Watch Pigsty For Free

It's easily one of the freshest, sharpest and most enjoyable films of this year.

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

I enjoyed watching this film and would recommend other to give it a try , (as I am) but this movie, although enjoyable to watch due to the better than average acting fails to add anything new to its storyline that is all too familiar to these types of movies.

I didn’t really have many expectations going into the movie (good or bad), but I actually really enjoyed it. I really liked the characters and the banter between them.

This movie is a testament to the power of poetry and its capacity to dwarf the medium of cinema. Pasolini merges the rites of passage towards 'bildung', {German concept for the development of civilizing Culture}, using five separate themes; - the immature rapport between a wealthy, young bourgeois couple, {named Julian and Ida}, the dilemma of Julian's parents, who desire the union, {it would be materially beneficial}, and the contrasting styles of two German plutocrats, - all this Pasolini combines and contrasts with the historical Italian vagabond life of a countryside bandit , circa the early 1500's, armed with a musket, roving the barren hilly escarpment in the Pompeian district and preying on unarmed, vulnerable Christian pilgrims on their way to Rome.Julian and Ida play at being in love - but their inexperience leads them to compromise reality with their love of words. Julian is a spoilt young man who has been infantilized by his doting mother, who in her ensuing dialogue with Ida reveals herself to be totally blind to her son's character, believing instead that Julian has all the laudable attributes of a good German. The narrative flow concerning this German family, shot as an interior with much opulence, antique furniture and Renaissance paintings, in enormous palatial rooms, which as the story moves forward, is intercut with desolate scenic waste as the vagabond displays primitive savagery, in killing, dismembering and cannibalizing his victims. These scenes are in a landscape that is evocatively lyrical and empty of civilization {that is apart from the hymns which are beautifully chanted by the pilgrims on their way to destruction}.In a parody of Godard and Truffaut, it soon becomes obvious that the love of the two 'pretty young things' is doomed to fail {as the barrier that they set up between each other with meaningless words becomes insurmountable}. The movie now shifts into its essential focus. The two plutocrats, the one, being Julian's father Herr Klotz, a German word for 'idiot' or blockhead, and the other, Herr Herdhitze, meaning 'hot fire' {possibly a reference to the exterminating ovens}, square up as two contrasting sides of the German psyche. Klotz, a humanist, is a cultivated man with a sense of cynicism and an appreciation of the accurate satirical art works of George Grosz - he sees himself depicted by Grosz sitting in a café with a sexy young secretary on his lap, cigar in his mouth and a piggish face - he also refers to Brecht's championship of the workers. Herdhitze, a technocrat, on the other hand, refers to himself as a man of science, who despises individuality, and wants to convert all the impoverished farmers to technicians - he has no soul at all.The two men face off with the core of the German problem - their love of the meat of the pig. Their dialogue .... Klotz - 'the Germans love their sausage' to which Herdhitze replies 'shit' Klotz 'but they do defecate a lot'. The ironic impasse between the two Nazis is whether Jews are pigs or not - with the added Surreal contradiction of, if the Jews are pigs why do the Germans love their pork. and why do they grunt like pigs?The year is 1959, in the German quest for an economic miracle, questions of Jews and culture are easily overcome, and the two plutocrats combine forces, in the pursuit of their worship of material wealth. Meanwhile Julian has resolved his confusion, and sacrifices himself to the totem of the pig, by going to the German Temple - the Pigsty - and there offers himself as an anointed meal to the pigsPasolini has wrought a great work of Art that might have been an Epic Poem or a great novel or a great Painting like Picasso's 'Guernica' or Goya's 'Atrocities of War'. He certainly has no sympathy whatsoever for the Nazi German and his god 'The Pig'. This is a difficult movie to digest, but it's rationale is crystal clear. If you are interested in the History of the Intellect, then this movie is unmissable.

So instead of having a party and drinking and such, I thought I'd see in the new year by watching two offerings from Pasolini, Le Mura di Sana / The Walls of Sana'a (1964) and Porcile (1969). There are DVD versions out there which have scenes from Porcile in the wrong order, so, at the time of writing, if you want to see Porcile properly you have to have the Region 2 UK Tartan Pasolini box-set. Porcile, I will say, is a great film. There are two stories that are played alongside each other. Pierre Clémenti is a... well... who knows, a sprite perhaps, in a barbarous medieval setting. It's clear Pasolini has chosen him because he has a hard-on for him, he looks like he's come straight out of a Caravaggio painting. Our sprite and some buddies run around the black slopes of Etna being mad, it's very entertaining, and almost wordless. You can't really believe what you're seeing, it appears that Etna is actually active when they're on it, there is black smoke spewing forth, and the actors run past the most awesomely evil sulphurous cave you've ever seen. So you get to see some fornication, cannibalism, volcanism, and our sprite throwing a human head into the aforementioned evil hole. It's the most purely primal thing I've ever seen, and I've watched Matthew Barney films.The other half of the movie is set in an Italianate villa in Germany, it concerns on the one hand Mr Klotz and Mr Herdhitze, two industrialists vying with each other for superiority, and on the other hand Julian (playde by Jean-Pierre Léaud), Herr Klotz's son. Julian is portrayed as withdrawing from the human race almost entirely, this is shown to be down to his parents, who self-describe themselves as the type of people who would be painted as pigs by George Grosz, an elitist, although entirely accurate and most wondrous piece of scriptwriting. Julian has no concept of the joy of living or of functional human relationships at all, and so this child of the rich takes to copulating with pigs. Who can blame him as he has only the example of his parents' ruinous and obscure preoccupations, specifically the pursuit of wealth. At one point Julian describes a dream where he walks along a road searching for something at night, the road is filled with shining puddles, and then a little piglet comes a long and playfully bites four of his fingers off, and it doesn't hurt, they come off, as if they were made of rubber. At one point Julian's mother and his girlfriend stand opposite one another describing him, as if he were two completely separate people. And yet he's both. This shows how ideology and prejudice only allow you to see someone, as if through murky water.

Perhaps Pasolini's most complex and difficult film, a two-strand tale about firstly the son of a wealthy industrialist who likes having sex with pigs, and secondly a medieval cannibal whose motto is "I killed my father, I ate human flesh, and I quiver with joy." At first, the two tales appear to have little relation with one another, other than a shared focus on extremely transgressive desires. But on closer inspection, the cannibal seems to be the dream Id of the son of the bourgeoisie, and the mythic tale operates in the subconscious of the contemporary one.The style of the film is very cryptic and deliberately unapproachable but there is method in Pasolini's madness. The industrialist and his rival are comic figures of monstrous proportion, and seem to represent the old-style Capitalism, with its factories blotting the landscape of Western cities, and the new Capitalism, whose factories are out-of-site in some third world clime. The second capitalism is equated with Nazi-ism, and an uneasy truce is reached between the two faces of Capitol. It is in that truce that Pasolini seems to be suggesting that those of us in Western societies live our consumer lives. Probably his second bleakest film, after of course Salo.

Porcile is one of those films that gets under your skin, and you're not sure why. The storyline unfolds in a style that is typically atypical of Pasolini; the tale of a college-aged son of a former Nazi isolating himself from everyone else (while encountering feelings that lend the film its title) is intertwined with that of a cannibalistic hermit from the Middle Ages. What results is a parallelistic criticism of modern society, not unlike Pasolini's earlier Teorema. The ending, which leaves an impact (although the actions take place off camera), is understated but undeniably chilling. Overall: 9/10