Original subtitles

- PASOLINI NEXT TO US -

Yes, here is fine.

- Okay? - Okay. This way we'll get a medium shot.

People, please...

You can put it at 3 meters...

I think we can even offset the close-up...

Now, shut the lights for a while, otherwise everything will burn.

Ennio!

- Then, when the film is finished, Stefano wanted to talk to him. - Okay.

Let's hope that tomorrow he can do that. He's in hospital.

Make up your mind, because these new ones have to get done,

the ones that Bonacelli and Curval do, we have to do them.

Third and fourth group. You have the same list as me.

I mean, Bruno gouging out his eyes, the scalping of Faridah,

the whipping of Antinisca.

Come on, attention! Roll film!

No, it was good like that, I could see him like that!

Stay there. Bend over and watch what they're doing to him.

Okay, roll film. Action! Scream, Tonino! Scream!

You probably met the people because you were there...

Before it was for "Sight and Sound".

They want it shortly for the issue coming out.

- Have you heard of "Sight and Sound"? - No.

It's an English movie magazine, the most important in the world.

And for "Mademoiselle", I don't know if you've heard of it.

These are 3 very different audiences, I don't know what language to use.

- I imagine you don't worry about where they go. - No, no.

- Really? - An author, regardless of his level of expression,

must know who his product is intended for.

I can't produce boots for a cripple.

- Understand? - Yes, but I think that it's unimportant, because then

I put the material already published in "Bianco e Nero" together

and take some pieces from this discussion.

I understand. Then, you take care of it.

- You are my interlocutor. - Yes. - Fine.

What is this?

This is the microphone.

- How does it work? - Connect it inside, no?

They are filming what you are saying.

- Really? - Yes. - No, I'm ashamed!

- You're ashamed? - Ah, I'm ashamed!

I'm ashamed, I can't speak!

As you know, the film is taken from De Sade's "The 120 Days of Sodom",

but it's set during the Republic of Sal�,

in 1944-1945.

So, there's lots of sex,

but the sex in the film is De Sade's typical sex,

which is characteristically exclusively sadomasochist,

in all of the atrocity of his details and his situations.

This sex interests me the way it interested De Sade,

that is, for what it is,

but in my film, all of this sex takes on a particular meaning:

It is a metaphor of what power does to the human body,

its commercialisation, its reduction to a thing,

which is typical of power, of any power.

If in the place of the word "God", in De Sade, I put the word "power",

the result is a strange and extremely current ideology.

This currency marks a true change

with respect to the films I have made up to now,

that is the "Trilogy of Life": "The Decameron",

"The Canterbury Tales" and "The Arabian Nights".

It is pure Marxism, Marx's "Manifest" says just this:

Power commercialises the body, it transforms the body into goods.

When Marx speaks of the man exploiting man,

he is really talking about a sadistic relationship.

- SAL�, OR THE 120 DAYS OF SODOM -

That sadists have always been powerful is a point of fact.

In fact, in De Sade, the 4 people

that perform the terrible acts during the 120 days

are a banker, a duke,

a bishop and a president of the court

and they represent power,

the secular arm of power.

They are 4 Nazi-Fascists of that period,

however, they are particularly cultured,

able to really read Nietzsche or Baudelaire well

perhaps even Lautr�amont.

They are rather ambiguous characters.

And then, above all, the film is devoid of psychology

and so it's devoid of real personal information.

Another inspiring element of the film

is the memory of those days I lived,

the days of the Republic of Sal�.

- Were you there in those days? - I wasn't in Sal�, but in Friuli.

Friuli had become a German region,

it had been bureaucratically annexed to Germany.

It was called the "Adriatic Coast".

There was a Gauleiter, which was a sort of governor,

from September 8, 1943 until the end of the war.

And so, I lived frightening days in Friuli.

To begin with, there had been one of the toughest partisan struggles

and my brother died in that struggle.

Then, it was one of the cruellest

because Friuli was completely under German control

and there few Fascists were seen, they were true assassins.

Among other things, Friuli was continuously bombed by the Americans

because the Flying Fortresses dropped bombs over Friuli

on their way to Germany.

Roundups, deserted towns, bombings

almost futile, pure cruelty.

- What city were you in? - I was in Casarsa, my mother's hometown.

- Casarsa? - Casarsa.

- Where you were born? - No, I was born in Bologna.

It's my mother's hometown, where I spent part of my childhood,

where I went every summer as a child. In 1943 we were evacuated.

- Evacuated? - That means "refugees".

- From Bologna? - Yes.

- So, you didn't work there. - No, I was still in school.

I wrote poems, which were my first Friulano poems.

- What year were you born in? - 1922.

How can this film's message be understood

by today's young people?

I don't think that the young will understand it.

I have no illusions of being understood by the young

because it's impossible to establish a cultural relationship with them

because they live new values which have nothing in common

with the old values that I refer to.

It's as if they have an agreement!

They talk, they laugh and they behave the same way,

they use the same gestures,

they love the same things, drive the same motorcycles...

In short, I saw uniforms!

When I was a boy, I saw the Fascist youth movement,

but I have never seen people conform like they do today,

that is not in the name of an organisation,

they are not called Boy Scouts, Balilla or Fascist Youth,

they may not have those names,

but it's a conformism based on this informal

and self-creating youth movement.

It is all based on children, on young people.

The horrible thing about journalism and about the Italian culture

is that young people are free, they are free of complexes,

they are uninhibited, they live a happy life.

Imagine, the entire Italian bourgeoisie is convinced of this.

And the entire left-wing, as well.

They think that these young people are finally the young people...

Do you follow me?

They don't understand, they don't see, because they don't love them!

Those who don't love farmers don't understand their tragedy.

Those who don't love the young couldn't care less about them.

They don't care about them because they don't love them.

Not having loved yesterday's young

they don't realise today's young have changed.

They are always the same for them.

I, having loved them dearly, have always followed them.

So, now this is a catastrophe for me!

It is all dedicated to love.

All of my books and my narrative works

speak of the young.

I loved them and I depicted them.

Now I couldn't make a film about these imbeciles that surround us.

Sometimes my eyes literally well up with tears

when I see Ninetto's son, who is a year old.

Tears come to my eyes in pity for his future.

Yes, because the fathers of these, terrible young people,

the fathers of this new generation of hateful, young people,

I speak of the masses but, poor things, there are infinite exceptions.

In the big industrialised cities

the young generation has become hateful, unbearable.

After all, what have their fathers done,

those who are 40-50 years old?

What have they done to prevent these children from becoming what they are?

The fathers who have children from 15 to 20 years old

objectively, can no longer teach them anything,

because they have not experienced the life their children are living.

They have no right to say: "Look"

When they were young, their problem was finding bread,

while their childrers problem is finding a motorcycle.

So, they cannot tell them: "When I was young... "

No, for their type of life was so different

that they have no right to teach and so they stay quiet.

But which generation created the conditions

so that their children could live like they do?

It's always their fault!

So, poor fools, they are powerless in relationships with their children

we can even understand them,

but they are responsible for this situation.

Today's ideal is consumerism,

there is an enormous group extending from Milan to Bologna,

it includes Rome and spreads to the south.

It is a homologating civilisation that makes everything the same.

So it's clear that the barriers fall, that small groups disband.

- Without ideology? - What, it has no ideology?

With a consumer ideology, you don't... Instead of having a flag,

the clothes they wear are their flag.

Some of the means and some of the external phenomena have changed,

but, in practice, it's a depauperation of individuality

which is disguised through its valorisation.

- CIRCLE OF MANIAS -

The film was offered to Sergio Citti

and I had worked with him on the screenplay.

My main contribution to the screenplay

was to give it a dantesque type structure

which De Sade probably already had in mind.

I divided the screenplay into circles.

I gave the screenplay a sort of verticality

and a dantesque type of order.

But while we were working on the screenplay,

Sergio Citti little by little, lost interest

because he had an idea for another film,

instead, I fell in love with it little by little.

And I definitely fell in love with it when we got the brilliant idea

of transporting De Sade into 1944 at Sal�.

During the so-called "repressive" ages sex was a joy,

because it was practiced in secret

and it made a mockery of all of the obligations and duties

that the repressive power imposed.

Instead, in tolerant societies, as the one we live in is declared to be,

sex produces neuroses

because the freedom granted is false

and, above all, it is granted from above and not won from below.

Therefore, the population does not live sexual freedom,

instead they adapt to a freedom which is granted to them.

And so, at a certain point,

one of the characters in the film says exactly this:

"Repressive societies repress everything,"

"therefore, men can do anything".

But I have added this concept which for me is lapidary:

Permissive societies permit a few things

and only those things can be done.

Hey!

That is terrible!

In Italy, today, some things are allowed.

Before, in reality, nothing was granted.

The women were almost like those in Arab countries.

Sex was hidden and you couldn't talk about it,

and you couldn't even show a partially nude breast in a magazine.

Now a few things are granted, they allow photos of naked women,

but not of men.

#On the bridge of Perati, black flag. #

#It is Julia's mourning as she goes to war. #

#It is Julia's mourning as she goes to war. #

#On the bridge of Perati, black flag. #

#The best of the young are buried. #

#The best of the young are buried. #

Then, this great freedom in heterosexual couples,

freedom, so to speak, because it cannot be otherwise,

and then it is obligatory.

Since it is granted, it has become obligatory,

since it is granted,

a young man cannot but take advantage of this concession.

Therefore, he feels obliged to always be part of a couple

and the couple has become a nightmare, an obsession,

instead of a freedom.

Have you noticed how fashionable couples are today?

But it is a completely false and insincere couple,

frighteningly insincere.

See these kids, under the power of who knows what romantic notion,

they walk hand-in-hand, or arm-in-arm, a young man and a girl.

"What is this sudden romanticism?", you may ask. Nothing.

It is simply the new couple as revived by consumerism

because this consumerist couple buys. - Exactly.

Hand in hand they go to La Rinascente, to Upim...

Italians are neurotic.

At one time they were very well-balanced, sexually,

in times of repression.

With the advent of tolerance they've all become neurotic.

Besides the anarchy of power,

my film is about the possible non-existence of history,

that is, it is in contrast with history

as seen by the Eurocentric culture,

that is middle-class rationalism or empiricism on the one hand

and Marxism on the other.

Take France, for example,

in its relations with Algeria and the Third World in general.

France, which has reached maximum rationalism of the world.

For France, the word "freedom" corresponds to "rationality".

Now France has reached a sort of saturation

in terms of its own rationality.

And so, how does a nation like France stand on this flood of irrationality

which arrives in the wake of the Third World, a world of hunger?

There is a huge world, the Third World...

The Third World populations precisely because they've been repressed

and kept at the margins of society and political life,

like all marginal areas have preserved

an earlier sort of culture,

which, in some way, was prehistoric in nature.

France sets itself as the tamer of rationality

to the colonial populations.

In fact, it educates them very well.

France has taken nothing from them, it has only given.

It gave them a model of education, rationality, civilisation,

but did not know how to learn anything from them

because this religious, irrational, prehistoric type

that the Third World brings with it cannot be rationalised.

Therefore, the French must modify their reason

if they want to understand, if they don't want to remain behind.

Paris is a marvellous city that I admire

because the matrix of my culture is there.

You cannot but admire it,

but you feel that it is farther away, more remote and archaic

than a little city of any developing nation.

The modern world will be a synthesis

between today's middle-class western world

and the world of the underdeveloped nations

that are meeting history now,

that is, western rationality will be modified by the presence

of another type of world vision that these peoples express.

Modernity consists in this modification.

It is true that man is always the same, but it is also true that he changes.

Now more than ever because at this moment we are being threatened

by real anthropological mutation.

The true apocalypse is that technology,

the era of applied science,

will transform man into something different from what he was before.

Something has happened now that has no equivalent in the history of man.

- CIRCLE OF SHIT -

And we are terrified by the idea that our children and descendents

will no longer be like us.

It's a sort of end of the world.

Sadomasochism is an eternal category of man:

It was there in De Sade's time, it's here today, etc.

But this is not what I care about.

I also care about this, but the real sense of sex in my film

is a metaphor of the relation between power with its subject.

Therefore, in reality, it is true for all times.

The drive came from the fact

that I detest, above all things, today's power.

Everyone hates the power he is subject to.

Therefore, I hate the power of today, of 1975, with particular vehemence.

It is a power that manipulates the bodies in a horrible way,

it has nothing to envy

of Himmler's or Hitler's manipulation.

It manipulates them, transforming their conscience, in the worst way,

establishing new values which are alienating and false.

The values of consumerism,

which accomplish what Marx called genocide

of the living, real, previous cultures.

For example, it has destroyed Rome. The Romans no longer exist.

The young Roman no longer exists. He is a cadaver.

A shadow of himself, which continues to exist biologically

but which is in a state of limbo

suspended between the ancient values of his popular, Roman culture

and the new lower middle-class, consumerist values,

which have been imposed on him.

Then, this type of change has spread the ideology

of consumeristic hedonism amongst the Italians,

an ideology which is, perhaps stupidly, secular and rational.

It is nearsighted, narrow.

This ideology affects all of the Italians, intellectuals included.

Without wanting to, I also participate in this ideology, in a certain sense

because I, too, am happy to have a car

or to push a button and turn on the heat.

I, too, in a certain sense, tend towards superfluous goods.

Except that I save myself from all this thanks to culture, etc.

In this, I am privileged.

However, the enormous mass of the Italians

has fully fallen into this mechanism.

Values have fallen and they have been replaced by others.

Behaviour models have fallen and were then replaced by others.

This replacement was not the will of the people,

but it was imposed by the consumerist power,

held by the large Italian multi-national industry

and even by the national one made up of pseudo industrialists,

that wanted the Italians to consume a certain type of goods in a certain way.

And to consume them they had to create another human model.

An old farmer, traditionalist and religious,

did not consume junk food

advertised on television.

Instead, a way had to be found so that he would consume it.

In reality, the producers force the consumers to eat shit.

Knapp bouillon or...

They give adulterated, bad things,

little robiola cheeses, processed cheese for babies,

all horrible things that are shit.

If I made a film on an industrialist from Milan that produces cookies,

advertises them and makes the consumers eat them,

the result would be a terrible film on pollution, on adulteration,

on oil made from the bones of carrion.

I could make a film like that, but I can't!

How can I wait a year, first thinking about it and then shoot it?

It would be more useful, in the direct, practical sense of the word,

to show reality as it is. But why bother?

It would be self-punishment.

Power remains exactly the same, only its characteristics change,

the subject is no longer parsimonious or religious,

he is a consumer and so

he is short-sighted, irreligious, secular, etc.

The cultural characteristics change, but the relationship is identical.

Therefore, it is a film not only about power,

but about what I call "the anarchy of power".

Nothing is more anarchic than power. Power does what it wants

and what it wants is totally arbitrary

or dictated by its economic reasons

which escape common logic.

Both Christianity and Marxism have always been imposed from above,

they have never come from below.

The principle of submission

might be a bit similar to Marx's death instinct, no?

Co-existent with the aggressive spirit of love.

In my opinion, it continued to exist unchanged under Christianity,

because Christianity had quickly become the State religion,

that is from the dominating class and it was imposed,

therefore it did not change these profound instincts.

Instead the only ideological system which has truly involved

the dominated classes, as well, is consumerism,

because it is the only one that went all the way,

which gives a certain aggressiveness

because this aggressiveness is necessary to consumption.

If one is purely submissive,

he follows the pure instinct of submission like an old farmer

who would lower his head in resignation,

which is a sublime act, like heroism.

Now this spirit of resignation, of submission no longer exists;

how can a consumer be resigned

or accept a, so to speak, archaic, backward and inferior state?

He must fight to raise his social status.

"I lower my head in the name of God" is already a great phrase.

While now, the consumer does not even know he lowers his head,

to the contrary he stupidly believes

he has not lowered it and that he has won his rights.

To the contrary, he is always there demanding his rights,

believing they say he's right, instead he is a poor fool.

Power is always a codifier and ritual.

Without wanting to, I found myself representing in this film

both the proper middle-class life

with its parlours, its tea, its double-breasted blazers,

and the Nazi ceremony,

in all of its macabre solemnity, gloomy and wretched,

because power is ritual and a codifier.

But that which ritualises, which codifies

is always nothingness, pure will, that is, its own anarchy.

- CIRCLE OF BLOOD -

Men were in need of a myth.

However, in the average farming world

myths were always relived through rituals.

The Mass was a ritual which, for millenniums, crystallised

a religious creed.

All of the ancient religions can be summarised in one model,

that of the eternal return:

Death and then the resurrection.

Death and resurrection, of nature, grass, harvests...

This eternal return no longer has any sense for modern man.

The seasonal cycle has been replaced

by infinite cycles of production and consumption,

that of the bicycle, the automobile, clothing...

They are many small cycles.

Produce and consume, produce and consume

is an artificial cycle, rather than natural, but still a cycle.

Today, rituals are of another type,

for example lining up in front of a TV

or waiting in a queue of cars on the week-end

or going on a picnic in a field.

Every power has its forms of ritual.

One of the features of the disappearance of the myth

and the ancient, farmer ritual,

replaced by industrialisation, is the disappearance of initiation.

For the Catholic religion, puberty had Communion and Confirmation,

which now no longer have any weight, they no longer have any meaning.

Now, there is no initiation because a newborn is already a consumer.

There is no initiation into the consumerist society.

The young people have

the same authority as consumers as the elders do.

Man has always been a conformist.

His main characteristic is that of conforming

to any type of power or quality of life he finds at birth.

Perhaps, biologically, man is narcissist, rebellious,

he loves his own identity, etc.,

but it's society that makes him conformist and he's lowered his head

once and for all, before the obligations of society.

I do not arouse pity through the victims,

if not just barely, with the utmost discretion.

The film would have been horrible, unbearable.

If I had created likable victims who cried and moved you,

you would have left the movie theatre after 5 minutes.

And then, above all, I don't do it because I don't believe in it.

There is someone who rebels, but only just barely,

unconsciously and he is just one.

It's the culmination of the film: He dies clenching his fist.

But don't write this, I want it to be a surprise.

I don't believe there will ever be a society in which man is free.

So, it is futile to hope so.

But, we must never hope in anything. Hope is a terrible thing,

invented by the parties to keep their members happy.

I don't write like I used to,

which is the same as saying that I no longer write.

At first, when I began to make films,

I thought it was only the adoption of a different technique,

I would almost say of a different literary technique.

Then, instead, I realised, bit by bit,

that it was the adoption of a different language.

Therefore, I abandoned the Italian language,

which I used to express myself as a man of letters,

to adopt cinematographic language.

I have said many times, in protest, in total contestation,

that I would have liked to renounce the Italian nationality.

In making films, in a sense I've renounced the Italian language,

that is, my nationality.

But there's another truth, perhaps more complicated and profound:

Language expresses reality through a sign system.

Instead, the director expresses reality through reality.

Maybe this is the reason why I like cinema and I prefer it to literature,

because in expressing reality as reality

I continuously work and live at the level of reality.

A poet uses the word "flower", but where does he take it from?

He takes it from the language of men which we use in communicating.

Poetry means nothing to us.

We use the word "flower" because we need it in our human relationships.

Instead, what other language are images based on?

They are based on the images of dreams and memories.

When we dream and reminisce, we shoot short films in our heads.

Then, cinema has its foundations, its roots

in a completely irrational, irrationalist language:

Dreams, memory and reality seen as hard fact.

Therefore, an image is infinitely more dreamlike than a word.

In the end, when you see a film it seems like a dream.

Beautiful, then! Beautiful!

Better, better like this!

Well?

Did you put it at 25 or not?

Now we need to lower it a bit more.

- I have to lower it a bit? - Yes, otherwise like this...

- Look, huh? - Yes.

- Here... a bit too much. - Too much?

- A little, just a little. - Like this? - Yes, like this.

Action, roll. Come on, scream!

Look!

Stop! But you kept your eyes closed and you never looked into the camera.

If you close your eyes, you don't look into the camera.

In general, my work is influenced by the use of non professional actors

and of sets which are not reconstructed in a theatre.

I use real sets:

When I shoot, in reality I only gather material.

Then I go in any old place, chosen by me, in nature,

and I gather material according to the light,

according to what I find there in that moment.

When you are in the middle of a beautiful landscape

with some characters that you like,

you are greedy, like a glutton in the midst of all sorts of good food

you dive in like a beast eating here and there. That's how I was.

I take a young man who has never acted,

I put him in front of the camera

and I keep him there a long time, gathering material.

This means that then I have a long job of editing to do

to remove everything that is futile

and grasp, instead, that moment of truth that may have

flashed in his eyes, in his smile while I was shooting.

Instead, in this film, this is not the case

because it is not a film of collected material

processed during editing. It is already finished

and edited as I am shooting it.

So, I need more professionalism from the actors.

In fact, there are 4-5 professional actors,

in the purest sense of the word,

but I also use the actors that I have taken from the street and

who are acting for the first time as if they were professional actors.

I demand a professional performance won'thy of actors from them:

They must say the entire line,

with the right expression from the beginning to the end, etc.

Scream!

Put your head down! Remove the candle!

Renata! People!

When I say "action", let Renata's head go

and her head must fall down alone, in a faint.

Don't you push it down.

- Attention! - Attention, roll film!

Action!

- Stop! - Bring them up, let's make the bulletins. - Is this good?

Then he calmly puts the candle down, there, and walks towards Franchino.

And you, Franchino, remember, put up a good fight, huh?

- Ettore, let's do it again. - Okay, another like that!

Ready! Go, roll film!

Action!

Stop!

Valletti, place the candle with more calm.

It must seem like a ritual, performed by a priest.

You did it a bit hurried.

Then, naturally, I leave a wide margin for improvisation and freedom.

But here, it is all better programmed than usual.

I want to edit it perfectly.

This film must almost be a crystal at the end, formally.

It must not be confused, chaotic, invented, disproportionate.

Everything must be very calculated, much more accurate.

Everything: The movements, the compositions, the stunts...

Once I didn't care much about stunts, but in this film

when someone has to fall dead, he has to repeat it a 1,000 times

until he really seems like a dead body.

I always try to obtain formal perfection,

which I use as a wrapping

for the terrible things of De Sade and of Fascism.

Okay, stop. No! A little more to my left. There!

A bit more, there! Huh?

Everyone come forward. A little more. There!

The obsessive use of the shot and the reverse shot,

of a close-up in contrast with another close-up,

the absence of over-the-shoulder shots,

the absence of characters that exit and enter the shot,

above all the absence of long shots

are typical features of all of my films.

In this film, all of that is brought

to the height of lucidity and to their absolute state.

My almost obsessive habits are taken to such a point

of obsession so that perhaps the quality is changed.

If I believed that my cinema were totally integrated

into a society that also wanted the kind of films that I make,

maybe I wouldn't make them.

But I am convinced that there is something that can't be integrated.

Middle-class society amalgamates, assimilates and digests all.

But, in every work where individuality and singularity stand out along with

originality and violence, there is something that can't be integrated.

Who is this film for?

In general, for everyone, for another me.

It is true that the masses alienate and alter art when

the latter is commercialised and proposed to them in a certain way,

but the masses are still made up of individuals.

And so, in a theatre, in a social ritual, let's say,

where my film is proposed to the masses in this way, etc.,

in these theatres, in fact, there are individuals.

The individual internalises the world's problems.

Everything happens in the individual.

I attribute to the others, even those most constrained,

most enslaved by social customs, the chance, in any case,

to understand a work in their way, at their level.

I have this faith in human freedom,

that I wouldn't know how to rationalise.

But I realise that, if things continue like this,

man will become mechanised, so conformist,

so unpleasant and hateful

that this freedom will be completely lost.

I would continue to make films anyway even if I were the only free man

and if that freedom were to die with my cinema.

Maybe I would continue to make films because I need to do it,

I like doing it and I would do it. I'd either kill myself or I do it.

In making a film, I express myself.

If then, my expression is alienated, mechanised, so what!

In the meantime I have expressed myself as freely as possible.

Isn't there a small bad-guy part for me? I never get to play the villain, huh?

- Wait and see what you'll be doing in the next scene - That's great! Thanks.

- Wait and see what you'll be doing. You can't imagine. - Thank goodness!

What do you consider the central point of your work,

I mean the core of your work that guides you from one film to the next?

A message, an obsession or an idea...

It is a formal idea

which is the same in every film, of what I must do.

The formal model, the flash that I have of what a film must be

it can't be said in words:

You either understand it, or you don't, I can't explain it to you.

When I decide to make a film, it is because I have a flash,

a formal idea for the film. It is the synthesis of the film.

The idea for a film is never the result of a series of thoughts.

If anything, there is a series of thoughts interrupted,

by a flash, as in the case of De Sade.

When you make a film, like when you write a novel,

there are phases.

It is the story of things as they become what they are

and the author, at the end, has done something

that was only partly in his head.

The editing of the film is a moment of great surprise

for the author himself,

not so much because it results

in something different than what he had in mind,

but because the real thing came out!

When I look at things,

I have a rational, critical eye that I take from my secular culture,

middle-class and then Marxist.

Therefore there is a continuous critical exercise

of my reason over world events.

But my real vision, the older, more archaic one,

given to me at birth and shaped in my early childhood,

my original vision is a sacred vision of things.

In the end, I see the world like those who have a poetic vocation do,

that is, like a miraculous, almost sacred fact.

And nothing can desecrate my fundamental sacredness.

I think that no artist in any society is free.

Being crushed by the normality and by the mediocrity

of any society in which he lives,

the artist is a living contestation.

He always represents the contrary

of the idea that every man in every society has of himself.

In my opinion, a minimum, perhaps immeasurable, margin of freedom

is always there.

I can't say to what point this is, or is not freedom.

But certainly, something escapes

the mathematical logic of mass culture, for the time being.

What must we do, in the meantime?

What must we do?

Be coherent with our own ideas and try to do that minimum part

that each of us can do. What do you want to do?

In short... believe?

Even not believe! As long as not believing is dynamic!

One who doesn't believe and makes his unbelief a banner

comes to something.

The true reality is that contemporary man does not and does believe.

But does Pasolini believe or doesn't he?

I do and I don't.

This is my answer.

Subtitles STUDIO ASCI - Crema