Whoever Says the Truth Shall Die
Studio: Facets
WorkNameSort: Whoever Says the Truth Shall Die
Whoever Says the Truth Shall Die is a provocative title befitting its provocative subject: Italian poet, novelist, filmmaker and anti-fascist commentator Pier Paolo Pasolini. The Truth, in this case, is that Pasolini’s 1975 murder was not at the hands of the 17-year-old male prostitute convicted of the crime, but was a premeditated, politically motivated attack by a gang of neo-fascist thugs.
The truth about Pasolini’s murder may never be realized; last year’s reopening of the guilty verdict following the recanting of the original confession yielded no new conclusive evidence. Pasolini’s case is a mysterious bombshell for conspiracy theorists, but don’t expect Whoever to be the filmmaker’s JFK or Kurt & Courtney. The grisly details and conspiratorial hypotheses don’t come about until the final quarter of this short (58 minutes) feature. The rest is a rather procedural biography, chronicling Pasolini’s childhood, his early forays into poetry and his ascent toward becoming postwar Italy’s pre-eminent artist-intellectual, interspersed with interviews with friends, yellowed photos and film clips.
It’s certainly true that Pasolini’s death was not unlike so many of the protagonists in his fatalistic movies. Whoever director Philo Bregstein smartly contends that many of Pasolini’s characters were surrogates for the director, be them the death-obsessed hood in Accattone, Jesus in The Gospel According to Saint Matthew or Oedipus in Oedipus Rex.
If the film itself isn’t the last word on Pasolini’s murder, the bonus features try to slam the nail in the 30-year-old coffin. New audio interviews with Bregstein and Bernardo Bertolucci hit on many fascinating aspects of the case, this time with decades of hindsight, and an informative booklet traces the murder and its aftermath in a handy timeline form and includes a cogent theoretical analysis of Pasolini’s oeuvre. Image-wise, the Facets transfer is mouth-watering compared to the shameful releases of most of Pasolini’s films from the Water Bearer imprint.
This article appears in Nov 1-7, 2006.