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Pasolini double Pigsty & Hawks and Sparrows on DVD in July

16 May 2012

Continuing their tribute to the great Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini (following releases earlier in the year of The Gospel according to Matthew & Accattone), Eureka Entertainment have announced they will be releasing two more typically provocative Pasolini films from the 1960s: Hawks and Sparrows, a political comedy starring Italian popular actor Totò and a Marxist talking crow(!), and Pigsty, a portrayal of bestiality, degradation, and bourgeois life circa 1969.

Pigsty (Porcile)

Decades on from its release, and featuring an all-star cast that includes Jean-Pierre Léaud, Anne Wiazemsky, Franco Citti, Pierre Clémenti, and Marco Ferreri, Pigsty (Porcile) remains one of Pier Paolo Pasolini's most controversial and wilfully provocative works – a deranged parody of cinema as revolutionary act.

It comprises parallel stories: (1) Clémenti and Citti as cannibalistic savages who rampage a world outside of any distinct time or place, and who push against the boundaries of human morality; (2) Godard-regulars Léaud and Wiazemsky as a romantically engaged couple in a contemporary Germany painted as a morass of industrialisation, fascist impulse, and bestial instincts.

Rivalled only by the director's Salò in its obsession with the politics of bourgeois degradation, Pigsty continues to challenge and enlarge the notions of what makes for "a political film" and what is meant by "a Pasolini film".

 

Pigsty will be released on UK DVD as part of the Masters of Cinema Series in a special DVD edition on the UK on 23rd July 2012 at the RRP of £16.34.

Featuring a new high-definition transfer in the film's original aspect ratio and newly translated optional English subtitles, the disc will have the following extra features:

  • Original Italian theatrical trailer;
  • Illustrated booklet featuring rare archival imagery, the words of Pasolini, and more!

Hawks and Sparrows (Uccellacci e uccellini)

One of the handful of films that found Pier Paolo Pasolini sustaining a merrier mode of cultural assault, Hawks and Sparrows (Uccellacci e uccellini) features Italy's popular comic actor Totò (known to cinephiles as the star of Roberto Rossellini's Dov'è la liberta...?) and Pasolini regular Ninetto Davoli in a picaresque fable that lampoons politics, religion, and the legacy of neorealism.

A crow gifted with the power of speech accompanies wandering duo Totò and Ninetto on a trail that leads to their roles as Franciscan friars who preach to the literal "hawks and sparrows", before returning in time to gaze upon slum-dwellers, Danteist dentists, itinerant actor-hippies, and, ultimately, the state of the modern world.

Featuring a score by the legendary Ennio Morricone, Pasolini's anarchic comedy remains a time-capsule of the giddy tensions torqued by the dawn of the late Sixties.

 

Hawks and Sparrows will be released on UK DVD as part of the Masters of Cinema Series on 23rd July 2012 at the RRP of £16.34.

Featuring a new high-definition transfer in the film's original aspect ratio and newly translated optional English subtitles and the following extras:

Original Italian theatrical trailer;

Illustrated booklet featuring rare archival imagery, the words of Pasolini, and more!