Caught between a silly past and a cruel future, the Pasolinian present is marked by war. The montage of archives that he proposes crushes under the images of repression the emancipatory aspirations of the workers, the reflection of freedom still present "on the face of the poor and the hungry". The chosen excerpts - the film is the result of a commission to reedit the newsreels of the Italian cine-newspaper Mondo Libero - show a world of violence and suffering. Unsurprisingly, it is through the text that the wounds of the 20th century are exposed. The commentary read in alternation by Giorgio Bassani and Renato Guttuso connects the French exactions in Algeria with the Soviet painting or the overflow of pomp of the coronation of Elizabeth II. Little by little, the poetry of the Italian filmmaker, who is not afraid of complexity or harsh repetition, finds the flaw, reveals the impossible concordance between human suffering and the ideological, technical or cultural proposals that try to make people forget its existence, or worse, to explain its necessity. Placed at the very end of this work of reconstitution by Guiseppe Bertolucci, an excerpt from an interview gives some keys to the reading of the film. The rage must always be maintained, says the director, it cannot rest on prefabricated motives. The criticism, its corollary, must thus tolerate no dogma, no ready-made formula.

Martin Bonnard
Postdoctoral research fellow at McGill University
and labdoc member

Presented in dialogue with We Are Become Death of Jean-Gabriel Périot

With the support of