JOHN DI STEFANO
PASOLINI: DURATIONS [2025]
EXHIBITION: PASOLINI: DURATIONS
ARTISTS: Cathy Lee CRANE & John DI STEFANO
DATES: NOVEMBER 3 - 14, 2025
Mon - Fri, 10:00 am - 6:00 pm
OPENING: MONDAY NOVEMBER 3
6:00 pm - 8:00 pm
LOCATION: CASA ITALIANA – ZERILLI-MARIMÒ
NEW YORK UNIVERSITY
24 W 12th St, New York, NY 10011
https://www.casaitaliananyu.org/exhibit/pasolini-durations/
On the fiftieth anniversary of Pier Paolo Pasolini's death, artist-filmmakers Cathy Lee Crane and John Di Stefano present a meditation on Pasolini with a series of video-based works presented at NYU’s Casa Italiana – Zerilli-Marimò.
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.
The exhibition is accompanied by a special screening of Cathy Lee Crane’s film Pasolini’s Last Words (2012) on November 10, 2025 at 6:30 PM with a reading by Stacy Szymaszek from The Pasolini Book.
Pasolini: Durations is 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 curated by Professor and author Ara H. Merjian and creative producer Mila Tenaglia.
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Pasolini: Durations
The exhibition 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.
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Casa Italiana Zerilli–Marimò presents Pasolini: Politics & Poetry, on the fiftieth anniversary of Pier Paolo Pasolini's death. The artist endures as a figure of controversy and contradiction, yet this milestone demands more than commemoration: it calls for a critical interrogation of his literary and cinematic oeuvre—vast, fractured, and unruly—alongside the political and intellectual commitments that continue to resist facile categorization. Curated by Professor and author Ara H. Merjian and creative producer Mila Tenaglia, the program runs from November 3 to 11 and pursues a multidisciplinary engagement with Pasolini's work, traversing the languages of music, cinema, theater, and scholarly inquiry, including Cathy Lee Crane and John Di Stefano's Pasolini: Durations. Rather than merely honoring his legacy, the initiative seeks to restore the vitality and provocation of his thought and poetics, with particular attention to how contemporary artists and scholars have reinterpreted, challenged, and claimed his intellectual and artistic inheritance.
Pasolini: Politics & Poetry extends beyond screenings of Pasolini's films—drawn from cinetecas, the Criterion Collection, and the Archivi Luce—to embrace works by directors and filmmakers who have discovered in his vision a wellspring for creative dialogue. This convergence of past and present positions the initiative not as a nostalgic ritual but as a living encounter with one of the twentieth century's most formidable intellectuals, enriched by musical performances, a video installation exhibition, conversations, and academic interventions. Pasolini's death—among the most notorious and contested episodes in Italian history—was not simply the murder of a homosexual man, but an event in which politics, literature, and society collided in ways that remain unresolved.
Consult full program below
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BIOGRAPHIES:
Cathy Lee Crane
Cathy Lee Crane is a filmmaker who has been charting a speculative history on film since 1994. She received the Guggenheim Fellowship (2013) for her lyrical re-combinations of archival and staged material. Her body of work enjoyed its first survey as part of American Original Now (2015) at the National Gallery of Art. Crane’s award-winning films –including experimental biographies Pasolini’s Last Words (2012), and Unoccupied Zone: The Impossible Life of Simone Weil (2006)– have screened at Viennale, San Francisco International Film Festival, Festival du Nouveau Cinema (Montreal), Cinematheque Francais, BFI, and Arsenal/Berlin and are distributed by Canyon Cinema, Lightcone, Video DataBank and Films Media Group. Her first feature-length fictional hybrid The Manhattan Front (2018) premiered at SFIndie Fest with a profile in Filmmaker Magazine.
In 2020 she released Crossing Columbus, a feature-length documentary about the border town of Columbus, New Mexico which was supported by the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center Residency and the El Paso Cultural Foundation. Her engagement with the history of the US/Mexico border continued as Residency Fellow at the Harun Farocki Institut in Berlin (2022), where she presented an installation of Drawing the Line, a film series premiered at the Poetics & Politics Documentary Research Symposium (2019) at UC Santa Cruz. Crane is Professor of Film at Ithaca College.
https://www.cathyleecrane.com/
John Di Stefano
John Di Stefano is a visual artist/filmmaker, writer, and curator whose work focuses on reconciling the personal with the social, the everyday with history through hybrid forms of documentary practices and the essayistic form. His creative practice is focused primarily in video, installation, and photo-based media. This documentary-based work often deals with his own immigrant past seen through a queer lens, including the feature-length You Are Here (2009) which premiered in official competition at the Festival International du Documentaire (Marseille).
Recipient of multiple awards, including at the San Francisco International Film Festival, his work has been broadcast on PBS and featured at the Videonale (Bonn), Whitechapel Gallery (London), Tensta Konsthall (Stockholm), Pera Museum (Istanbul), Barcelona Museum of Modern Art, Para/Site Art Space (Hong Kong), Anthology Film Archives (New York), Oberhausen Short Film Festival, and the Transmediale (Berlin). Di Stefano’s video work is distributed by Video DataBank and VTape, and his critical writings appear in various international journals and publications. He currently teaches at Concordia University (Montreal), and was previously faculty at the University of Sydney, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and at California Institute of the Arts.
https://www.johndistefano.net/
Casa Italiana Zerilli–Marimò at New York University promotes Italian culture by offering a program of free events, open to everyone, on all aspects of Italian culture, including language, literature, cinema, music, theater, visual arts, as well as politics and economics. Casa’s mission is to create a physical and virtual space for dialogue between Italy and the United States on all of these themes.
https://www.casaitaliananyu.org/
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WORKS IN THE EXHIBITION:
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] :
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."
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:
– 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.
– 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.
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SCREENING – NOVEMBER 10, 2025 – 6:30 PM
The exhibition is accompanied by a special screening of Cathy Lee Crane’s film Pasolini’s Last Words (2012) – with a reading by Stacy Szymaszek from The Pasolini Book (2022)
PASOLINI'S LAST WORDS [2012] Cathy Lee Crane
Single-channel digital video | stereo
This elegiac essay film explores the year leading up to Pier Paolo Pasolini's murder in 1975. Through a combination of staged and archival material, this poetic biography documents the final words of one of the most important filmmakers of the twentieth century. They include the polemical articles that appeared in newspapers, his unfinished novel Petrolio, and the collection of writings La Divina Mimesis, published just days after his death. This film presents a fictional form of biography that seeks to penetrate what Raul Ruiz described as the ‘subtle tissue of life’, or what Pasolini himself called ‘the material presence’ of poetry.
The film is structured in ten discreet parts, each of which addresses its viewer as Pasolini addressed his reader in the Corriere della Sera in the months leading up to his death (now collected as Letters to Gennariello). These ‘lessons to a young boy’ insist among other things, on looking closely at bodies and things to detect the subtle work of homogenization wrought by consumer capitalism, his primary preoccupation in the last year of his life. This is the biography of that preoccupation. The film began in production in the summer of 2006 during which the director revisited the locations of Pasolini’s two Roman films. Guided by Pasolini scholar John David Rhodes (Stupendous, Miserable City) and accompanied by dancers from Cornell University.
REGISTRATION FOR THE EVENT: https://www.casaitaliananyu.org/events/pasolinis-last-words/
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PUBLICITY IMAGE:
John Di Stefano Ponte (verticale) (2013)
DOWNLOAD IMAGE:
https://static.wixstatic.com/media/f462df_4b18d6c73b0f47d580de4da05449205d~mv2.jpg
