La rabbia (Part One)

Why are our lives dominated by dissatisfaction and fear? In 1963, producer Gastone Ferranti put this question to Pier Paolo Pasolini, one of the greatest intellectuals of post-war Italy. Starting out from this existential question, the filmmaker and poet analyzed modern life. The result, (), is a film essay made up of historical found footage, with a poetic tone and a strong ideological slant. In a meandering text spoken in voice-over, the militant Marxist Pasolini criticizes capitalism and promotes class struggle. From the Hungarian uprising of 1956 and the Cuban Revolution, he finally ends up in the recently independent former colonies in Africa, where in his opinion the future lies. All that is left for Europe is alienation and loss of identity. Pasolini’s film is the first in a two-part project. In addition to Pasolini, Ferranti also asked Giovannino Guareschi, a conservative monarchist, to rearrange images from cinema newsreels and create an argument. Predictably, this resulted in a completely different film: pro-Europe and pro-Christianity. This second part of the film completely disappeared right after the premiere, and it wasn’t until 2009 that the two parts were reunited and screened as a whole. By that time, Pasolini’s film had a whole life behind it as an independent work.