While several films separate them, Pigsty (Porcile) from 1969 is the closest of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s films to his final incendiary masterpiece Salo, not only terms of its bleakly apocalyptic satire, but also in its ability to divide audiences. This is arthouse cinema at its most uncompromising and difficult, and for many viewers, I suspect, it sits on the wrong side of the dividing line between intellectual provocation and utter pretension. However, get into it and you’ll find this to be one of Pasolini’s more compelling movies.
The film tells two separate and unconnected stories, intercut throughout. The first has a cannibal savage who wanders through a wasteland, murdering, raping and forming a band with like-minded miscreants, roaming the land in search of more victims before being brought to justice. It’s a visually impressive, if rather empty tale, short on dialogue but strong on atmosphere, and doesn’t really go anywhere – but the apocalyptic feel is pervasive and affecting.
The second story has bourgeois Jean-Pierre Léaud and Anne Wiazemsky trying to form a relationship, something hampered by Léaud’s secret, unspoken love, while his former Nazi (and Hitler look-alike) father forms a business partnership with war criminal Herr Herdhitze. It’s a static piece, with absurdly, deliberately pretentious dialogue (and lots of it), static shots and mannered, emotionless performances that unquestionably brings to mind the worst excesses of 1960s European arthouse cinema. But it becomes slowly, quietly intriguing as the unspoken mystery is not quite revealed (no one actually says what Léaud’s dark secret is, but it becomes clear that it involves pigs and crimes against nature) and the structured dialogue – as well as the ‘flat’ delivery – starts to actually make sense. As a satire on the hypocrisy of bourgeois society, hiding dark secrets beneath social niceties and willing to cover up crimes if it’s socially and financially expedient to do so, the film might not be overly subtle (Pasolini leaves you in no doubt about what he thinks of his fascist monsters and the legacy of their corruption) but it’s certainly intriguing.
Pigsty is, unquestionably, hard work. The intercutting of the stories makes it difficult to follow either, and the first tale is certainly a case of style over substance No one can argue that this isn’t an extraordinarily self-indulgent work, and in many ways you could hold it up as a prime example of the sort of European arthouse pretentiousness that puts off many viewers. You could also see it as a satire on that sort of cinema, if you chose to. But I would say that despite its flaws, its glacial pace and its self-indulgence – and in many ways because of them – Pigsty eventually winds up as strangely compulsive viewing, and a classic example of cinema from a time when you could make challenging, intellectual movies without any regard for commercial appeal.
DAVID FLINT
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