Pasolini in New York

"I want to be eighteen to live a life in New York. A magical, overwhelming, beautiful city. One of those fortunate cities that possess grace." — Pier Paolo Pasolini

An in-depth interview with film director, poet, critic, and political activist Pier Paolo Pasolini, conducted in New York in 1969. In that year, Pasolini visited the city for the second time (his previous visit had been in 1966 for the New York Film Festival) and was interviewed by Guiseppe Cardillo, the longtime director of Instituto Italiano di Cultura of New York, for a wide ranging conversation in which he discusses his childhood, his move to Rome, religion, Jean-Luc Godard, Marxism and the sequence shot. The recording of this interview was completely unavailable to the public until it was recently discovered and rescued by Luigi Fontanella, a poet, novelist, Pasolini scholar and professor at SUNY Stony Brook.

This book presents this historic interview in full, in a new translation from the Italian by Michael Palma, and with an extensive introduction by Luigi Fontanella.