Pasolini’s 1968 film Teorema is not
long on dialogue: its first American distributor even tried to turn the film’s
lengthy silences into a selling point, with one early poster claiming “there
are only 923 words spoken [in the film] … but it says everything”. Indeed,
Pasolini makes his arguments – such as they are – less through spoken words
than through ambiguities of action and gesture, purposeful juxtapositions and
sudden cross-cuts to desolate landscapes. If the film still has the power to
provoke discussion and analysis more than fifty years after it was released, it
is precisely because it refuses to clarify itself by giving its characters
recourse to language.
For this reason alone Teorema would
seem an unlikely choice of raw material for an opera. Yet Giorgio Battistelli’s
Il Teorema di Pasolini – commissioned by and given its…
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