JOHN DI STEFANO
PASOLINI: DURATIONS [2025]
John Di Stefano & Cathy Lee Crane
On the fiftieth anniversary of Pier Paolo Pasolini's death, Cathy Lee Crane and John Di Stefano present a meditation on Pasolini with a series of video-based works. PASOLINI: DURATIONS proposes a poetic and experiential approach to Pasolini’s radical social critique and aims to recontextualize his work within the contemporary moment.Inspired by Pasolini’s ideas about filmmaking as a means of engaging the social and the political, Crane and Di Stefano’s work considers the spatial and temporal relationships of the moving image as a means of revisiting history.In an essayistic manner, Crane and Di Stefano mine Pasolini’s films and writings for resonant moments which they rework through strategies of montage to produce new perspectives. In some works, urban locations evoked by Pasolini’s films and writings serve as catalysts for new, speculative and revised narratives, both documentary and fictional in nature.
SHOWN:
Casa Italiana – Zerilli-Marimò (New York)
https://www.casaitaliananyu.org/exhibit/pasolini-durations/
PASOLINI: DURATIONS was presented as part of Pasolini: Politics & Poetry, a multidisciplinary engagement with Pasolini's work, traversing the languages of music, cinema, theater, and scholarly inquiry at Casa Italiana–Zerilli-Marimò (New York University) curated by Ara H. Merjian and Mila Tenaglia.
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PASOLINI: DURATIONS explores some of Pasolini’s ideas about filmmaking as a means of engaging the social and the political. In ‘Theory of Splices’ (Teoria delle giunte), Pasolini proposes a concept of cinematic montage that equates spatial and temporal relationships created by splicing with a ritmema (a rhythm-unit). These splices are not just technical cuts but also significant junctures for the potential iteration of subjectivities.
"Instead of organizing itself simply as a succession, a film ‘fishes’ continuously in the deep, in the matrix that is the world of objects ... The editor attaches shots to each other with ‘splices’ [producing] a ‘meaningful nonexistent’. It is in this incalculably minimal fraction of time (the interval produced at the cut point) that we should calculate the ‘negative durations,’ that is, those which do not exist, either as audiovisual material representation or as mathematical or rhythmic abstraction. In the convention of the infinitesimal duration of a splice an even more infinitesimal real duration can take place; conversely, instead, an immense duration can take place – a life, a century, a millennium."
Pier Paolo Pasolini Theory of Splices (1971)
What is particularly resonant is Pasolini’s notion of ‘negative durations’ where time is made to trace something that is not yet visible. Consequently, the experience of time itself – duration – is central to the works presented. In PASOLINI: DURATIONS, time is excerpted, compressed, extended, looped, frozen, etc., as ways of creating space for something that might not yet exist. These durational experiences are embedded in Crane and Di Stefano’s works, and they are often linked to human movement, such as walking, running, falling, etc. which mark time through the body, but not necessarily in a linear fashion.
Crane and Di Stefano are also inspired by the introductory ‘Project note’ of Pasolini’s unfinished novel Petrolio where he describes a kind of filmmaking that deploys intersections and ‘swarms’ of various elements: documents, newsreels, interviews, images, etc.[1] For Pasolini, this evokes a ‘romanzo a brulichio’ (swarming novel) characterized by an open-ended, nonlinear narrative and structure that perpetually reshapes itself, somewhat reminiscent of the swarming and teeming activity of ants, or what Gian Carlo Ferretti describes as "the boiling, lava-like river of the 'lived'." The works in the exhibition aim to engage these ideas by considering Pasolini’s films as a ‘swarm’ from which fragments can be drawn and reshaped. Like a Venn diagram of co-existing associations, the works in PASOLINI: DURATIONS revisit these films for their images, but also for the retroactive possibilities they may offer.
The installation consists of the following discrete works
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TRA [2025]
Cathy Le Crane & John Di Stefano
Single-channel digital video | presented without sound – projection
Tra synthesizes the narrative of Pasolini’s film Teorema (1968) by highlighting its interstitial moments. The act of running that appears throughout the film is isolated and deployed to expose the film’s subtextual currents.
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[Two discrete works by Crane and DI Stefano are presented together for the first time as a synchronized dual-screen work] :
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ADRIFT [2009]
Cathy Lee Crane
16mm film transferred to digital video | presented without sound
A poetic adaptation of the fountain of youth fable, Adrift follows a woman who has come to Rome to die. On her journey through the city, she encounters a young girl who taunts her with visions of lost innocence. This film was staged on locations of Pasolini’s films and includes an original score by composer Ben Kamen. Adrift is a quiet opera at the center of an evolving study of the human gesture, the unconscious way in which hands hold things and the body moves. This direct encounter with the materiality of existence, the way it resides in the body is profoundly political. Pasolini wrote: "The education given to a boy by things, by objects, by physical reality—in other words, the material phenomena of his social condition—make that boy corporeally what he is and what he will be all his life. What has to be educated is his flesh as the mold of his spirit. Social condition is recognizable in the flesh of an individual."
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MURMURATIONS (ROME) [2017]
John Di Stefano
Single-channel digital video | stereo
Murmurations (Rome) juxtaposes documentation of two historical sites in Rome as a means of commenting on fascism's ghostly specters. The work records the act of walking through these sites today, reanimating their political and ideological significance.
The two sites are:
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The Foro Italico, a sports complex inspired by the Roman forums and a preeminent example of Italian Fascist architecture, paved with large-scale mosaics celebrating Mussolini.
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The Fosse Ardeatine, an ancient Roman catacomb where, during World War II, 330 Italian civilians were massacred and mass-buried by German occupation troops as a reprisal for a partisan attack.
The historical events that define these two sites have long since passed, and only a lingering murmur of them exists. The documentation of these sites is accompanied by images of the intricately morphing formation of starlings in flight—called murmurations— that descend upon the city, and narrated with excerpts from Pasolini’s poem Le Ceneri di Gramsci (1957) spoken by the author.
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PONTE (VERTICALE) [2013]
John Di Stefano
Single-channel digital video | silent
Ponte (Verticale) appropriates a scene from Pasolini’s film Accattone (1961) which depicts the protagonist’s precarious dive into the Tiber River in Rome. The image is slowed down and durationally extended. This results in a suspension of the body across the surface of a vertically elongated screen._______________________________________________________
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SFUGE (APRÈS VARDA) [2025]
Cathy Lee Crane & John Di Stefano
Single-channel digital video | silent
Sfuge presents fleeting glimpses of Pasolini as he walks through New York city, appropriating moments from Angès Varda’s film Pasolini (1967)._______________________________________________________
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VOLGAR ELOQUIO [2002]
John Di Stefano
Single-channel digital video | silent – projection
Volgar Eloquio is a performance-based video work depicting the typing of a poem by Pasolini, Versi del Testamento (1969), in real-time. The poem describes Pasolini’s inner solitude as he walks through the streets of Rome
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NOVEMBER 2, 1975 [2002/2025]
John Di Stefano.
Embossed paper, typewriter, table
November 2, 1975 is the re-working of a previous work (Senza Parole (2002)) that aims to situate the viewer at the desk where Pasolini wrote his last words. The work consists of a sheet of embossed paper strung through an Olivetti typewriter, identical to the one used by Pasolini._______________________________________________________
