Pasolini's Poetic Gaze in Palestine

Pasolini’s Poetic Gaze in Palestine  

We would like to invite you to a special screening event this Friday night at Millenium Film Workshop where we will project Pier Paolo Pasolini's  Searching for Locations in Palestine for the Gospel According to Mathew (1965) by Pier Paolo Pasolini followed by Pasolini Pa* Palestine (2005) by Ayreen Anastas. It is  the first time the films have ever been screened together in one film program. 

Together, the films enact a kind of interrogation of seeing, framing, and representing Palestine through the cinematic appartus and gaze. Pasolini's journey to an imagined "Holy Land," premised as a cinematic location scouting  for The Gospel According to Matthew, becomes a meditation on the impossibility of finding an "authentic" biblical landscape - his disillusionment with the modernity of the recently formed Israel and the perceived poverty of Palestinian life projects a Eurocentric vision, where history and myth are expected to manifest as archaic, picturesque settings. His camera documents, observes, part objectifies, part aestheticizes and ultimately rejects the colonial realities of Palestine in favor of a less profane image of a biblical past, leading him to relocate The Gospel to…