Laviamoci il cervello: RoGoPaG
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- (1963, Eureka! PG) Philip French
- The Observer,
Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Ricotta, from Laviamoci il cervello. The depiction of the crucifixion proved highly controversial. Photograph: British Film Institute
This fascinating portmanteau film, supposedly “recounting the joyous beginning of the end of the world”, was the brainchild of Italian producer Alfredo Bini as a way of using four leading directors he was working with on other projects. Despite creating a furore it failed to find a theatrical distributor in Britain. The title translates as Let’s Wash Our Brains, expressing a shared disillusionment with society on the part of its four directors whose names make up the other part of the title: Roberto Rossellini, Jean-Luc Godard, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Ugo Gregoretti.
Rossellini’s Virginity is a slim tale about a rapacious American TV executive pursuing an Italian air hostess (Rosanna Schiaffino, producer Bini’s wife). Godard’s The New World is an elegant, talkative picture set in a Paris little affected by a nuclear holocaust. Then best-known for his innovative TV documentaries, Gregoretti’s Free-Range Chicken is a funny if dated assault on consumerism as experienced by a middle-class family (Ugo Tognazzi the paterfamilias) that anticipates by seven years Jack Nicholson’s diner scene in Five Easy Pieces. The truly memorable episode is Pasolini’s Ricotta, a bitter satire on tasteless exploitation cinema in which Orson Welles plays a Marxist film-maker directing a crucifixion scene on location outside Rome. It led to Pasolini’s arrest for blasphemy and a large fine for the producer before its eventual release. The double disc DVD/Blu-ray box is accompanied by an illuminating booklet.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2012/sep/09/laviamoci-cervello-rogopag-dvd-review