Noted Italian film critic and historian Gian-Piero Brunetta teaches at the University of Padua. He has written several books on Italian cinema including Cinema italiana tra le due guerre (1975) and Storia del cinema italiana dal 1945 agli anni ottanta (1979, reissued 1982). It is thanks to the efforts of Mr. Brunetta that we are able to show those rare Pasolini films included in tonight's program which are not in distribution in the U.S. With the exception of La terra vista dalla Luna, from Le Streghe, the films are presented in Italian without English subtitles.

La Terra vista dalla Luna
(The Earth as Seen from the Moon)
Pasolini's episode in the omnibus film, Le Streghe (The Witches), produced by Dino De Laurentiis; other episodes were directed by Visconti, Bolognini, Rossi and De Sica. Pasolini again features Totò and Ninetto Davoli (the team in The Hawks and the Sparrows) as an eccentric old widower and his half-wit son. They are visited by a deaf-mute beauty, Silvana Mangano, who sets about putting their squalid existence into domestic order. Filmed in fantastic colors which, apart from Davoli's green hair, reflect those Pasolini found in such impoverished seaside resort areas as Ostia, La Terra vista dalla Luna is a surrealist fable. Its characters, Pasolini notes, were not so much creations as exaggerations of what Pasolini saw in the clownish Toto and the “magical” Davoli.
• Directed and Written by Pier Paolo Pasolini. Photographed by Giuseppe Rotunno. With Totò, Ninetto Davoli, Silvana Mangano, Laura Betti. (1966, 30 mins, In Italian with English titles, 35mm, Color, Print from MGM/United Artists)

Che Cosa Sono le Nuvole?
(What Are the Clouds?)
Pasolini's segment of De Laurentiis' Capriccio all'Italiana again features Totò, along with other popular Italian comics chosen by Pasolini for their “plebeian quality.” The film draws on popular puppet theater in retelling the story of Othello using “human puppets”: Ninetto Davoli as Othello, Laura Betti as Desdemona, and Totò as Iago.
• Directed and Written by Pier Paolo Pasolini. Photographed by Tonino Delli Colli. With Totò, Franco Franchi, Ciccio Ingrassia, Ninetto Davoli, Laura Betti. (1966, 22 mins, In Italian, 35mm, Color)

Il Fiore di Carta
(Paper Flowers)
Pasolini's episode in the omnibus film, Amore e Rabbia (Love and Anger), to which Bertolucci, Godard, Bellocchio and Lizziani also contributed episodes. Based on the Gospel parable of “the innocent fig tree”--in which Christ curses the fig tree which has not yet produced its fruit because it is only March--Il Fiore de Campo concludes that “there are moments in history when one cannot be innocent...when not to be aware is to be guilty.” In this 12-minute segment, Ninetto Davoli is pictured walking up the Via Nazionale “without a thought in his head,” as world-wide events pass above him “like shadows.” Though God exhorts him to be aware, “like the fig tree he does not understand.” (Pasolini, in Oswald Stack's Pasolini on Pasolini)
• Directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini. Photographed by Giuseppe Ruzzolini. With Ninetto Davoli. (1967, 12 mins, In Italian, 35mm, Color)

Le Mura di Sano
(The Walls of Sano)
Pasolini made this documentary in Yemen before making Arabian Nights in 1974. (10 mins, In Italian)
• (Prints from Giuseppe Zigaina, Gian-Piero Brunetta and Cineteca Nazionale of Rome except where otherwise noted.)