La rabbia

EN

Oswald Stack: What do you feel about La Rabbia?

Pier Paolo Pasolini: La Rabbia is a strange film because it is entirely made up of documentary material, I didn’t shoot a single frame. Mainly it’s pieces from newsreels, so the material is extremely banal and down-right reactionary. I chose some sequences from newsreels of the late fifties and put them together my own way – they’re mostly about the Algerian War, the reign of Pope John, and there are a few minor episodes like the return of the Italian prisoners of war from Russia. My criterion was, let’s say, that of a marxist denunciation of the society of the time, and what was happening in it.
One odd thing about the film is that the commentary is in verse: I wrote some poetry specially for it, and it is read by Giorgio Bassani, who dubbed Orson Welles in La Ricotta, and by the painter Renato Guttuso. The best thing in my half of the film, and the only bit that is worth keeping, is the sequence devoted to the death of Marilyn Monroe. 

The film came to a bad end, didn’t it, because of Guareschi’s part?

It’s not a very interesting story. I did my episode, thinking that was all there was to it, but when I’d finished the producer decided he wanted to have a commercial hit and so he had the brilliant idea of getting another episode with a commentary from the other side of the political spectrum. However, the person he chose, Guareschi, was unacceptable. So there was some trouble with the producer, and anyway the film was a flop because people weren’t interested in such highly political material.

Oswald Stack in conversation with Pier Paolo Pasolini1

• 1Oswald Stack, Pasolini (Bloomington: Indiane University Press, 1969), 71-72.