Love Meetings [Comizi d'amore] (1964, Pier Paolo Pasolini)

Tuesday 24th of June, 6:45pm in the Richard Hoggart Building Cinema

Join us on Tuesday 24th of June from 6:45pm (film starts at 7pm) for a screening of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Love Meetings [Comizi d’amore] (1964). The film is 1 hour 32 minutes long so the screening will end at around 8:30pm.

Rarely screened and often overshadowed by his later work, Love Meetings is a feature-length documentary in which Pasolini travels through a 1960s Italian society at odds with modernity, conducting conversations on love, sex, sex work, homosexuality and gender in a way which forces unassuming average Italians, intellectuals, teenagers, rural families, to confront where their instinctive opinions come from, and to imagine a world where alternatives beyond ingrained conformity are possible, naturalized ideas may actually be constructed, and ideas deemed deviant might not be. Pasolini acts like an impish though gracious anthropologist and appears to come from a different dimension to his interviewees, indirectly showing the audience that bourgeois morality is false and oppressively monolithic, a system of meaning from which the only derivable sense of self is an inauthentic one. An object of early cinema-verité, saturated with reactions ranging across embarrassment, discomfort, resentment, confusion, amusement and curiosity, it shows a culture where only what is seen and presented as true is believed, and where there is freedom in what isn’t being said.

For Eye for Film, Themroc writes:

The central problem with the documentary is that whilst the working class interviewees are happy to express their views frankly, Pasolini finds it nearly impossible to penetrate the bourgeois veneer of respectability to get the middle classes to talk about the subject. As one responds when asked a characteristically blunt question by her impatient inquisitor: “You have to understand that in order to get answers to these questions, you would need to talk to your interviewees for a long time and waste a lot of film”.

When asked to explain why this is, a psychologist speculates that their reticence comes from both a fear of the self-awareness necessary to answer the questions honestly and a reluctance to risk negative social repercussions by saying something controversial or non-conformist. The result, as Pasolini himself acknowledges, is that there is a large black hole in the centre of his film. It ends up being, not a representation of Italian attitudes, but a representation only of the attitudes of those prepared to answer his questions. Although it is possible to guess at why others refuse to discuss such subjects, it’s impossible to know what they really think about them.

Confronted with this awkward fact, Pasolini attempts to spuriously link his findings to a Marxist critique of Capitalism by summarising: “People talk [about these subjects] with disarming superficiality or hopeless confusion… all this in a country blessed by an economic miracle… naively hoping to find signs of a simultaneous cultural and spiritual miracle. The spirit of a materially wealthy Italy is refuted by real Italians."