Film Comment Live: La rabbia di Pasolini + Walk Me Home

Part of: Film Comment Live: Hold Everything Dear — John Berger and Cinema, showcasing films renowned critic John Berger shaped, critiqued, or inspired to revive his intellectual and political legacy for modern film culture. Additional screenings at Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), Anthology Film Archives, the Museum of the Moving Image, and Metrograph.

La rabbia di Pasolini
Pier Paolo Pasolini, Giuseppe Bertolucci, Italy, 1963, 35mm, 53m
Italian with English subtitles
In 1962, the Italian producer Gastone Ferranti commissioned Pier Paolo Pasolini to make a newsreel using his archives from 1945–62. Pasolini’s film, a furious screed against the Western bourgeois world and its hunger for war, was feared by the producers as controversial, so they invited a right-wing journalist, Giovanni Guareschi, to make a second part, which would be combined with a cut-down version of Pasolini’s work and presented as one film. Pasolini disowned the resulting movie. In 2008, Giuseppe Bertolucci and the Cineteca di Bologna reconstructed Pasolini’s version of the film using the filmmaker’s shot list, dialogue transcript, and notes on music. The reconstruction only distills even further what John Berger wrote upon discovering the film in 2006: “La Rabbia, I would say, is a film inspired by a fierce sense of endurance, not anger. Pasolini looks at what is happening in the world with unflinching lucidity. (There are angels drawn by Rembrandt who have the same gaze). And he does so because reality is all we have to love. There’s nothing else.”

Walk Me Home
Timothy Neat, 1993, U.K., 98m
North American Premiere
Walk Me Home, directed by Timothy Neat and co-written by John Berger and Nella Bielski, returns to the question of postwar historical memory many decades later, using a different, but equally piercing mode. This elliptical, fictional feature follows a German research scientist, Cloud (Angela Winkler), who is visiting the Scottish island of Inchkenneth for a research project, and has strange, sensual, time-and-space hopping encounters with two men—one played by Paul McIsaac (from Robert Kramer’s Doc’s Kingdom, said to be inspired by Berger) and the other by Berger himself. Throughout, portraits by Jean Mohr punctuate the proceedings, as do absurdist interludes from the 1939 Laurel and Hardy film The Flying Deuces, exploring the possibilities of love and imagination in the wake of a century of war and the fall of communism. Walk Me Home makes its North American premiere as part of this series.