''Pigsty'' ( it, Porcile) is a 1969 Italian film, written and directed by
Pier Paolo Pasolini
Pier Paolo Pasolini (; 5 March 1922 – 2 November 1975) was an Italian poet, filmmaker, writer and intellectual who also distinguished himself as a journalist, novelist, translator, playwright, visual artist and actor. He is considered one of ...
and starring
Jean-Pierre Léaud
Jean-Pierre Léaud, ComM (; born 28 May 1944) is a French actor, known for playing Antoine Doinel in François Truffaut's series of films about that character, beginning with ''The 400 Blows'' (1959). He also worked several times with Jean-Luc ...
,
Marco Ferreri
Marco Ferreri (11 May 1928 – 9 May 1997) was an Italian film director, screenwriter and actor, who began his career in the 1950s directing three films in Spain, followed by 24 Italian films before his death in 1997. He is considered one of ...
,
Ugo Tognazzi
Ugo Tognazzi (23 March 1922 – 27 October 1990) was an Italian actor, director, and screenwriter.
Early life
Tognazzi was born in Cremona, in northern Italy but spent his youth in various localities as his father was a travelling clerk fo ...
,
Pierre Clémenti
Pierre André Clémenti (28 September 1942 – 27 December 1999) was a French actor.
Life and career
Born in Paris to an unknown father and Rose Clémenti, a Corsican concierge whose surname he took, Clémenti had a difficult childhood and took ...
,
Alberto Lionello
Alberto Lionello (12 July 1930 – 14 July 1994) was an Italian film actor, voice actor, singer and presenter.
Life and career
Born in Milan into a family of Venetian origins, after studying acting at the Accademia dei Filodrammatici Lione ...
,
Franco Citti
Franco Citti (; 23 April 1935 – 14 January 2016) was an Italian actor, best known as one of the close collaborators of director Pier Paolo Pasolini. He came to fame for playing the title role in Pasolini's film ''Accattone'', which brought hi ...
and
Anne Wiazemsky
Anne Wiazemsky (14 May 1947 – 5 October 2017) was a French actress and novelist. She made her cinema debut at the age of 18, playing Marie, the lead character in Robert Bresson's ''Au Hasard Balthazar'' (1966), and went on to appear in several ...
.
Plot
The film features two parallel stories. The first one is set in an unknown past time and is about a young man (Clémenti) who wanders in a
volcanic
A volcano is a rupture in the crust of a planetary-mass object, such as Earth, that allows hot lava, volcanic ash, and gases to escape from a magma chamber below the surface.
On Earth, volcanoes are most often found where tectonic plates a ...
landscape (shot around
Etna) and turns into a
cannibal
Cannibalism is the act of consuming another individual of the same species as food. Cannibalism is a common ecological interaction in the animal kingdom and has been recorded in more than 1,500 species. Human cannibalism is well documented, bo ...
. The man joins forces with a thug (Citti) and ravages the countryside. At the end, he and his gang get arrested and at his execution, he recites the famous tagline of the film: "I killed my father, I ate human flesh and I quiver with joy." The story is about the human capacity of destruction and a rebellion against the social prerequisites implied against it.
The second story is about Herr Klotz (Lionelli), a
German
German(s) may refer to:
* Germany (of or related to)
** Germania (historical use)
* Germans, citizens of Germany, people of German ancestry, or native speakers of the German language
** For citizens of Germany, see also German nationality law
**Ge ...
industrialist and his young son Julian (Léaud) who live in 1960s
Germany
Germany,, officially the Federal Republic of Germany, is a country in Central Europe. It is the second most populous country in Europe after Russia, and the most populous member state of the European Union. Germany is situated betwe ...
. Julian, instead of passing time with his radically politicised ''fiancée'' Ida (Wiazemsky), prefers to build relationships with pigs. Herr Klotz, on the other hand, with his loyal aide Hans Guenther (Ferreri), tries to solve his rivalry with fellow industrialist Herdhitze (Tognazzi). The two industrialists join forces while Julian gets eaten by pigs in the
sty. Herdhitze intends to conceal the event. The story attempts to provide a link between the
Third Reich
Nazi Germany (lit. "National Socialist State"), ' (lit. "Nazi State") for short; also ' (lit. "National Socialist Germany") (officially known as the German Reich from 1933 until 1943, and the Greater German Reich from 1943 to 1945) was ...
and
Wirtschaftswunder
The ''Wirtschaftswunder'' (, "economic miracle"), also known as the Miracle on the Rhine, was the rapid reconstruction and development of the economies of West Germany and Austria after World War II (adopting an ordoliberalism-based social ma ...
Germany.
Reception
On
review aggregator
A review aggregator is a system that collects reviews of products and services (such as films, books, video games, software, hardware, and cars). This system stores the reviews and uses them for purposes such as supporting a website where users ...
website
Rotten Tomatoes
Rotten Tomatoes is an American review-aggregation website for film and television. The company was launched in August 1998 by three undergraduate students at the University of California, Berkeley: Senh Duong, Patrick Y. Lee, and Stephen Wang ...
, the film has a rating of 56% based on 9 critics, with an
average rating
In ordinary language, an average is a single number taken as representative of a list of numbers, usually the sum of the numbers divided by how many numbers are in the list (the arithmetic mean). For example, the average of the numbers 2, 3, 4, 7 ...
of 5.7/10.
References
External links
*
Italian avant-garde and experimental films
Films directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini
Films about cannibalism
Films scored by Benedetto Ghiglia
1960s Italian-language films
1960s Italian films
{{1960s-Italy-film-stub