Pasolini compared making Teorema to painting a “large fresco,” which invokes the director’s admiration for the late Gothic or Renaissance paintings of Giotto, Duccio, Masaccio, Pontormo, and Mantegna, reflected here in the religious icons that surround Emilia’s mirror and bed, and in the film’s sometimes hieratic close-ups. Teorema is bracketed by images of gray desolation, that of Paolo’s Milanese factory and that of Mount Etna’s Sicilian slopes, contrasted in Pasolini’s typical equation of the North with urban alienation and the South with innate authenticity—the volcano was a favorite symbol of the latter for the director, one that he had also employed in The Gospel According to St. Matthew (1964) and would again in Porcile (1969). Throughout Teorema, Etna’s sifting ashes form a mysterious visual motif—frequently associated with the guest’s seductions, as when he makes love to Emilia or keeps Pietro awake with desire—that can be variously interpreted as suggesting the spiritual wasteland to which the characters, save the saintly Emilia, are all destined; as an entropic landscape that mocks the false stability of the bourgeois household, manifested in the monumentality of their Milanese palazzo; or as merely a marker of mortality. Pasolini complicated these readings when he wrote, startlingly, that the desert gives Paolo “a deep sense of peace: as if he had returned, no, not to the womb of the mother but to the womb of the father” (his emphasis). The filmmaker originally conceived Teorema as the seventh in a series of “verse tragedies,” and several months before the movie’s release published a novel version, partially in poetry, that helps us (or not) to understand the final cry of the patriarch on Etna—cathartic primal scream or shriek of existential despair?

No one can say what kind of scream

is mine: it’s true it’s terrible—

so terrible it twists my features

making them like the jaws of an animal—

yet there’s a kind of joy in it,

a joy that makes me helpless, a child again.

It’s a scream that comes to call someone

or to ask for his help; but also, maybe, to damn him.

It’s a scream that wants you to know,

in this desert place, that I exist,

or better, not only do I exist,

I do know. It’s a scream

that, from anxiety’s depth,

reveals some vile accent of hope;

or a scream of certainty, absolutely absurd,

in which echoes, undefiled, desperation.

In any case, this is certain: whatever

my scream might mean,

it’s destined to outlast all possible endings.

Less extreme in her reaction to the guest’s abandonment, Lucia attempts to fill the void he leaves by cruising in her car for youths to have sex with, men who remind her of him and, in one case, whose clothes she lovingly inspects as she did his, as if they were holy vestments. Lucia desultorily crosses herself early in the film but commits a blasphemous act in her last rendezvous, during which she has sex with a teen in a trench beside a Palladian building in the countryside that is later revealed to be a church, and in which she will immure herself. Pasolini’s work was embraced by feminists who recognized his profound understanding of the oppression of women, though his hostility toward abortion—he once launched a long polemic bluntly titled “I Am Against Abortion,” calling its proposed legalization a validation of homicide—and gender equality aligned, if somewhat uneasily, with conservative orthodoxy, so one wonders what Lucia’s erotic adventures are meant to signify: “the mother abandon[ing] her destiny of motherhood/wifehood and return[ing] to a world of genital but nongenerative sexuality,” as one moralistic critic wrote a decade later, or Lucia’s liberation from that very fate, which, as she admits in the “confessions” sequence, left her feeling that her life was empty? (Admittedly, her scowl of disgust as she initiates her sexual quest, reminiscent of Caravaggio’s Medusa, suggests self-censure and loathing.)



The unfixed nature of Teorema’s meanings is compounded by the daring combination of disparate influences and allusions in its form. The director described himself as a pasticheur who, rejecting the rationality and artificial organicism that he associated with bourgeois culture, selected “items, objects, and even styles from here and there” to reproduce the richness and clamor of the world. Pasolini characterized his use of pastiche with a typically provocative statement: “I work under the sign of contamination.” The artist, he suggested, “contaminates” his work by appropriating styles, icons, and ideologies from other periods and works of art, producing not a “random mixture . . . [but] an amalgam with a stylistic unity.” Though less “contaminated” than many of Pasolini’s other films, Teorema does mix its modes, quickly moving at its outset from a documentary style to silent comedy shot in sepia to full, jewel-toned color and sound in a party sequence that recalls the precredit fete in Luchino Visconti’s Sandra. The music score segues from the anxious modernism of Ennio Morricone, with its stinging strings, eerie chorus, and occasional electric guitar, to frequent passages from Mozart’s death-haunted Requiem, in a rather lugubrious performance by a Soviet choir and orchestra. The many literary texts cited range from a volume titled Elements of Civil Construction and Arthur Rimbaud’s collected works to Leo Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich and, inevitably, the Bible (Jeremiah 20:7, in one instance). And Pasolini’s penchant for quoting and invoking paintings, from the early Renaissance through contemporary times, asserts itself in the lingering shots of Francis Bacon’s Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion and Two Figures in the Grass, whose imagery of two men making love abets Pietro’s seduction, and in the pop art (Roy Lichtenstein?) and two baroque tableaux glimpsed in the boy’s bedroom. As for filmic influences, the appearance of Anne Wiazemsky—who was encouraged by her husband at the time, Jean-Luc Godard, to take the role of Odetta after the two encountered Pasolini when they went to the Venice Film Festival with La Chinoise—conjures Robert Bresson’s Au hasard Balthazar, made two years before, which might also explain Teorema’s unusually synecdochic fixation on extremities: Paolo’s hairy paw resting on a window ledge, and his bare feet after he strips in the Milan railroad station; the guest’s hands eagerly undoing Odetta’s dress; the doctor’s hand that strokes her face; the flailing shoe of the boy who makes love to Lucia in a ditch; the praying hands of the old peasant woman in adoration of Emilia; and, especially, Odetta’s clenched, trembling fists as she turns catatonic on her bierlike bed—“Please open your fist, Miss Odetta,” cries the maid as she tries to force the fingers free, but Odetta’s divine transformation forbids it.



Denounced by the pope, banned for a time and charged with obscenity by the Italian state, Teorema proved another emblem of Pasolini’s artistic martyrdom. Our times, perhaps even more than Pasolini’s own, cry out for the voice of the heretic and prophet who declared, “The first duty of an artist is not to fear unpopularity.”