Carte Italiane

Pier Paolo Pasolini’s La Ricotta, one of four episodes of the film RoGoPaG (1963) focuses on a director (played by Orson Welles) shooting a film about the Passion in a remote Italian countryside. Just as Pasolini, through the persona of the Other director (Welles), directs a film that is not his film, so too Fernando Pessoa, a generation earlier, writes a poem that is not his poem through the persona of the Other poet (Caeiro). This article is focused the relationship of the Creator (director, poet, God) to his creatures and, in particular, on the sardonic reimagining of the Passion to reject the institutionalization of artistic and religious creation. In addition to the literal unnailing of Christ from the cross, the bucolic settings of Pasolini’s film and Caeiro’s poem are disrupted and exploited by modern systems of production and representation. Moreover, while challenging the hierarchical relationship of ignorance and intellect, pathos and logos, the authoritative and the communal, Pasolini and Pessoa articulate their struggle to critique the Church while also attempting to revive pre-historical, pre-Christian figures in an industrialized modern landscape. In so far as both the filmmaker and poet are aware of the polemical nature of their representations of Christ, anticipating and attempting to defend themselves against accusations of blasphemy, I attempt to answer the question that both Pasolini and Pessoa seem to pose: Can the creator abandon his assigned role in order to give movement to the still, flexibility to the stable, the gift of ignorance to the educated?