Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922–1975), the Italian Marxist film director, was a towering polymath who made a significant contribution to shaping the intellectual and political landscape of the twentieth century. Pasolini distinguished himself as a journalist, novelist, playwright, essayist, artist and actor. His films, including The Gospel According to St Matthew (1964), Theorem (1968), The Decameron (1971) and The Canterbury Tales (1972), won high praise and awards at various film festivals.
Pasolini created La rabbia (Anger) in 1962, following a producer’s request to write a commentary for a large, diverse cache of newsreel footage. He crafted a hundred pages of elegiac prose and verse, a texture of moving images, photographs and painting reproductions, experimenting for the first time with a form differing from the conventions of traditional film narrative and documentary. In his own words, what he wanted to create was ‘a new film genre. To make a poetic and ideological essay with new sequences.’ La rabbia was meant as ‘an act of indignation against the unreality of the bourgeois world and its consequent historical irresponsibility—a record of the presence of a world that, unlike the bourgeois world, has a deep grasp of reality. Reality: a true love of tradition, as only revolution can give.’
46.
Algeria. New flights and air raids. People fleeing. Burnt corpse. Child crying.
Buzzing
in the sky of Algeria
is a crisis
that recreates death
and in the search
for a new freedom
wants victims
whose victory is certain!
Ah, France,
the hatred!
Ah, France,
the plague!
Ah, France,
the cowardice!
A hideous,
idiotic,
obscene buzzing,
a music
that finales into a child’s trauma,
into a sob that wrecks the world.
48.
Algeria: paratroopers on patrol
At the core of a war
there is something
survivors
will remember all their life
like a heady tang of arson.
French and German soldiers
are mixed into the future
with the burning elation of death:
emblems of what life
like a monument of earth and blood
owns at the core of a war.
54.
Algeria: new series of tortured and brutalised people
On the desert nomads
on the farm hands of Medina
on the wage slaves of Oran
on the petty clerks of Algiers
I write your name.
On the wretched people of Algeria
on the illiterate peoples of Arabia
on the underclass of Africa
on the enslaved people of the sub proletarian world
I write your name
O freedom!
(Here, Pasolini echoes Paul Éluard’s famous poem 1942 Liberté )
55.
Algeria: celebrating the liberation
Joy after after joy,
victory after victory!
People of colour,
Algeria is returned to history!
People of colour,
it lives the best days of its life!
Never will the light in their eyes shine purer,
never will happy gestures be more loving!
People of colour, these are the days of victory
for all the partisans in the world!
People of colour, it is in the joy of victory
that Resistance plants its roots and builds the future!
56.
Cut to black
Silence, buzz of an airplane and distant air raids.
After a few instants, the first caption.
Captions
Joy.
But so much inextinguishable terror.
In a thousand parts of the world.
And in our memory.
In a thousand parts of the soul, the war is not over.
Even if we don’t, don’t want to remember, war
is a terror that won’t stop, in the soul, in the world.
Extracted from Pier Paolo Pasolini, La rabbia/Anger,
translated by Cristina Viti, Tenement Press, 2022.