Love Meetings / Comizi d'amore (1964) [The Criterion Collection]

Director: Pier Paolo Pasolini
Stars: Lello Bersani, Alberto Moravia, Cesare Musatti

Let’s talk about sex. In this radically engaged and engaging documentary, Pier Paolo Pasolini takes to the streets, town squares, beaches, factories, and universities of 1960s Italy to solicit everyday citizens’ thoughts on a host of hot-button subjects, including sex work, gender equality, homosexuality, and divorce (then illegal in Italy). What emerges is both a kaleidoscopic cross section of faces and places—from the industrialized cities of the North to the rural villages of the South—and an incisive portrait of a society where, despite the rapid modernization brought on by the postwar “economic miracle,” hypocrisy, repression, and conformism still hold sway.

Extras:
- New 4K digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack
- Notes for a Critofilm, a 1967 documentary short by Maurizio Ponzi in which Pasolini explains his cinematic grammar
- Short film from 1967 shot by Agnès Varda in which she meets Pasolini in New York City
- 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.