Pasolini's Anger. Hypotheses for the Reconstruction of the Original Version of the Film

Summary

Pasolini's Anger, as his subtitle suggests, is a "reconstruction hypothesis," and at the same time an unexpected revelation, a return of a lost poetic voice, and a visionary force that makes us dizzy in our present. The film is the result of a lengthy research work and a philological research by Giuseppe Bertolucci under the auspices of Cineteca di Bologna and Istituto Luce. The reconstruction hypothesis 'restores' Pasolini's work to its original completeness with the unprecedented 16 minutes of material that is a valuable addition and insight into the spirit of the times.

Unpublished Pasolini in 2008? The story begins in 1963 when producer Gastone Ferranti hired Pasolini to make the movie La rabbia. It will be a film lab, a film essay, a montage of repertoire images that will form a poetic and political account of the contemporary world. Pasolini works with movie magazines from the popular Mondo libero series produced by Ferranti, and decides to use these visual clues to news and past events, interpolate them with artistic paintings and rotogravures, and subordinate them to lyrical text quivering with civic indignation (reciting voices belonging to Giorgio Bassani and Renato Guttus) - thus creating a new cinematic genre. It is a powerful intellectual experiment that is suddenly thwarted: the producer decides to transform the film and split it into two parts, entrusting the second part to Giovannino Guareschi, according to the well-known scheme "seen from the left perspective - seen from the right perspective". Pasolini reacts irritably, but eventually accepts and renounces the first part of his film to make room for Guareschi's episode. This creates a split between the poetic text, which is longer and differently structured, and the film, which has been shown so far, though very rarely, and was actually withdrawn immediately after its release.

It is a film "rejected, distorted, halved" (Sanguineti) that finally saw the light of day thanks to archaeological excavations and cultural passion. The idea stems from a perceived mismatch between poetic text and film. The initial part of the film, which Pasolini had to relinquish, was faithfully reconstructed by following the instructions of the text and finding the appropriate images in the Mondo libero collection kept in the Istituto Luce. The reconstruction brings sixteen minutes of new images (new voice cast, Bertolucci and Valerio Magrelli himself), images of De Gaspari's funeral, atomic cannons, the birth of the European Union, the Korean War, the Italian landscape, Italian television. They manifest "a violent, irreversible social and cultural transformation in which Pasolini will be the sharpest and most tortured witness" (Roberto Chiesi). The spirit of the times, in which a systematic media lynch against the poet takes place, is finally circulating with documents that close Pasolini's Anger - a right-wing film magazine called Settimane Incom that mocks him and wants to destroy him, and there are two rare interviews by the author.