Pasolini Conference at the "Swedish Institute"
Filminstitutet / Swedish Film Institute
Lecture by Erminia Passannanti
SYNOPSYS: TEOREMA.
SYNOPSYS: TEOREMA.
In 1968, after the success of Il Vangelo secondo Matteo (The Gospel according to St Matthew, 1964), another of Pasolini’s films, Teorema, came to ill fame. It featured as main character a disquieting young man who within a few days manages to seduce all the members of an apparently quiet bourgeois Italian family. The actor, Terence Stamp, was immediately believed to be suggestive of Christ.
Despite the film receiving the OCIS prize, on the 13th September 1968, the Catholic L’Osservatore Romano inflamed the controversy by stating that Teorema had an immoral plot and should be denied public exhibition. The CCC committee attributed an ‘E’ certificate (excluded to all) to Teorema for being ‘negative and even dangerous’. As a result, as soon as the film was screened in public cinema theaters, it obtained massive criticism from cultural policy-makers and was boycotted by conservatives Catholic activists. Following this course of action, Teorema was sequestered by the Rome Attorney’s office under the charge of ‘obscenity’.
Pasolini was finally cleared of all charges but Teorema remains pivotal of how Catholic critics tried to silence once again Pasolini’s counter-discourse on institutionalized religion and its effects on Italian mass society.
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In her lecture, Erminia Passannanti discusses the implications of Teorema’s cinematic treatment of the sacred within a secular post-Christian capitalist world, which at the time of Pasolini’s life was still remarkably controlled by the Vatican as an institution of power.
Despite the film receiving the OCIS prize, on the 13th September 1968, the Catholic L’Osservatore Romano inflamed the controversy by stating that Teorema had an immoral plot and should be denied public exhibition. The CCC committee attributed an ‘E’ certificate (excluded to all) to Teorema for being ‘negative and even dangerous’. As a result, as soon as the film was screened in public cinema theaters, it obtained massive criticism from cultural policy-makers and was boycotted by conservatives Catholic activists. Following this course of action, Teorema was sequestered by the Rome Attorney’s office under the charge of ‘obscenity’.
Pasolini was finally cleared of all charges but Teorema remains pivotal of how Catholic critics tried to silence once again Pasolini’s counter-discourse on institutionalized religion and its effects on Italian mass society.
---
In her lecture, Erminia Passannanti discusses the implications of Teorema’s cinematic treatment of the sacred within a secular post-Christian capitalist world, which at the time of Pasolini’s life was still remarkably controlled by the Vatican as an institution of power.
