In 1962, Pier Paolo Pasolini filmed La Ricotta. Sixty years have passed since that pearl within his filmography, in which his vision of the world appears. The perspective of the artist whose ideas confront the established.
In the short film La ricotta, he officiates as director, and as Pasolini’s own alter ego, Orson Welles himself, another irreverent and independent temperament.
Pasolini was a heterogeneous intellectual: poet, playwright, essayist, filmmaker
In the film the martyrdom of Christ is parodied, but not from a purely sacrilegious pose, but from an inversion of the essential: the most important thing is not the kingdom of heaven, but the kingdom here, on earth. Happiness, future, bread, here in this world. The main character is Stracci (rags), the poor man eaten away by hunger, who works on the set as the “good thief” hammered on the cross next to Christ. To his wife and his children, Stracci gives all his food. He then gets enough ricotta cheese, but his irrepressible greed to eat while being “crucified” causes him to die of gastric congestion.
The blasphemous filming of the crucifixion of Jesus Christ takes place in a somewhat mountainous area, not far from a residential area. Stracci lays bare a Catholic Church more obsessed with its status than with the unfortunate, which recalls Pasolini’s questioning of the Church in his Escritos corsarios (the volume with the articles he published from 1973 until his assassination, edited posthumously). Critical darts that also reach religion only experienced as empty formalism, which is expressed by the actors not attuned to the ritual they represent, and more focused on their relaxed bodies and dancers to the rhythm of twist music. Cultural decline that is also revealed by the parodied poses of the characters of the Italian Renaissance painters, Pontormo and Giovanni Battista di Jacopo, called Rosso Fiorentino.
In the particular recreation of the torment of Christ in La ricotta, the foams of hypocrisy, superficiality and impoverished cultural traditions are mixed, which also resonates in Pasolini’s poem that Welles reads during an interview in which he dispatches against the mediocrity of his time: “I am a force from the past, only in tradition is my love. I come from the ruins of churches, from altars, from forgotten villages, in the Apennines and the Alps”. Romantic vindication of the pre-modern, of a past that drinks from richer sources than fast and superficial modernity.
And before being a filmmaker, Pasolini, who was born in Bologna in 1922, was a heterogeneous intellectual: poet, playwright, essayist, filmmaker. Traces of diversity as in Pessoa, Benjamin, Cocteau, Sartre. And man as wolf of man, in a Marxist rather than Hobbesian sense, was always one of his claims: “As long as man exploits man, as long as humanity is divided into masters and slaves, there will be neither order nor peace. This is the origin of all the evil of our time. Pasolini’s reflection on La rabbia (1963), a documentary in which he also alludes to the death of Marilyn Monroe as a swan song of beauty, and renews his lament for consumerism and the loss of the rural world among the gears of industrialization, alienation and dehumanization, while also advocating decolonization and recalling the class struggle from his Marxist eye, but not conditioned in his view by any party structure.
The “evil of division” is confirmed in Pajarracos y pajaritos (1966), with its raven who, after presenting himself as a complete Marxist, affirms that humanity is divided into two groups in continuous conflict.
And in his filmography, Pasolini first adhered to neorealism in Accatone (1961) and Mamma Roma (1962), with Anna Magnani; and later expanded into Teorema (1968), which brought him international recognition; The crudeness of Pocilga (1969); and the Trilogy of life, with The Decameron (1971), The Canterbury Tales (1972) and The Thousand and One Nights (1974): Oedipus the King (1967) and Medea (1969), with María Callas in the role of the character tragic of Euripides, between the fertile land of the mythical and the echo of the reflections of the wise Chiron; and at the end of the road, in 1975, shortly before his assassination in Ostia, still with overtones of mystery: Saló or the 120 days of Sodom, in which, under the inspiration of the Marquis de Sade, he resorts to sadism, and the tormented and degraded bodies, in an intense repudiation of fascism.
Filming course to which is added the theoretical reflection on cinema in its essential “Discourse on the shot-sequence or cinema as semiology of reality” (1971).
Orson Welles, who is preparing to premiere The Process, in La ricotta represents Pasolini himself
Ricotta is part of the collective work RoGoPaG, with four parts, directed by Jean-Luc Godard, Ugo Gregoretti, Pasolini and Roberto Rosellini; hence the title of the film as an abbreviation of the surnames of the authors. Pasolini’s iconoclasm on his part meant that he was accused of attacking religion and sentenced to four months in prison, which he avoided by paying a fine, until, finally, the sentence was annulled by the court of appeals.
The Welles as an actor who represents Pasolini himself in La ricotta is the one who, at that time, is preparing to premiere his famous adaptation of Kafka’s The Trial, with Anthony Perkins, and who is four years away from giving birth to Midnight Bells, in which his love for Shakespeare raises him perhaps to the pinnacle of his film temple. The atheism of the author of El Ciudadano had no qualms about associating himself with criticism of religion, but such criticism is not what it seems at first glance. Pasolini, in fact, modeled his vital nonconformity from a veiled religiosity. As he rails against consumerism and leans back into a romanticized Marxism via Gramsci, Pasolini drinks in his nostalgia for human works as ladders to something greater. His statements to the French writer René de Ceccatty, collected in his book Pasolini (Gallimard, 2005), can be understood in this orientation: “I am anticlerical (I am not afraid to say so!), but I know that there are two thousand years of Christianity in me: I, with my ancestors, built the Romanesque churches, and then the Gothic ones, and then the Baroque churches: they are my inheritance, in content and style”.
This coincides with the artist’s insistence on his respect for the Christian heritage, and his passion for recreating the life of Christ in The Gospel according to Saint Matthew (1964).
At the end of the day, the artist Pasolini’s rudder opens the waters to recover some spirituality. In the world of post-pandemic angst, where news, entertainment, gadgets and goods are desperately devoured, Pasolini’s ideas can remind us of the dignity of life, beyond what is bought and sold.
*Philosopher, writer, teacher.
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