Pigsty
Pigsty
| 02 September 1969 (USA)
Pigsty Trailers

Two dramatic stories. In an undetermined past, a young cannibal (who killed his own father) is condemned to be torn to pieces by some wild beasts. In the second story, Julian, the young son of a post-war German industrialist, is on the way to lie down with his farm's pigs, because he doesn't like human relationships.

Reviews
Solemplex

To me, this movie is perfection.

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Micitype

Pretty Good

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Cheryl

A clunky actioner with a handful of cool moments.

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Jenni Devyn

Worth seeing just to witness how winsome it is.

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Mariam Mansuryan

I thought this movie must had had something ingenious while watching it, but couldn't really understand it. It was about a boy who does something very strange that he doesn't want to tell anyone about. He kills pigs, and at the end gets consumed by these same pigs. To his bone, without any trace left of him. And one of the characters decides it would be best if he would just had disappeared. I don't want to immediately go to the semantics of this and ask the inevitable question: what do the pigs represent, and what does the boy represent, and what does his parents' big house represent. First I want to understand the plot.There are two parallel stories, one is about a traveller who looks like the protagonist, trying to survive in a lonely land, and the other one is about a rich boy from a rich family who doesn't do anything with his life. Who is 25 but hasn't yet kissed a girl. He also used to kill pigs. For fun. He didn't need to do it, he was just so rich he didn't need to do anything really. His father is a mockery of Hitler or one of his servants, that is obvious by all the ridiculous names of the officials. The war is over, the USSR is taking on. The pigs represent the weaker, the worse types. So in this case, it may very well be that the pigs are the Jews, the Soviets, whom they had been slaughtering with such light hands. Unconsciously perhaps, the father had sent his son to do that. And the son was his father's conscience. He got destroyed, completely by those same pigs he was eating before. The conscience was actually way bigger and freer than the confining large house he lived in. The conscience was in the mountains, killing people. That seems to be another version of the protagonist's life. He kills and eats a human there. Just the same way he killed pigs in the castle. It's as if this second world is the dark reality while the first world is the beautiful illusion. In reality, it is a person he is killing. And at the end, the protagonist gets crucified by a tribe of others. So happens in the castle, just by pigs, not anyone else. It's as if there is this higher world and all the officials live in this castle where nothing is real, while the boy's true residence is there. Now why do I think he is the conscience of the father? Maybe he isn't, he is just able to see the reality.While he was probably eating healthy and luxurious foods in his father's castle, the protagonist was in reality starving in the mountains. He had a spiritual need that could only be fulfilled by eating those pigs. It was hunger for destruction, hunger that no palace could fulfill.And what about the girl? The girlfriend of course showed the period of time, she was one of those hippy kids. So now is the time where people are going against the Soviet Regime. That means, that the German era is over, all their games are fake already. At the end, the father walks out of the house, with still his proud walk. He lives the place and disappears among the guests, the waiting crowd.The girl is also very young, only seventeen. In one scene, they are walking towards each other with a lake separating them. He asks her to kiss him, first she says no, then when they reach each other, the girl wants to kiss the protagonist, but he no longer wants that kiss. This shows the longing for desire. It's like in Michelangelo's Adam's Birth. Where Adam and God are reaching towards each other but there is always this slight distance between their fingers and I think it's that distance that gives the painting all its beauty. That distance is life. If they touch, nothing is so unknown and mysterious anymore.In another scene, they are both in the house. But he is sitting in the carriage while Ida invites him out. It's a carriage in the house. One that doesn't move. It's something that maybe used to work but not anymore. Completely pointless. That shows that the boy is stuck in his life, that he is going nowhere. While she wants to move on in her life.Father and mother care about him. Father also plays the harp, which, especially in one particular sequence, is shown to control the world. As if he is controlling the world without even leaving his palace. But I don't know whether this lasts for the entire movie. There was probably another instrument which overtook at the end, I just didn't notice it.There is a lot of loneliness in the protagonist's life. He is all alone, he lives in his world and Ida leaves him too. He has this sort of double existence in his huge bed and meditative world.I don't know what I thought about this movie, I think it is definitely rewatchable, there would definitely be new things I would understand if I were to rewatch it.

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Stanley-Becker

This movie is a testament to the power of poetry and its capacity to dwarf the medium of cinema. Pasolini merges the rites of passage towards 'bildung', {German concept for the development of civilizing Culture}, using five separate themes; - the immature rapport between a wealthy, young bourgeois couple, {named Julian and Ida}, the dilemma of Julian's parents, who desire the union, {it would be materially beneficial}, and the contrasting styles of two German plutocrats, - all this Pasolini combines and contrasts with the historical Italian vagabond life of a countryside bandit , circa the early 1500's, armed with a musket, roving the barren hilly escarpment in the Pompeian district and preying on unarmed, vulnerable Christian pilgrims on their way to Rome.Julian and Ida play at being in love - but their inexperience leads them to compromise reality with their love of words. Julian is a spoilt young man who has been infantilized by his doting mother, who in her ensuing dialogue with Ida reveals herself to be totally blind to her son's character, believing instead that Julian has all the laudable attributes of a good German. The narrative flow concerning this German family, shot as an interior with much opulence, antique furniture and Renaissance paintings, in enormous palatial rooms, which as the story moves forward, is intercut with desolate scenic waste as the vagabond displays primitive savagery, in killing, dismembering and cannibalizing his victims. These scenes are in a landscape that is evocatively lyrical and empty of civilization {that is apart from the hymns which are beautifully chanted by the pilgrims on their way to destruction}.In a parody of Godard and Truffaut, it soon becomes obvious that the love of the two 'pretty young things' is doomed to fail {as the barrier that they set up between each other with meaningless words becomes insurmountable}. The movie now shifts into its essential focus. The two plutocrats, the one, being Julian's father Herr Klotz, a German word for 'idiot' or blockhead, and the other, Herr Herdhitze, meaning 'hot fire' {possibly a reference to the exterminating ovens}, square up as two contrasting sides of the German psyche. Klotz, a humanist, is a cultivated man with a sense of cynicism and an appreciation of the accurate satirical art works of George Grosz - he sees himself depicted by Grosz sitting in a café with a sexy young secretary on his lap, cigar in his mouth and a piggish face - he also refers to Brecht's championship of the workers. Herdhitze, a technocrat, on the other hand, refers to himself as a man of science, who despises individuality, and wants to convert all the impoverished farmers to technicians - he has no soul at all.The two men face off with the core of the German problem - their love of the meat of the pig. Their dialogue .... Klotz - 'the Germans love their sausage' to which Herdhitze replies 'shit' Klotz 'but they do defecate a lot'. The ironic impasse between the two Nazis is whether Jews are pigs or not - with the added Surreal contradiction of, if the Jews are pigs why do the Germans love their pork. and why do they grunt like pigs?The year is 1959, in the German quest for an economic miracle, questions of Jews and culture are easily overcome, and the two plutocrats combine forces, in the pursuit of their worship of material wealth. Meanwhile Julian has resolved his confusion, and sacrifices himself to the totem of the pig, by going to the German Temple - the Pigsty - and there offers himself as an anointed meal to the pigsPasolini has wrought a great work of Art that might have been an Epic Poem or a great novel or a great Painting like Picasso's 'Guernica' or Goya's 'Atrocities of War'. He certainly has no sympathy whatsoever for the Nazi German and his god 'The Pig'. This is a difficult movie to digest, but it's rationale is crystal clear. If you are interested in the History of the Intellect, then this movie is unmissable.

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hasosch

Bsesides his final work "Salo", the "Porcile" is Pier Paolo Pasolini's most abstract, most hermetic and thus most and also most controversially discussed film. In a famous German reference work of film, this movie is interpreted in the following way: both cannibalism and sodomy be "symbols" of Pasolini's homosexuality. I have seldom read something more stupid and primitive. Moreover, in all reference commentaries that I have seen so far, the interpreters seem to be sure that "Pigsty" consists of two independent parts.In one of the two parallel told stories, a cannibal who seems to live in a paleolithic world, is condemned to be mangled by dogs. In the other parallel told story which plays in a German (?) castle, some negotiations of leading fascists are told. Here we see the ultimate predecessor motives of Salo. There is also a son, Julian, bourgeois like his father, who meets Ida, a liberal girl, and it seems that they cannot come together. The water that separates them looks like the border between the Here and the Beyond and not like a swimming pool embedded in a piece of park. Even when they try to walk towards one another, the never succeed in reaching a meeting point on one of the borders. Julian, however, prefers to enjoy his sexual contacts in the pigsty that belongs to the park of the castle, with the pigs that finally eat him up. The two parallel told stories have in common, as Pasolini himself said, that "bourgeoisy eats up his children". This may be true - since the time of evolution between the paleolithic and post-war fascistoid Italy just made the short step from cannibalism to sodomy.

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jaibo

Perhaps Pasolini's most complex and difficult film, a two-strand tale about firstly the son of a wealthy industrialist who likes having sex with pigs, and secondly a medieval cannibal whose motto is "I killed my father, I ate human flesh, and I quiver with joy." At first, the two tales appear to have little relation with one another, other than a shared focus on extremely transgressive desires. But on closer inspection, the cannibal seems to be the dream Id of the son of the bourgeoisie, and the mythic tale operates in the subconscious of the contemporary one.The style of the film is very cryptic and deliberately unapproachable but there is method in Pasolini's madness. The industrialist and his rival are comic figures of monstrous proportion, and seem to represent the old-style Capitalism, with its factories blotting the landscape of Western cities, and the new Capitalism, whose factories are out-of-site in some third world clime. The second capitalism is equated with Nazi-ism, and an uneasy truce is reached between the two faces of Capitol. It is in that truce that Pasolini seems to be suggesting that those of us in Western societies live our consumer lives. Probably his second bleakest film, after of course Salo.

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