Dr Ward Blanton from the Department of Religious Studies will be at the Institute of Contemporary Arts on Thursday 10 July as part of a panel to discuss Saint Paul and the Italian filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini’s politics and attitude to religion.
The event, entitled ‘A Visionary Rage: Pasolini’s Saint Paul’, will discuss and celebrate the publication of Saint Paul (Verso Books, 2014), to which Ward contributes, and includes a screening of Pasolini’s forensic dissection of the tragedy of human society and life La Rabbia (The Rage, 1963).
The book presents, in English translation, Pasolini’s screenplay for a life of Saint Paul, an unfilmed project that would have transposed the biblical Paul to a contemporary setting. Pasolini’s greatest achievement was his forceful, articulate, personal challenge to Church, state and religion in a country that had known fascism, was home to the Vatican and yet elected numbers of communist officials. His legacy is a sensational body of film and writing that goes to the very root of human life. His personality and intelligence still resonates vividly today, despite his brutal murder in 1975. His life of Christ film, The Gospel According to Saint Matthew (1964) is claimed by many as not only the greatest religious film ever made, but also as an exemplar of Marxist film-making.
For further details and to book, please see the webpage:
www.ica.org.uk/whats-on/visionary-rage-pasolinis-saint-paul