Views from the Avant-Garde - Pier Paolo Pasolini and Apichatpong Weerasethakul

I saw the first and second programs of this year's Views from the Avant-Garde section of the NYFF. La Rabbia di Pasolini (above left) is a fascinating recreation of a film that Pier Paolo Pasolini made in 1962-63 following completion of his first two films, Accatone and Mamma Roma. Pasolini created a feature-length political essay film using the newsreel archives of Italian documentary company Mondo Libero and other sources. Against Pasolini's wishes this was cut to 50 minutes and paired with an extreme right-wing documentary by Giovanni Guareschi. Giuseppe Bertolucci has made an attempt to recreate the missing footage using the same archives and Pasolini's original notes, allowing us to see both the surviving portion and the circumstances surrounding its making. Pasolini's radical vision of historic events from the postwar period up to the early 60s (wars, postcolonial transformations, the distractions of celebrity) is scored to Albinoni's mournful Adagio and accompanied by a fiercely angry poetic commentary that gives us the essence of Pasolini's worldview. After the original La Rabbia, Bertolucci presents some newsreel clips that show the extreme hostility and homophobia that Pasolini provoked in his time. This fascinating context doesn't diminish the power of Pasolini's film but serves to illuminate it.

Apichatpong (Joe) Weerasethakul's A Letter to Uncle Boonmee (above center) may be, frame for frame, the most beautiful film I've seen yet in the festival. This 17-minute digital video short, to quote from Joe's program notes, "is part of the multi-platform Primitive project which focuses on a concept of remembrance and extinction set in the northeast of Thailand. Boonmee is the main character of the feature film of the project. This short film is a personal letter describing my Nabua to Uncle Boonmee. The film comprises of shots of house interiors in the evening. The houses are all deserted except for one, where there is a group of young soldiers, played by some teens of Nabua. Two of them impersonate me by narrating the film."

The repetition of the narration follows the pattern of the doubled or split narrative of his last three features, while looking ahead to the themes of his next feature. The slow, graceful camera movements accompanied by a slightly ominous, droning score, the exquisite textures of light and shadow on various objects, give a sense of exploration, of haunted memories. The result is a profoundly mysterious beauty, a mix of narrative and abstraction, that is the hallmark of Joe's cinema. I can't wait to see his next feature.