Oggetti smarriti: in cerca di Giuseppe Bertolucci
La rabbia di Pasolini
Italy / 2008 / 83′
The newsreels *Mondo Libero* and footage sourced from Czechoslovakia, the Soviet Union and England are used to construct a lyrical and polemical analysis of the social and political phenomena and conflicts of the modern world, with commentary divided between a ‘poetic voice’ (Giorgio Bassani) and a ‘prose voice’ (Renato Guttuso). This was the concept behind La rabbia, a montage documentary which, in 1963, producer Gastone Ferranti entrusted to the critical eye of Pier Paolo Pasolini. Driven by political scruples and commercial motivations, Ferranti adapted the film in production to the ‘viewed from the right, viewed from the left’ format, and commissioned Giovannino Guareschi to direct part of it.
Pasolini endured this forced collaboration with displeasure, but found an ideal redemption thanks to Giuseppe Bertolucci, who in 2008 had the intuition to reconstruct, or rather “simulate”, the missing first part, drawing on a text by the poet and materials from the Mondo Libero archive.
L’idea di rivisitare il “genere” cinegiornale – il più basso, il più esposto alle peggiori derive qualunquistiche –, di sporcarsi le mani in quel letamaio per estrarne le pietre preziose di alcune straordinarie immagini, di cambiarlo di segno inventandosi un irripetibile prototipo di poema dell’attualità… solo Pasolini poteva arrivare a tanto e solo gli anni sessanta potevano consentirgli l’impresa. Per questo ci sembrava assolutamente necessario provare a restituire al progetto pasoliniano la sua fisionomia originaria […] Rinunciando a qualsiasi pretesa di una forma definitiva, l’idea è stata quella – nello spirito di quegli anni sessanta che qui rievochiamo – di offrire allo spettatore un kit specialissimo per un fai da te creativo e critico di sicuro interesse.
Giuseppe Bertolucci
INTRASTEVERE CINEMA – Room 2, May 27, 5:30 p.m.
book presentation
La rabbia. Un film di Pier Paolo Pasolini (Cronopio 2025) by Alessia Cervini
La rabbia. Un film di Pier Paolo Pasolini By Alessia Cervini (Cronopio 2025)
This book is dedicated to one of the strangest, almost unclassifiable objects of Pasolini’s cinema, La rabbia (1963), a film that shakes the aesthetic and political physiognomy of its own time to its foundations, managing at the same time to evoke another future and redraw the grammar of the cinema to come. But that’s not all: La rabbia represents a decisive-but not infrequently underestimated-turning point in Pasolini’s own trajectory, also recalibrating the idea of cinema that the director had frequented up to that point.
There are, then, two reasons above all for being interested, even today, in a film like La rabbia: the first, all internal to the work of its author (writer, director, poet, critic and film theorist); the second, on the other hand, closely related to the film’s ability to raise issues that question both the world it tells about and the world of the following decades, up to the present.
