Great analysis, zedz. I agree about "Teorema" having been a slight disappointment after re-watching it (in my case, it must have been almost 20 years before I saw it again on the R1 dvd), for precisely the reasons you mention. I only think that the Stamp character stands not just for 'sexual liberation', but also and perhaps more so for the 'divine' in the wider sense of the word, i.e. everything that doesn't fit into the materialist/capitalist/bourgeois world that Paso was criticizing. In connection with his other work of the time, one could add the 'mythic' or 'archaic' as well, though this is less apparent in the film if you consider it on its own.
As to "Porcile", I tended to read the 'pagan' part as allegorical for the working classes, those who have to struggle for life and being literally speechless, while those in power make endless and empty talk. Not having any power, the poor engage in an endless and useless war against themselves (the cannibalism part). But this might be a too narrow way of seeing things. What about the Ninetto Davoli character? He appears in both parts, and in the 'pagan' part he is even doubled. Does this mean he is a 'reflector', an indication that the two parts indeed belong together? For instance, the industrialists do everything to hide their 'animal' parts, otherwise the son's desire for pigs wouldn't have been such a problem for Klotz in the first place. But their interactions are as cannibalistic (metaphorically) as those of the pagans.
davidhare wrote:Do you see any connections with the superb Edipo Re Zedz? The backwards and forward time shifts. The mythical and the ordinary.
This connection is there in all films from the late 60s I would say, starting already with "Uccelacci e uccellini" (a film I find terribly underrated, the episode with the medieval monks being among my favourite things in all Pasolini). But while in "Edipo Re" the mythical part presents us with a world which - despite Oedipus' crime - still functions, "Porcile" shows us a mythical world which is as bleak as the modern one. One could argue that this is much more to the point, and one would then have to discount the whole of the Trilogy of Life as taking back a statement, an insight that he already had, and romanticizing the 'past'. Still I would argue that what happens in the Trilogy is not a look into the past, but into a utopia not located in any temporal relation to the modern world.
zedz wrote: I'm not sure of the exact timing involved, but it seems to me very much a post-68 film, with Pasolini having a far more jaded and pessimistic (and thus more stimulating) perspective on societal rebellion. Plus, it's technically stunning. I don't know of any director who made better use of real locations (Medea is probably the pinnacle of this tendency).
It was made in 1969, directly after "Teorema", and before "Medea". I would also say that "Medea" is his most impressive film, for a lot of reasons (and Maria Callas being not the least of them), but as for location shooting, I would easily add "Arabian nights" as being as impressive.