Many of the vanguard cultural icons of the 1960s were so of their time that in retrospect their work remains mired in the era that spawned it. This object lesson is particularly relevant when considering international filmmakers who broke new aesthetic ground four decades ago. As the program director for the Film Society of Lincoln Center, Richard Peña, recently put it, “I love Ingmar Bergman, but I don’t pretend that he’s an artist of the 21st century.”

The films of the Italian writer and director Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922–75) outraged and energized world cinema, from his astonishing 1961 debut feature “Accattone” to “Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom,” which was released a few weeks after the director’s murder. Yet Pasolini’s cinematic poetry and persuasion remain undiminished. “No other major filmmaker from the ’60s continues to seem as strikingly contemporary,” Mr. Peña said.

As part of a citywide celebration of Pasolini’s legacy, the Film Society of Lincoln Center will present “Heretical Epiphanies: The Cinematic Pilgrimages of Pier Paolo Pasolini,” a 13-film retrospective of Italy’s most lionized and most excoriated director that begins Wednesday.

Pasolini was an accomplished linguist, poet, novelist, and essayist, and burgeoning screenwriter when he made “Accattone.” He was also a former resident of the borgate shantytown slums that ringed Rome and provided the setting for his debut. The film’s story of a pimp (Franco Citti) balancing his loathing for conventional employment with a need to survive, caught Italian filmgoers off guard. Pasolini’s confident blend of a kind of neorealist, offhanded approach to crime, coupled with unabashedly religious iconography strewn among modern Roman ruins, earned the director mainstream scorn and an abortive obscenity trial. “You can see what a bombshell ‘Accattone’ must have been when it came out,” Mr. Peña said. “It just violated every piety about the poor.”

Pasolini was an avowed anti-fascist (his father had been decorated for saving Mussolini’s life, to the nascent director’s shame) and a card-carrying Italian communist. Yet “Accattone” was an affront to every political side. Right-wing and centrist Italians seeking to distance themselves from the recent wartime past denounced the film. Communists resented that the director had created a movie that “was not the inspiring, sentimental, red-flag-waving film he was supposed to make,” Mr. Peña said. Pasolini further enraged European leftists when he came out in support of the working-class cops tasked with repelling middle-class college students during the 1968 Paris riots and in similar disturbances in Rome the following year.

Though unapologetically sordid, “Accattone” remains a movie of uncompromising compassion and surprising beauty. Neither exposé nor down-market exploitative travelogue, “Accattone” is first and last a brilliantly parsed and paced narrative, leavened by ingenious visual poetry of such urgent purity that Pasolini’s assistant, the future director Bernardo Bertolucci, likened the experience to bearing witness at “the birth of cinema.” But for a native film industry working to portray Rome as Europe’s new center of stylish modern excess, “Accattone” was simply appalling. “‘La Dolce Vita’ came out at the same time,” Mr. Peña said. “Taken in that context, ‘Accatone’ was a loud ‘no’ to the ‘yes’ that the rest of Italy was shouting.”

Pasolini once summed up his religious convictions by observing, “I am an unbeliever who has a nostalgia for belief.” In 1964’s “The Gospel According to St. Matthew,” the director, a homosexual Marxist atheist, created quite simply the most luminously spiritual version of the life of Christ ever put on film. One of Italy’s chief exports to the rest of the film-going world of the 1960s was sword and sandal “peplum” costume dramas that superficially retold ancient history and biblical tales in the glibbest and most superficial ways imaginable. Yet Pasolini, rather than confining Christ’s birth, life, crucifixion, and resurrection in a back lot Technicolor fantasyland, let the story loose on a beautiful black-and-white southern Italian coastal landscape and in a vaguely defined historical era resembling feudal Italy.

“If you think of Italy as a country that had made hundreds of films set in Roman times,” Mr. Peña said, “you have to see the film as a response to that.” Instead of becoming mired in period detail and corroborative history, Pasolini cut through bible movie conventions to depict, “a moment that marked the beginning of a whole new way to think about what God meant.”

The director’s final film was a far darker watershed. Alternately banned and bootlegged since its release, “Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom” is a reworking of a De Sade novel that depicts a handful of young Italians enduring a joyless orgy of humiliation, sexual abuse, and torture at the hands of a group of fascist gentry near the end of World War II. The narrative point of view in “Salo” eventually forces the viewer into a position of collusion or acceptance of the banal cruelties that become increasingly vicious in the latter third of the film.

“It’s very isolating,” Mr. Peña said. “As you watch it, you really feel yourself as distinctly different from other members of the audience.” “Salo” is one of the most uncompromising, ferociously medieval visions ever committed to film. It is also one of cinema’s most unbridled indictments of authoritarian government. Like the rest of the director’s films, Pasolini’s “Salo” was made by an artist whose radically incisive humanism is as timeless as the heartless malice he abhorred.

Through December 4 (70 Lincoln Center Plaza, at Broadway at West 65th Street, 212-875-5601).