Accattone (1961) [The Criterion Collection]

Director: Pier Paolo Pasolini
Writers: Pier Paolo Pasolini, Sergio Citti
Stars: Franco Citti, Franca Pasut, Silvana Corsini

Poet and painter turned filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini courted controversy with his very first feature by using Catholic iconography and liturgical music to render a plaintive, brutally beautiful portrait of a shiftless Roman pimp and thief (then-nonprofessional Franco Citti, in a revelatory performance) whose life of petty crime turns increasingly desperate when the woman who supports him is imprisoned. Melding a hardscrabble neorealist milieu with classical influences, Pasolini offers a vision of underclass struggle as a kind of modern sainthood.

Extras:
- New 4K digital restoration with uncompressed monaural soundtrack
- Audio commentary by critic Tony Rayns
- New program on Pasolini's visual style as told through his personal writing, narrated by actor Tilda Swinton and writer Rachel Kushner
- Episode from 1966 of the French television program Cinéastes de notre temps
- Original theatrical trailer




Pasolini 101:
One of the most original and controversial thinkers of the twentieth century, Italian polymath Pier Paolo Pasolini embodied a multitude of often seemingly contradictory ideologies and identities—and he expressed them all in his provocative, lyrical, and indelible films. Relentlessly concerned with society’s downtrodden and marginalized, he elevated pimps, hustlers, sex workers, and vagabonds to the realm of saints, while depicting actual saints with a radical earthiness. Traversing the sacred and the profane, the ancient and the modern, the mythic and the personal, the nine uncompromising, often scandal-inciting features he made in the 1960s still stand—on this, the 101st anniversary of his birth—as a monument to his daring vision of cinema as a form of resistance.