Whoever Says the Truth Shall Die

The documentary takes up Pier Paolo Pasolini. The director Philo Bregstein looks at his life and his work. What he is after is to explain his death. The film tells the life in order. Family roots, hiding during the Second World War, teaching and the move to Rome are inside the account. So are being tried and acquitted many times, the poems, and the turn to cinema. The account comes at the end to his killing. Bregstein argues that it was a lynching; that reading belongs to the film. Among those who speak are Alberto Moravia, Laura Betti and Bernardo Bertolucci. Readings of the poems and clips from four of his films are cut in, chief among them The Gospel According to St Matthew. This Dutch documentary of 1981 runs sixty minutes.