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CONTENTS

Drake Stutesman and Susan Potter
Editorial

DOSSIER
Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Centenary Retrospective: Film Culture in Action
Guest editor: Jane Mills

Jane Mills
Introduction

Jane Mills
Introducing Accattone

Giorgia Alù
Introducing Mamma Roma

Bruce Isaacs
Pasolini’s Poetic Image: Il vangelo secondo Matteo/The Gospel According to Matthew

Nicky Hannan
Introducing Uccellacci e uccellini/The Hawks and the Sparrows

James Vaughan
Introducing Edipo re/Oedipus Rex

Philippa Hawker
Introducing Teorema/Theorem

Janice Tong
Introducing Porcile/Pigsty

Angelica Waite
Introducing Medea

Trevor Graham
Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Il Decameron/The Decameron

Angelita Graham
Pasolini and the Queer Lens: Il Decameron/The Decameron

Danielle McGrane
Pasolini, Poet of the People: I racconti di Canterbury/The Canterbury Tales

John McDonald
Introducing Il fiore delle mille e una notte/Arabian Nights

Catharine Lumby
Introducing Salò o le 120 giornate di Sodoma/Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom

Jane Mills, Bruce Isaacs, Lauren Aimee Curtis, James Vaughan, Susanna Scarparo
A Roundtable Discussion—Pier Paolo Pasolini: Poetry, Politics and Provocation

Susan Potter
Il diverso (the different one)

ESSAY
Sima Kokotovic
Archival Film Practice Behind Off Frame: Unravelling Cinematic Solidarities in the Palestinian Struggle for Liberation

INTERVIEW
Nicole Bonino and Hiromi Kaneda
Reclaiming Identity: The Cinematic Activist Journey of Afro-Argentinian Director Wisny Dorce and His Film Production Company “Black Existencia Films”

EDITORIAL

This issue of Framework constellates three kinds of small-scale film cultural activism and the impact that each has in the world, from production through exhibition and reception. The opening section comprises the dossier, “Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Centenary Retrospective: Film Culture in Action,” guest edited by scholar Jane Mills. It is complemented by Sima Kokotović’s essay, “Archival Film Practice Behind Off Frame: Unravelling Cinematic Solidarities in the Palestinian Struggle for Liberation,” on Mohanad Yaqubi’s documentary Off Frame aka Revolution Until Victory (PS/QA/FR/LB, 2016), and an interview with Afro-Argentinian filmmaker and producer Wisny Dorce, “Reclaiming Identity: The Cinematic Activist Journey of Afro-Argentinian Director Wisny Dorce and His Film Production Company ‘Black Existencia Films,’” conducted by Nicole Bonino and Hiromi Kaneda.

The Pier Paolo Pasolini dossier is a document of one of the many retrospectives of the director’s work undertaken to honor the centenary of his birth in 1922. Jane Mills’s introduction positions the dossier and the retrospective in relation to a particular location and history of film culture in Sydney, Australia, drawing on Mills’s experience as a migrant academic and highly networked scholar in the academy and beyond. The dossier assembles short pieces on his films and documents a roundtable event conducted in late 2022. It gathers an extraordinary diversity of voices engaged with Pasolini’s cinema, including established scholars, experienced film critics, long-time fans, and a younger generation of writers and filmmakers, in order of appearance: Giorgia Alù, Bruce Isaacs, Nicky Hannan, James Vaughan, Philippa Hawker, Janice Tong, Angelica Waite, Trevor Graham, Angelita Graham, Danielle McGrane, John McDonald, Catharine Lumby, Lauren Aimee Curtis, Susanna Scarparo, and Susan Potter. Fresh eyes encounter an iconoclastic filmmaker, one whose legacy deserves to be continually updated and refreshed for a present in which the economic, cultural, and ideological forces that Pasolini struggles against have further dispersed and intensified.

“Archival Film Practice Behind Off Frame: Unravelling Cinematic Solidarities in the Palestinian Struggle for Liberation” is Sima Kokotović’s fascinating, in-depth account and analysis of Mohanad Yaqubi’s documentary Off Frame aka Revolution Until Victory (PS/QA/FR/LB, 2016), a film collecting material from more than twenty films made by Algerian, Palestinian, European, and Soviet filmmakers, all of which centered on Palestinian activism of the 1960s and 70s. Off Frame ambitiously took on the task of building a new archive of Palestinian revolutionary filmmaking because existing archives had been destroyed. As important, Off Frame’s aim was to place Palestinian film in a larger revolutionary context and, as Kokotović notes, to uncover its “ties to global Third Worldist cinematic networks.”

Rounding out this issue, “Reclaiming Identity: The Cinematic Activist Journey of Afro-Argentinian Director Wisny Dorce and His Film Production Company ‘Black Existencia Films,’” is the 2023 interview by Nicole Bonino and Hiromi Kaneda with Wisney Dorce. Dorce created the production company Black Existencia Films to reveal the complexity of the Afro-Argentinian community, whose roots go back generations, and to address and bring to light the major part it has had in Argentina history.

—Drake Stutesman and Susan Potter