acoolsha
Pier Paolo Pasolini
Porcile (The Pig Sty) 6 January 06
Section: pasolini
Categories: Film / in-a-cinema
A very funny and politically bold film with poetic and raw (as raw as flesh) dialogue sometimes cadenced and punctuated with a "hurrah!," usually by Jean-Pierre Léaud, like a cabaret theater, which draws attention — and a tension, like on the surface of a painting — to itself and keeps us conscious of the film: the opposite of escapist entertainment. The narrative takes place in Germany and involves elements of the bourgeoisie, including an industrialist who had been a Nazi during the war.
A good part of the film’s humor comes from the choice of names for the key characters, such as a Herr Klotz and Herr Herdhitze (Klotz usually means a block of wood and is related, via the Yiddish klots, to the English klutz; Herdhitze is a combination of the word Herd, meaning stove or hearth, and Hitze meaning heat, so: stove–heat). I can’t explain why Herdhitze was funny, it simply was, and increasingly so as Herr Herdhitze, with its alliteration, was repeated by some characters with the pathetic servility of those whose main joy in life is wallowing in their place within the status quo, in this pig sty, so to speak. On that list will be… all bourgeois politicians and most middle and upper managers. While trying to articulate the above I deepened my understanding of why the film is so amusing, it had humor in the sense of the release of a tension born of frustration at evil and stupidity. The humor is so stark and brazen, and at the expense of characters who so rightly deserve bearing its brunt, that it keeps on being funny.
- Title: Porcile (The Pig Sty)
- Directed by: Pier Paolo Pasolini
- Writing credits: Pier Paolo Pasolini
- Starring: Pierre Clémenti, Jean-Pierre Léaud, Alberto Lionello, Ugo Tognazzi, Anne Wiazemsky, Margarita Lozano, Marco Ferreri, Franco Citti, Ninetto Davoli
- Cinematography: Tonino Delli Colli, Armando Nannuzzi, Giuseppe Ruzzolini
- Year: 1969
- Cinema: Deutsches Filmmuseum, Frankfurt