Don't Pas(olini) This One By!

As foretold in March, today is the day that Criterion's great big beautiful boxed-set of Pier Paolo Pasolini movies hits store shelves! You can buy it here if you haven't already (or maybe wait a week and buy it in July when Barnes & Noble has their big biannual Criterion sale). This set contains nine of Pasolini's films -- Accattone, Mamma Roma, Love Meetings, The Gospel According to Matthew, The Hawks and the Sparrows, Oedipus Rex, Teorema, Porcile, and Medea -- and is chockful of extras otherwise. I'll re-share the full details for the set after the jump...

One of the most original and controversial thinkers of the twentieth century, Italian polymath Pier Paolo Pasolini embodied a multitude of often seemingly contradictory ideologies and identities—and he expressed them all in his provocative, lyrical, and indelible films. Relentlessly concerned with society’s downtrodden and marginalized, he elevated pimps, hustlers, sex workers, and vagabonds to the realm of saints, while depicting actual saints with a radical earthiness. Traversing the sacred and the profane, the ancient and the modern, the mythic and the personal, the nine uncompromising, often scandal-inciting features he made in the 1960s still stand—on this, the 101st anniversary of his birth—as a monument to his daring vision of cinema as a form of resistance.

NINE-BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION

COLLECTOR’S SET FEATURES

Nine feature films: Accattone, Mamma Roma, Love Meetings, The Gospel According to Matthew, The Hawks and the Sparrows, Oedipus Rex, Teorema, Porcile, and Medea
New 4K digital restorations of seven films and 2K digital restorations of Teorema and Medea, with uncompressed monaural soundtracks
Two shorts made by director Pier Paolo Pasolini for anthology films: La ricotta (1963) and The Sequence of the Paper Flower (1969)
Two documentaries made by Pasolini during his travels
New program on Pasolini’s visual style as told through his personal writing, narrated by actor Tilda Swinton and writer Rachel Kushner
Audio commentaries on Accattone and Teorema
Documentaries on Pasolini’s life and career featuring archival interviews with the director and his close collaborators
Episode from 1966 of the French television program Cinéastes de notre temps
Interviews with filmmakers and scholars
Trailers
New English subtitle translations
PLUS: Deluxe packaging, including a 100-page book featuring an essay and notes on the films by critic James Quandt, and writings and drawings by Pasolini