La Rabbia (1963) (review)

While the tidy dozen fiction films made by Pier Paolo Pasolini between the years of 1961 and his death in 1975 are now widely available on home video—most recently in the Criterion Collection's Blu-ray edition of his final film, Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom—the filmmaker's nonfiction works remain largely unseen in North America. Often taking the form of companion pieces or appunti, or "notes," for his fiction works, Pasolini's nine documentaries reveal rather more explicitly the filmmaker and poet's life as a public intellectual in postwar Italy, his strident left-wing critique of his country's modernization, his complex relationship with the Communist Party, and his often scandalous public persona. Raro Video's 2011 release of the two-part compilation film La Rabbia (The Anger), which pairs essay films by Pasolini and the conservative humorist and journalist Giovannino Guareschi in a somewhat forced point-counterpoint format, offers crucial insight into both the political and intellectual climate of 1960s Italy and Pasolini's important, if often unstable, role within it.

The history of the film is itself difficult to parse, but the extensive supporting material in Raro's DVD edition—including writings by the filmmakers, essays by scholars of both Pasolini and Guareschi, and contemporary film reviews, and an exhaustive sixty-eight-minute documentary on the film by the critic Tatti Sanguinetti— offers useful context about the film's tortured production and short life in circulation. Originally, producer Gastone Ferranti, whose Mondo Libero newsreel provides the raw material for much of the film, conceived of the project as a single feature-length documentary by Pasolini. (Guiseppe Bertolucci released an eighty-three-minute reconstruction of this longer cut in 2008 that is not included in this release.) Later, Ferranti decided that the film would be more profitable if reconfigured as a sort of cinematic debate between left- and right-wing ideologies, each attempting to answer the question, "why is our life dominated by discontent, by anguish, by the fear of war, by war?" Trumped up as a war of ideas between two public figures on opposite sides of the political spectrum, the film finally proved dissatisfying to nearly everyone: on its release in April 1963, critics savaged it, audiences widely ignored it, and Pasolini largely disowned it. Thereafter the film was split in two, and each part of the film was screened individually, if only occasionally, by respective partisan groups—leftist or rightist— before dropping out of circulation entirely. Subsequent screenings of a black-and-white 16mm print of the complete film were rare until 2005, when Raro rediscovered a complete color negative mislabeled L'Arabia, the source for this edition's restoration.

Despite the relative coherence of the concept—not to mention Ferranti's aggressive marketing campaign, which included trailers with statements from each filmmaker berating the other for his ideological narrowness—the two parts of La Rabbia sit awkwardly side by side in the final film, largely mismatched in style and barely responding to one another. Not surprisingly, Pasolini's contribution is by far the more poetic, even cryptic, deftly mixing newsreel footage of the 1956 Hungarian counterrevolution, France's occupation of Algeria, and the arrest of Patrice Lumumba with paintings by Jean Fautrier, George Grosz, and Renato Guttuso. The latter also provides one of two voice-overs, which are by turn elegiac, exultant, and scathing, as in Pasolini's comment on footage of the Republican nomination of Dwight Eisenhower: "the joy of the American who feels the equal to millions of Americans in the love of democracy: this is the disease of the future world."

Working with legendary editor Nino Baragli, Pasolini constructed an elegant, if ideologically slippery, essay that juxtaposed images of the major events and figures of the postwar period with those of subproletarian workers and revolutionaries in Africa, the Middle East, Europe, and Latin America. In this way, this first half of La Rabbia is a product of the filmmaker's idiosyncratic Marxism, his deep skepticism of modernity, and his outspoken views about sexuality and exploitation. Beginning...