s Rome
  • New English subtitle translation
  • PLUS: An essay by film scholar James Quandt

New cover by Nessim Higson

Teorema
Cast
Terence Stamp
The guest
Silvana Mangano
Lucia
Massimo Girotti
Paolo
Anne Wiazemsky
Odetta
Laura Betti
Emilia
Andrés José Cruz Soublette
Pietro
Ninetto Davoli
Angelino, the postman
Credits
Director
Pier Paolo Pasolini
Written by
Pier Paolo Pasolini
Produced by
Franco Rossellini
Produced by
Manolo Bolognini
Director of photography
Giuseppe Ruzzolini
Music by
Ennio Morricone
Edited by
Nino Baragli
Art direction by
Luciano Puccini
Costumes by
Marcella De Marchis
Production director
Paolo Frascà

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From The Current

Teorema: Just a Boy
Teorema: Just a Boy

Pier Paolo Pasolini’s seemingly irreconcilable allegiances to Marx, Freud, and Jesus Christ come to the fore in this radical provocation, which marks the midway point of the polymathic artist’s filmmaking career.

By James Quandt

Essays — Feb 18, 2020
Rachel Kushner’s Top 10
Rachel Kushner’s Top 10

The author of The Mars Room and The Flamethrowers shares a selection of her favorite films, including masterworks by Altman, Sembène, and Pasolini.

— May 20, 2021

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Pier Paolo Pasolini

Writer, Director

Pier Paolo Pasolini
Pier Paolo Pasolini

Pier Paolo Pasolini’s ability to simultaneously embrace conflicting philosophies—he was both a Catholic and a Marxist; a modern-minded, openly gay man who looked to the distant past for inspiration and comfort; a staunch leftist who at one point in the late sixties infamously spoke out against left-wing student protests (sympathizing instead with the working-class police)—was matched by the multifariousness of his professional life, as a filmmaker, poet, journalist, novelist, playwright, painter, actor, and all-around intellectual public figure. What he is best known for, however, is undoubtedly his subversive body of film work. He was a student of the written word, and among his earliest movie jobs was writing additional dialogue for Federico Fellini’s Nights of Cabiria (1957). Soon he was directing his first film, Accattone (1961), a tale of street crime whose style and content greatly influenced the debut feature of his friend Bernardo Bertolucci, La commare secca (1962), for which Pasolini also supplied the original story. The outspoken and always political Pasolini’s films became increasingly scandalous—even, to some minds, blasphemous—from the gritty reimagining of the Christ story The Gospel According to St. Matthew (1964) to the bawdy medieval tales in his Trilogy of Life (1971–1974). Tragically, Pasolini was found brutally murdered weeks before the release of his final work, the grotesque, Marquis de Sade–derived Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975), still one of the world’s most controversial films.

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