Theorem / Teorema (1968) [The Criterion Collection]

Director: Pier Paolo Pasolini
Writers: Pier Paolo Pasolini
Stars: Silvana Mangano, Terence Stamp, Massimo Girotti

With Teorema, a coolly cryptic exploration of bourgeois spiritual emptiness, Pier Paolo Pasolini moved beyond the poetic, proletarian earthiness that first won him renown. Terence Stamp stars as the mysterious stranger—perhaps an angel, perhaps a devil—who, one by one, seduces the members of a wealthy Milanese family (including European cinema icons Silvana Mangano, Massimo Girotti, Laura Betti, and Anne Wiazemsky), precipitating an existential crisis in each of their lives. Unfolding nearly wordlessly, this tantalizing metaphysical riddle—blocked from exhibition by the Catholic Church for degeneracy—is at once a blistering Marxist treatise on sex, religion, and art and a primal scream into the void.

Extras:
- New 2K digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack
- Alternate English-dubbed soundtrack featuring the voices of actor Terence Stamp and others
- Audio commentary from 2007 featuring Robert S.C. Gordon, author of Pasolini: Forms of Subjectivity
- Introduction by director Pier Paolo Pasolini from 1969
- Interview from 2007 with Stamp
- Interview from 2020 with John David Rhodes, author of Stupendous, Miserable City: Pasolini's Rome




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.