![Sample our Arts journals, sign in here to start your access, latest two volumes FREE to you for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/110799/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Arts.jpg"})
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Rothberg, Implicated Subjects, 32. Rothberg’s work is infused with the belief that our conceptual vocabulary for understanding power, privilege, and violence is not capacious or precise enough. How are we to define our compromise with forms of exploitation far away in time and space? In what ways are we implicated in events that seem to lie beyond the capability of our individual action? The categories of guilt and innocence are inadequate, as are those of detachment and disinterestedness. By interlacing the notions of Jasper’s ‘political guilt’, Arendt’s ‘collective responsibility,’ and Levi’s ‘gray zone’, Rothberg’s study enables us to map out a murky, ambiguous area of responsibility: that of implication.
2 In the writing that appears before the opening credits, Pasolini admits that he conceived Rage ‘to not follow a chronological or even logical order, perhaps’. The film starts by focusing on the year 1956, with the Soviet invasion of Hungary (the original version, which was cut for commercial reasons that will be discussed shortly, was planned to start with the funeral of Alcide De Gasperi, former prime minister of Italy, on August 21, 1954), and ends with the feat of German Titov, a Soviet cosmonaut who, in 1961, completed seventeen orbits around the earth in twenty-four hours.
3 See Benedetti, “La rabbia di Pasolini,” 40.
4 On the work’s genesis, see Chiesi, “Il mosaico elegiaco di Pasolini,” 45, and Rizzarelli, “Un blob su commissione,” 267-276.
5 Pasolini, “Pier Paolo Pasolini ritira la firma.” Unless otherwise indicated translations are by Zakiya Hanafi.
6 Ibid.
7 Ibid.
8 According to Roberto Chiesi, rather than censorship, it was more likely ‘a marketing strategy that induced the producer to couple Pasolini’s movie with another medium-length film’. (Chiesi, “Il mosaico elegiaco di Pasolini,” 46).
9 This is how Pasolini reconstructs the affair: ‘[w]e considered various solutions and decided to follow my film with another part given to another filmmaker. I was thinking about Indro Montanelli, Luigi Barzini or Giovanni Ansaldo. Instead, at a certain point, the name of Guareschi came up. At first I refused. I was annoyed. Then, a series of considerations led me to change my mind. I remembered the Guareschi who made Bertoldo, which gave birth, in a certain sense, to my antifascism. Then I remembered the Guareschi who went into a concentration camp and stayed there out of pride. Then, Don Camillo, which is politically apathetic but not dangerous. And I resigned myself to it. In any case, my film had already been finished when Guareschi came into the picture’ (Pasolini, “Pier Paolo Pasolini ritira la firma.”)
10 ‘If Eichmann could return from the grave and make a film, this is what it’d be like. […] It isn’t a film that just promotes an “anything goes” political position or is only conservative and reactionary. It’s worse. There’s hatred for Americans, and the Nuremburg trials are defined as “a vendetta.” It talks about John Kennedy and shows only his wife, as if he didn’t exist. There’s hatred for blacks, and it’s pretty close to saying that we should line them all up against a firing squad wall. There’s a white girl who gives a flower to a Negro, and immediately afterward the speaker unleashes a torrent of abuse on her. There’s a hymn to the paratroopers, exalted as magnificent soldiers. There’s anti-Communism that isn’t neo-Fascist but comes directly from the 1930s. It’s got everything: racism, the yellow peril, and the typical Fascist presentation of “evidence” – an accumulation of facts that cannot be demonstrated’ (Pasolini, “Pier Paolo Pasolini ritira la firma.”)
11 The premiere was held at the Lux theater in Genoa on April 13, 1963. See De Laude, ‘Note ai testi,’ 3068.
12 Film by Giuseppe Bertolucci, based on an idea by Tatti Sanguineti. Editing: Fabio Bianchini Pepegna. Production: Gian Luca Farinelli, Giampaolo Sovena, Gialuca and Stefano Curti for Istituto Luce/Minerva Pictures Group/Cineteca di Bologna. Distribution: Istituto Luce. Length: 82’. Bertolucci’s version restores the first sixteen scenes that were expunged from the 1963 film. He used detailed notes included in the original screenplay, where Pasolini specifies the titles of the newsreel sequences and provides a transcription of the reporter’s voice he wanted to include. My analysis of Rage considers the 1963 version, the one actually shown in theatres soon after the film was released.
13 Pasolini, “Pier Paolo Pasolini ritira la firma.” The reasons for Warner Bros’ limited distribution and early pulling of the film from theaters are unclear. Chiesi hypothesises that ‘the determining factor was the ferocious attacks on the United States in Guareschi’s film’ (Chiesi, “Il mosaico elegiaco di Pasolini,” 47).
14 Sanzio Viano, A Certain Realism, 117.
15 Debord, The Society of the Spectacle.
16 Pasolini, La rabbia (screenplay), 399.
17 On how Pasolini’s montage is ‘capable of holding together events that are geographically distant and distinct but united historically by their scope’, see Perugini and Zucconi, “La rabbia: Pasolini’s color ecstasy,” 105.
18 Crucial in this regard is Rothberg’s distinction between those ‘who seem themselves as “disinterested spectators” of act of victimization and those who recognize that they may be implicated in events that are happening to others’, (Implicated Subjects, 32).
19 ‘The best thing, the only bit worth preserving, is the sequence on Marilyn Monroe’s death’ (Pasolini, Saggi sulla letteratura e sull’arte, XCII).
20 Words taken from the script preceding the film’s opening credits.
21 See Pasolini, “Pier Paolo Pasolini ritira la firma.”
22 The original screenplay shows the atomic bomb coming after the Marilyn sequence, but not before it as well. What Pasolini would have liked to come before were images of ‘concentration camps, extermination, hangings, executions, piles of corpses at Buchwald’. See Pasolini, La rabbia (screenplay), 397.
23 Pasolini’s theory of montage emerges in the essay “La lingua scritta della realtà” [“The Written Language of Reality”] where the author claims that the most important moment for the construction of meaning lies in the opposition between one image and another: ‘[i]t is through such relationship of opposition that montage performs its syntactic function.’ Pasolini’s idea of montage is strikingly similar to Benjamin’s. On the similarities between the two authors there is an extensive scholarship (see at least Agamben, Il regno e la gloria; Didi-Huberman, Survivance des lucioles; Gordon, Pasolini: Forms of Subjectivity; Mariniello, “Temporality and the Culture of Intervention”; Trentin, “Organizing Pessimism.”). A recent article by Monti, devoted to the similarities between Rage and The Theses on the Philosophy of History, convincingly demonstrates Pasolini’s direct knowledge of Benjamin (this is an issue on which previous critics had debated, but without coming to a solution). See Monti, “La rabbia.”
24 The film treatment appeared in issue 38 (September 20, 1962) of Vie Nuove, in response to a reader who had asked Pasolini a few questions about the movie. The text opens with an introduction, from which the cited words are taken. See Pasolini, “Note e notizie sui testi,” 3073.
25 Pasolini, “Appendice a La Rabbia,” 407.
26 Reading and commenting on these pages, Stefano Bellin asks fundamental questions, which are worth quoting here: ‘[w]hat are the limits and the actual potential of art? Is there a risk of overstating the power of literature/art/cinema? How does this affect artistic production? To what extent can art generate a healthy feeling of implication? How can we address/bridge the gap between the recognition of implication - via the poet’s disruptive work - and the political action that might emerge from it?’
27 On the debate between these two conflicting philosophical positions, see Callard, On Anger. A eulogy of rage as the guardian of morality is also present in Sloterdijk, Rage and Time.
28 Pasolini, “Appendice a La Rabbia,” 47.
29 On the Pasolini-Debord connection, see Benedetti, “La rabbia di Pasolini,” 44‐49; Leger, ‘Pasolini’s Contribution to La rabbia,’ 56-68. It should be noted that the détournement technique generated quite different results: Pasolini’s sophisticated lyricism is very distant from the crudeness of Debord’s cine-punch.
30 Rizzarelli, “Un blob su commissione,” 274.
31 ‘The reconstruction of this book is entrusted to the reader. It is the reader who must piece back together the fragments of a scattered and incomplete work. It is the reader who must reunite passages that, despite their distance, complement each other. It is the reader who must organize contradictory moments by looking for the essential unity.’ (Translated from the Italian; Pier Paolo Pasolini, Scritti corsari, 267).
32 For a detailed analysis of these sequences, see Didi-Huberman, “Film, essai, poème,” 28 (an expanded version of this article appears in Didi-Huberman, Sentir le grisou); Annovi, Pier Paolo Pasolini, 22-25.
33 Pasolini, “Osservazioni sul piano-sequenza.”
34 On this topic, see especially Ryan-Scheutz, Sex, the Self, and the Sacred, 35-41.
35 Pasolini, La rabbia (screenplay), 397.
36 Pasolini, “Note e notizie sui testi,” 3073.
37 As Annovi remarks, choosing to include only photographs of Marilyn in this sequence – motionless death masks – instead of clips from newsreels, passing over all moving images, is in line with the lethal spin that Pasolini gives to celebrity (Annovi, Pier Paolo Pasolini, 95-96).
38 See especially Pasolini, “10 giugno 1974.”
39 Guttuso articulates the ‘prose voice’, which informs us about what is happening, while Bassani is the ‘voice of poetry’, reminding us ‘of what we have chosen to forget […]. We are made ashamed of our forgetting’ (Berger, “The Chorus Is in Our Heads,” 150). Both John Berger (in the article cited here) and Carla Benedetti (in “La rabbia di Pasolini”) have compared these two voices to the chorus in ancient Greek tragedy: both are dislocated from the events and prepared to comment on events whose outcomes are already known to the spectators. For a detailed analysis of how these two voices function and of the entire audio component of the film (particularly its dissonance with the images), see Rascaroli, “Sound: The Politics of the Sonic Interstice”).
40 Pasolini, La rabbia (screenplay), 398.
41 See especially “Il genocidio.” See also the unpublished piece ‘Sviluppo e progresso’ in which Pasolini writes: ‘“[p]rogress” is therefore an ideal notion (social and political): whereas development is a pragmatic and economic matter. Because of this dissociation, there needs to be “synchrony” between “development” and ‘progress’, given that true progress is not conceivable (it would seem) unless the economic prerequisites needed to achieve it are created’.
42 Annovi notes that Pasolini presents us with images of Marilyn Monroe that are three degrees removed from the actress’s body, since the photographs are first reproduced in illustrated magazines and then transferred to the screen through another mass medium (Annovi, Pier Paolo Pasolini, 26). On celebrity’s infinite reproducibility, see also Carnevali, Social Appearances, 226-232.
43 Most of the images and film clips that depicted the effects of the atomic bomb on bodies were censored, coming into the public domain only at the end of the American occupation of Japan, in 1952 (until the late 1960s in the United States). On the mushroom as the icon of atomic destruction, see MacLear, Beclouded Visions; and Weart, The Rise of Nuclear Fear, 283-284. Weart tells us that competing images initially included forms of the raspberry, the cauliflower, the brain, and the medusa. The mushroom prevailed not only as a pharmakon, but also because, when Hiroshima was destroyed, the first thing that grew out of the ground was a matsutake mushroom. On this point, see also Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World.
44 See Shaviro, The Cinematic Body, 54; and Crary, “Terminal Radiance,” 60.
45 Regarding the split between image and event (primarily but not exclusively about September 11) see especially Dinoi, Lo sguardo e l’evento.
46 Didi-Huberman, “Film, essai, poème,” 124.
47 To explore these issues further, see Sontag’s classic book, Regarding the Pain of Others.
48 Even though Rage does not constitute a new cinematographic genre, it does present very bold experimental elements, which led to incomprehension among early – and later – reviewers of the film. Among these was Alberto Moravia, who thought the commentary in Rage was too ‘literary’: Pasolini should have kept in mind that the audience he was addressing was composed of ‘spectators’ not ‘readers’ (Moravia, “Pasolini nella trappola di Guareschi”). Alfonso Berardinelli, who reviewed the film in 2008 (the year that Bertolucci restored it), focused more on the audio aspect of the words, but he commented on the same lines: ‘Rage is a film that you listen to more than you watch it. The argumentation often breaks down, loses itself, and when the political interpretation seems (sounds) obvious or risky to him, he makes up for it by setting in motion his elementary, obsessive, iterative metaphorical and rhetorical device’. (Berardinelli, “Se il mondo intero”).
49 The most important works on the essay film are: Rascaroli, The Personal Camera; and Rascaroli, How the Essay Film Thinks; Corrigan, The Essay Film; Alter, The Essay Film After Fact; and Alter and Corrigan (eds.), Essays on the Essay Film: an anthology that collects essays written from the time the form was first codified to the present day.
50 Astruc, “Naissance d’une nouvelle avant-garde.”
51 Bazin, Chris Marker, 257-260.
52 Adorno, “The Essay as Form (1958).”
53 Bazin, “Bazin on Marker (1958).”
54 On redistributing the passive and active roles in viewing, see Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator; and Montani, L’immaginazione intermediale.
55 On the convergence between bystander and spectator, see Boltanski, Distant Suffering.
56 Pasolini, La rabbia (screenplay), 360.
57 On the problem of sensorial deprivation caused by geographic distance, see Ginzburg, “Killing a Chinese Mandarin,” 46-60.
58 Arendt, The Life of The Mind, 92-93.
59 Ibid., 40.
60 Pulcini, Tra cura e giustizia, 14.
61 Pasolini, La rabbia (screenplay), 399.
62 On the problem of the spectator who watches catastrophe at a distance, see Blumenberg’s classic, Shipwreck with Spectator.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Maria Anna Mariani
Maria Anna Mariani is Assistant Professor of Italian Literature at the University of Chicago. She is the author of the books Italian Literature in the Nuclear Age: A Poetics of the Bystander (Oxford UP 2022), Primo Levi e Anna Frank (Carocci 2018), and Sull’autobiografia contemporanea (Carocci 2012). Email: [email protected]