Originally Published: 2009-11-08

After its debut at the Venice Film Festival, the documentary La rabbia di Pasolini will be screening at TIFF Cinematheque on Nov. 8 as part of “The Way of the Termine: The Essay of Film” program – a series curated by director Jean-Pierre Gorin that is on till Dec. 6, featuring films by the director as well as “arthouse cinemas” by Jean-Luc Godard, Dziga Vertov, Alain Resnais, Orson Welles, Luis Bunuel, and Guy Debord.
La rabbia di Pasolini (The Rage of Pasolini) is a complex film. It’s the revisitation of a journalistic work created by the Italian author-director – a mix of poetry and unedited images taken from TV journalism, ranging from funeral ceremonies of Alcide De Gasperi and Marilyn Monroe to Pope John XXIII, to the Korean war, nuclear victims and fallen of Cefalonia, to come to understand the level of anger there was towards him.
La rabbia – the original title of the movie created by Pier Paolo Pasolini in 1963 – was an invective against intolerance, prejudice, banality, class conflicts, and prissiness that the director drawing on his personal principles against the deduced civility of the consumer society and of – as he defined it – the anthropological mutation of youth.
The original project was born when Gastone Ferranti, producer of the newsreel Mondo Libero, commissioned Pasolini to make a documentary film on the 15-year-long Cold War. The director gathered archived material from Ferranti’s newsmagazine as well as from newsreels from the former Soviet Union, England, and the former Czechoslovakia. Text was added to the images, and the narrative was by Giorgio Bassani and Renato Guttuso. The narration included:
“When war breaks out, whose fault is it? (It is) the fault of the poor (common) people, naturally. God punishes the Sodoms of rags, the Gomorrahs of poverty.” Almost prophetic.
But during the making of La rabbia, the producer decided to ‘tear up’ the project and turn Pasolini’s work into a four-part film. The first part was entrusted to Giovannino Guareschi, a right-wing intellectual, to quell political reaction. Guareschi’s part – well known for the Peppino and don Camillo saga – had a totally different, almost contradictory, aspect.

Page 1/...Page 2

Printable Version Email to a Friend Share

Voice Your Opinion Letter to the Editor