Close Up

7 January 2018: Take Two: La Ricotta / La Grande Bouffe

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La Ricotta

Pier Paolo Pasolini
1963 | 35 min | B/W & Colour | Digital

“For his contribution to the omnibus film RoGoPaG – comprised of episodes by himself, Rossellini, Godard and Ugo Gregoretti – Pasolini fashioned an ingenious fable that is both a satire on filmmaking and a tribute to Italian Mannerist painting. Although Orson Welles stars as a director filming the crucifixion, the real protagonist is an unassuming middle-aged man working as an extra to feed his family. The extraordinary meeting of three worlds – high art, moviemaking and all-too-real poverty – leads to a collision with tragicomic consequences, a “collage,” as Pasolini called it, that allows him to effectively critique the distance between ethics and aesthetics.” – Harvard Film Archive

La Grande Bouffe
Marco Ferrreri
1973 | 130 min | Colour | Digital

“Four tired-of-life middle-aged men – Mastroianni’s randy airplane pilot, Michel Piccoli’s gassy television producer, Philippe Noiret’s Oedipal judge, and Ugo Tognazzi’s Brando-impersonating chef – convene at an opulent Parisian villa for a gut-busting, nihilistic orgy of food and sex. Joined by three prostitutes and a kinky schoolteacher, the quartet gorge themselves silly on elaborately prepared feasts, make love anywhere and everywhere, and sometimes combine the two pursuits – all in the name of hedonistic self-destruction. Shocking, subversive, and scatological, this savage satire of bourgeois excess is the most outrageous act of gastronomic grotesquerie ever perpetrated on screen.” – Film Society of Lincoln Center