19 Oct 2009

The Ashes of Pasolini by Alfredo Jaar in Rotterdam

As from 8 October 2009, Sculpture International Rotterdam has a cinema at Coolsingel 47. For three months, films by a leading artist will be shown. For the entire month of October, the film is The Ashes of Pasolini by Alfredo Jaar (Chile, 1956). The cinema is open from Tuesday to Sunday and admission is free.

The Ashes of Pasolini is still on view at the Venice Biennale, and SIR showed this film during the performance programme When the Lightness of Poetry, organised by SIR in the final week of September. SIR wants to offer all of Rotterdam the opportunity to see this remarkable 38-minute film by Alfredo Jaar. The Ashes of Pasolini shows Jaar's belief in the relationship between ethics and aesthetics, in which a society takes responsibility for its culture in an active and social manner.

CULTURAL REPRESSION
At first sight, the film is about the life and the possibly politically motivated murder of film director Pier Paolo Pasolini. It is a passionate indictment of political and cultural repression, past and present. In the current political climate in Europe, which has shifted so far to the right, Alfredo Jaar's message with his portrait of Pasolini is of the highest importance.

'I will present a short film entitled The Ashes of Pasolini. It is a modest film about the death of an extraordinary intellectual.
It is mostly based on documentary material discovered after 1975, the year of his death, and before. As you know, it is still unclear who killed him. But for me, it has always been clear why: it was because of fear. Fear of his voice, fear of his life style, fear of his ideas, fear of his opinions, fear of his intellect. He was the totally complete intellectual: a filmmaker, a poet, a writer, a journalist, a critic, a polemist. He was totally involved in the cultural and political life of his time. As an artist he took risks, broke the rules, he created his own rules. Pasolini wrote one of the most beautiful poems of the 20th century titled The Ashes of Gramsci (2005), a eulogy to another great Italian thinker, Antonio Gramsci. The title of my film is based on this poem by Pasolini but I chose it to write a eulogy to Pasolini himself. In these dark times in which Italy finds itself, Pasolini's voice is sorely missed.'[...] Alfredo Jaar