Astral Projection: Teorema (Theorem)

Astral Projection is a monthly screening series exploring astrology through film curated by our Box Office Manager, Nic Kaneski. Join us in celebrating the beginning of each zodiac season with a screening embodying the qualities of the sign, directed by a filmmaker of the sign. For stargazers and skeptics alike and anyone interested in the intersection of astrology, pop culture, and identity.

Dir. Pier Paolo Pasolini
1968, Italy, 98 min
Italian with English subtitles

One of the iconoclastic Pier Paolo Pasolini’s most radical provocations finds the auteur moving beyond the poetic, proletarian earthiness that first won him renown and notoriety with a coolly cryptic exploration of bourgeois spiritual emptiness. Terence Stamp stars as the mysterious stranger—perhaps an angel, perhaps a devil—who, one by one, seduces the members of a wealthy Milanese family (including European cinema icons Silvana Mangano, Massimo Girotti, Laura Betti, and Anne Wiazemsky), precipitating an existential crisis in each of their lives. Unfolding nearly wordlessly in a procession of sacred and profane images, this tantalizing metaphysical riddle—blocked from exhibition by the Catholic Church for degeneracy—is at once a blistering Marxist treatise on sex, religion, and art and a primal scream into the void.

Generously sponsored by IATSE 856 Manitoba.

“The film, made in 1968, was provocative then and remains so now. But it doesn’t elucidate its ambivalent moral secrets easily.” – Derek Malcolm, London Evening Standard