La rabbia (1963) - full transcript

Rage (1963)

A film in two parts

The first part is by Pier Paolo Pasolini

The second part is by Giovanni Guareschi

Two ideologies, two opposite doctrines

answering a dramatic interrogation...

Why is our life dominated

by discontent, anguish, by fear of war, and war itself?

Why is our life dominated

by discontent, anguish, by fear of war, and war itself?

In order to answer this question I have written this film,



not by following any chronological or logical thread,

but rather by following my political beliefs

and my poetic sentiments.

Adieu, we won't foget you,

the Russians are too close,

on November 4th, a storm of fire
and death descends on a people

reclaiming liberty and the respect of being human.

Black winters of Hungary:

the counter-revolution breaks out.

Back cities of Hungary:

the white brothers are killing.

Black memories of Hungary:

the bourgeois brothers don't forgive.

Black peace of Hungary:



the price of blood for Stalin's mistakes,

the Austrian secretary of state and the
customs officers pass over to the anti-Russian side.

Black sun of Hungary:

Stalin's mistakes are our own mistakes.

If you don't cry "Long live liberty!" with humility,

you don't cry "Long live liberty"!

If you don't cry "Long live liberty!" with laughter,

you don't cry "Long live liberty"!

If you don't cry "Long live liberty!" with love,

you don't cry "Long live liberty"!

You, children's children,

are crying with contempt,

with rage and with hate

"Long live liberty"!

Thus, you don't cry "Long live liberty"!

Hear me, you children's children,

that you are crying "Long live liberty!"

with contempt, with rage and with hate!

Black evenings of Paris:

the French bourgeoisie makes for the Bastille.

Black boulevards of Paris:

its leaders are marching like colonels.

Black omens of Paris:

liberty has become a pain.

Black noise of Paris:

Bidault already has fashism in his heart.

Black future of Paris:

the French bourgeoisie dies howling.

The funeral procession with
MM. Pineau, Schuman, Bidault and other deputies

depose a wreath at the Arc de Triomphe.

Afterwards the crowd attacks
the French communist party's headquarters

and sets fire to it.

This snow is last year's snow,
or the snow of a 1000 years ago,

or the snow before all hope.

It is our mothers,

our children and grand-children,

our old parents, identical figures

following journeys of tears,

who are crying.

1943, 1944

These are the years

of whiteness, of emigrations.

They weren't gone,

they were still there, with their eternal snows

and their hereditary tears.

Sinister summers of Allah:

Egyptian patrol open fire.

Sinister silences of Allah:

miserable coloured men open fire.

Sinister sun of Allah:

in the name of a 1000 sub-proletarian people.

A new problem bursts into the world:

It's called colour,

it's called colour,

and it spreads throughout the world.

One must admit the thought of
thousands of black or brown children,

black-eyed children

with curly hair on their necks.

Other voices,

other glances,

other dances,

everything will become familiar and will increase the word.

Infinite vistas of real lives claim,

with an innocent ferocity,

to penetrate our reality.

These are the days of joy, the days of victory.

Men of colour, Tunisia is living its liberation.

Prepared by years of misery,

of labour and errors.

Men of colour,

in hope, man has no colour.

Joy after joy, victory after victory!

Men of colour,

Tanganjika is free.

A poor liberty

which makes Europe smile.

Men of colour,

a new African nation is independent.

An elementary liberty

with all the road before you which still has to be traveled.

The only colour: the joy to challenge one's own obscurity.

Cuba is free.

Men of colour,

in victory, the only colour is the colour of mankind!

Victory will demand sweat.

The enemy is among our brothers.

Victory will demand terror.

The brothers submitted by archaic terror.

Victory will provoke injustice.

The brothers, in their ferocity

innocent.

Fighting in Cuba!

Maybe only a song

can tell you what it's like "Fighting in Cuba".

Fighting in Cuba!

Maybe only a dance

can tell you what it's like "Fighting in Cuba".

Fighting in Cuba!

This means fighting

over unexplored seas,

with the ostentation of savage wars.

Fighting in Cuba!

At the present, Cuba is in the world:

Brains in Europe and America

are explaining the meaning of the fighting in Cuba.

A ferocious explanation

which only piety can make human,

in the light of a song.

Fighting in Cuba

a crushing defeat for the enemy.

Dying in Cuba!

Maybe only a song can tell you

what it's like to be dying in Cuba.

Dying in Cuba!

It's like dying in Naples or Sevilla,

with the ostentation of miserable deaths.

Dying in Cuba...

At the present, Cuba is in the world:

brains in Europe and America

are explaining the meaning of dying in Cuba.

A ferocious explanation

which only pity can make human,

in the light of tears.

Dying in Cuba,

joy after joy, victory after victory!

Men of colour from Africa to Cuba!

Men of colour, in victory, man has no colour!

In joy, the only colour

is the colour of mankind.

Voice of futile humour,

of the fear of culture,

unchain yourself!

The moment has come!

Let me hear your sigh of relief,

the sound of daily vulgarity.

It seems jazz knows neither frontiers nor limits,

because it unites in a frenetic rhythm

men of all latitudes

and of all beliefs.

All things considered,
Gershwin and Armstrong have defeated Karl Marx.

Ava Gardner likes our country a lot.

As soon as she has the time

between two films, she flies over to Italy.

This year, she came to Rome.

Welcome, Ava!

The very beautiful Sophia Loren,

who at the moment is filming in Polesine with Mario Soldati,

has made a visit with the actress Lise Bourdin

to a fish-canning factory.

The fascinating star is interested in the cleaning of eels

and shows an amused disgust at the spectacle of disembowled fishes.

On the Arno, the four ancient naval republics,

Pisa, Genua, Amalfi et Venice,

evoke a distant period

by displaying a naval competition

before the Predident.

In the streets of Pisa and on the quays

symbolic figures of the four republics pass in procession:

first Amalfi, then Genua,

Venice and Pisa.

Drum rolls, trumpet calls.

Perhaps in many countries,

and certainly in mine which is Italy,

the capital feels its powers coming back,

the day when it can again start buying.

The results, symptomatic,

show a clean, almost crushing victory

of the democratic trade unions.

Buying a worker costs nothing.

It is sufficient to appeal to the nobility of his heart

with a promise of gratitude.

He is a good son and a good father.

And he desperately wants to elevate himself to the rank of the spirit,

to participate the feasts of those who do not live by bread alone.

He can be mean, like a faithful dog,

the desperate white worker,

because he knows,

deep down in his conscience,

that he is unworthy.

And in his eyes glitters

the light of envy.

For a red flag betrayed,

a divine effigy regained.

The obscured conscience

does not clamour God,

but His statues.

The terrible power of the Pharisees

consisted in not fearing the banal and the ridiculous.

It is with an astonishing honesty

that they perform their rites.

The divine gift of water for progress

transforms itself into numbers,

For the power plant industry, the fury of a cascade

transforms itself into kilowatts, into amp?res.

Once a year, even the factory owners

and the men who measure the natural phenomena,

and who are slaves to dividends, become poets.

Yes, the voice of factory owners,

the voice of feigned impartiality.

They become poets

providing that poetry remains pure form,

voice of the incoercible formalism!

Form!

From now on, the "factory owner turned poet"

has as his flag a painting of abstract art:

the most arrogant form of the absence of the soul.

But... these capes, like mountains of gold,

these crowns, like small petrified souls...

Who could have told, in '45?

It would have seemed laughable, inconceivable in a socialist future,

or even in a neo-capitalist future.

Two million people are crowding the streets of London

to see the procession accompanying

Elisabeth II of England to Westminster Abbey

for the coronation ceremony,

2000 years old.

The young sovereign

is presented to the archbishop of Canterbury

who asks her the ritual questions.

Elisabeth answers in the affirmative.

She swears on the bible:

"What I have promised, I'll do, so help me God."

Ah, sweet queen,

touching bourgeois wife,

shy even

with her inferiority complex

and her good manners which prevent her being natural.

Ah, the reforms, certainly civil, astonishingly so.

But what will be the future for workers who strike

for the right to a tea-break?

The idyll is hard, sober, severe:

it fears neither the poets' irony,

nor the democrats' unbelief.

But time's prison is terrible,

and so is the liberal

and unmovable yoke of history.

And the people shout "God save the Queen!"

In Chicago, in the imposing Convention Hall,

the Republican delegates are united

to name their candidate

for the presidential elections.

The joy of one American who feels himself united

to a million other Americans

in his love of democracy:

that is the illness of the future world!

When the classical world will be exhausted,

when all the peasants and artisans will be dead,

when the industry will have turned round mercilessly

the cycle of production and consumption,

then our history will end.

In these shoutings,

these immense assemblies,

these lights,

these mechanisms, these declarations,

these armies,

these weapons,

in these deserts,

under an unrecognizable sun,

like the new prehistoric age.

A warrior leaves, armed with silence,

to a place where history is no longer.

Not one of these crying dignitaries

will know or will want to know

by what necessity and for what reasons

christianity

has been transformed from royal religion

to bourgeois religion.

At present, the bourgeois bow, with their sub-proletarian brothers,

before the coffin of the aristocratic pope,

like on the large square

of an immense and sinister nation.

Roman tradesmen in mourning,

the people with the epileptic gaze of a gypsy,

nondescript Italian burocrats.

It is the crowd of the sixties,

the ebb and tide of our century,

who still need religion,

desperately,

to give meaning to their panic,

their mistakes, their hopes.

Will there be white smoke for the popes,

sons of Ghana peasants, or of Uganda,

sons of Indian field workers, dead from the pest in the Ganges.

for popes, sons of yellow fishermen,

dead of the cold in Fireland?

The slow death of the peasant world,

who still survives populating continents,

in thousands of swamps,

along shark infested coasts,

on islands carbonized by volcanoes,

it will breathe into this white smoke

the archaic slowness of its existence.

Over there, in the future, where years or centuries stretch.

Like the cheating father

and the grand-father, drunk on delicious wines,

human figure unknown to the world's sub-proletariat,

but, he too, cultivates the earth,

the new pope,

with his sweet and mysterious smile, like a turtle,

seems to understand that he must be the shepherd of the miserables,

because the antique word belongs to them.

It is they who carry, through the centuries

and with him, the history of our greatness.

The Pastor Paganus smiles:

Renzo and Lucia are getting married, joy in their eyes.

From now on,

even the baroque arches belong to them,

and the gilded salons of Don Rodrigo,

and the great cathedrals.

"The spirit is the heir to the peasant world,

"and you, be the shepherd of the antique world

"which lives in this spirit."

Are these the words the angel

whispers into the ear

of this sweet pope

with his peasant and mysterious face?

A nation starting again on its history,

gives its people back, first of all,

the humility to resemble their fathers in all innocence.

Tradition, that is greatness expressed in just one gesture.

A thousand ancestors have seen this gesture, and through the centuries

it has become pure like the flight of a bird,

elementary like the movement of a wave.

But only the revolution can save the past.

Lucky are the sons

whose fathers were serfs in the clod,

the sons who can say: "My father has often laughed

"in his village,

"where his lord and the Zar's burocrats

"have starved him for centuries.

"The puritanical violence of my laughter,

"the theatrical ingenuity,

"of what amuses me in my village, in my factory,

"he gave this to me!"

Lucky the sons whose fathers were heroes,

those sons can say: "My father has fought

"against the Zar and against the capital.

"My freedom, he gave it to me,

"the earth I cultivate,

"the factory where I work,

"he gave them to me.

"The places where I enjoy my youth, he gave them to me.

" I can be proud to resemble him

"and to resemble him always."

In a small town in the USSR

I want to enjoy life intensely,

I want to do what has been forbidden for centuries

and what the youths of my province, richer than me,

have done for centuries.

I want to see dances, social events, spectacles,

everything the fathers of my ideal have seen,

and not the fathers of my flesh.

And I am proud to put on afterwards my poor worker's rags,

in the morning, under the boiling sun of my province,

of my village!

Everything the fathers of my ideal have had,

what the father of my flesh did not have,
and what I desire so much,

I want to have it.

I want to acquire traditional culture,

I want to own what is beautiful and noble,

what I have been deprived of for centuries.

I want to learn with the spirit of a good-willing father,

I want to read like a young father,

I want to know with the heart of a religious father.

With obedience, for I am the first educated son

of a line of men who had nothing else but

callous hands and the bullets of capital in the chest.

I can do it, for the first time in the history of my nation,

me, son of the people.

And I want to listen to the voice of culture,

of science,

of art.

Young comrades, I...

I am here in the name of our committee,

and I will teach you, eager to learn,

the glories of Soviet painting.

And that's what I'll do,

like in Stalin's time, I'll do my duty as Cic?rone:

"Look how well they are painted,

"our mine worker comrades,

"our kolkhoz comrades."

This is what I'll tell you.

However, something is heavy in my official's heart,

who does his duty like in Stalin's time.

It's a terrible weight, young comrades,

for it's the weight of truth which exists,

even if you don't say it.

These paintings, surely,

are full or our ingenuity,

of our brotherly feelings

which make life so beautiful and friendly,

but...

I am trembling to say it, like a comical character in Chekhov,

or a boy talking about love for the first time with his father,

in these paintings there are our errors,

we should take them off these walls and put them in the depot,

say good-bye to them, like to a period of our lives.

We should start again from the beginning,
where certainty didn't exist,

where the sign is desperate, and the colour crying,

where the bodies are convulsed like the cadavers of Buchenwald,

where a red banner is floating

to the sound of a victory which must never be the last one,

because the struggle of the classes is not over yet.

We are not Russians,

we are those who fight:

Spanish or Italian workers,

French intellectuals, Algerian partisans...

We are not in Moskow or Leningrad,

but in the factories where the struggle of the classes is fought,

in the deserts of the colonies
where the fight for freedom is fought.

Who would say that the profound feeling of liberty

is alive in men's hearts

with such humble faces?

Humble, like the remote corners of the earth,

where one works the earth or plunders it,

wearing the rags of the fathers,

humble faces of the sons,

born without necessity.

However,

behind these faces, of hungry men, bandits,

lies this terrible sentiment

which is called liberty in France.

A son, among others, who has only one face,

tormented for centuries,

the face of a young murderer, a gentle dock hand.

He's left town

and, driven by a necessity unknown to him,

he walks, walks with his comrades,

arrives in the wooded mountains, and there

he arms himself, prepares himself,

initiates himself to the new,

to the eternal fight.

The bitterness of the trees under the sun,

the smell of the bombed mountain.

The hour of combat has come, of resistance,

the hour of patrolling full of sweat,

the hour when the boy yearns for death,

the hour

when pity means dishonour.

Ah, France, the hate!

Ah, France, the pest!

Ah France, the cowardice!

A small plane

takes you away to the sky.

And in the sky is buzzing and again buzzing

hate, the pest and cowardice.

Revenge buzzes in the sky,

France, against whom nobody can say anything,

carries the conscience of the whole universe!

It still buzzes in the sky! France,

your confusion,

it buzzes in the sky of a nation which draws its force

from its humility.

In the sky of Algeria buzzes

a crisis which creates death.

Looking

for a new liberty,

it wants victims whose victory is certain.

Ah, France, the hate!

Ah, France, the pest!

Ah, France, the cowardice!

A terrible buzzing,

idiotic,

shameless,

a music

which ends with a child's terror

and a sob convulsing the world.

On my befouled rags,

on my skeletal nakedness,

on my gypsy mother,

on my shepherd father,

I write your name.

On my first brother, the bandit,

on my second brother, the lame one,

on my third brother, the bootblack,

on my forth brother, the beggar,

I write your name.

On my low-down comrades,

on my comrades without work,

on my comrades drilling as soldiers,

I write your name.

"Freedom!"

Oran, the evening meeting.

On the desert nomads,

on the Medina field workers,

on the employees of Oran,

on the small wage-earners of Oran,

I write your name.

On the miserable men of Algeria,

on the analphabetic people of Arabia,

on the poor classes of Africa,

on the enslaved people of the sub-proletarian world

I write your name:

"freedom!"

Joy after joy, victory after victory...

Men of colour,

Algeria has been restored to history!

Men of colour are living the most beautiful days of their lives!

Never have your eyes sparkled more,

never have your gestures expressed so much happiness.

Men of colour,

here's the victory of the whole world's partisans!

Joy,

but what incessant terror

in a thousand places on earth

and in our memory.

In a thousand souls, war has not ended.

Even if I don't want to remember,

war is a terror which does not want to end

in the soul, in the world.

Of the ancient world

and of the future world

there remains nothing but the beauty.

And you,

little sister,

running after your older brothers,

laughing with them,

imitating them,

you, the youngest of all little sisters,

you wore your beauty with humility.

And your soul, being the soul of a girl
coming from modest circumstances,

your soul had never been conscious of your beauty.

Otherwise, this beauty would not have been possible.

The world had taught it to you,

thus, your beauty became the world's.

Of the terrible ancient world

and of the terrible future world

nothing remains but beauty.

And you, you wore it like an obedient smile.

Obedience

demands too many swallowed tears,

generosity towards others, too many joyful glances

which ask for mercy!

Thus,

you have taken away with you your beauty,

you vanished like gold dust.

Of the stupid ancient world

and of the ferocious future world

there remained a beauty that wasn't ashamed

to show her girlish breasts,

a little stomach so easily bared.

That is why beauty was there,

the same beauty the sweet young girls of your world have,

the tradesmen's daughters, laureates

of the competitions of Miami or London.

You disappeared like a golden dove.

The world had taught it to you,

and thus, your beauty was no longer beauty.

But you went on being a child,

silly like antiquity, cruel like the future,

and between yourself and your beauty, possessed by power,

the stupid and cruel present seeped in.

You always wore it like a smile between tears.

Immodest by passivity, indecent by obedience,

you disappeared like a white-golden dove.

Her beauty, surviving the ancient world,

reclaimed by the future world,

possessed by the present word,

became a deadly evil.

And now, the older brothers at last turn round,

stopping for a moment in their cursed games,

leaving their endless distractions,

and ask themselves:

"Is it possible that Marilyn, little Marilyn,

"had shown us the way?"

And now, you don't count any more, poor child,

with your smile

you are the first to have crossed the world's doors,

abandoned

to your destiny of death.

Dreams of death.

Ah, children!

The mothers were monsters,

slow fatalities who accomplish far from the world.

We have never existed.

Reality,

that is forms

on top of the skies,

struggle of the classes,

the reason of all wars,

subtle forms of cancer,

weapons of the struggle of the classes.

Veil of terror which dominates the world,

eroding roses of war,

sowed by the classes' struggle.

The class possessing beauty,

reinforced by the use of beauty,

attains the extreme edges of beauty,

where beauty is only beauty.

The class possessing riches,

mingles such a self-assurance to wealth

that for her, nature and wealth become confused.

She is so much lost in the world of wealth

that for her, history and wealth become confused.

She is so touched by wealth

that she credits God with the idea of wealth.

The class of beauty and wealth,

a world which leaves you outside.

It's the class of black woolen scarves,

cheap black aprons,

cloths which cover the sisters' white faces,

the class of christian suspense,

of fraternal silences in the mud

and of sombre rainy days.

The class which gives highest value

to its poor thousand liras,

and founds on it

a life

hardly able to illuminate

death's fatality.

I ascent to heaven

with a heart which is simple

and great

because great is my nation.

Adieu, world of uncertain fathers and of certain sons.

I fly towards the Occident

and my flight absorbs in my generous heart

the evil which dominates the world.

Rome liberates itself,

viewed from the heights where the moral judgment reigns,

of the obscure incense

like a gas being scattered under the wind,

of a spirit of pure sentiments.

I fly towards the Occident

and my passage

is like the passage of an ordinary swallow

which announces that May is arriving without doubt.

Over there, a civilization triumphs.

Suddenly, I announce agony.

In Paris, in London, a human fable collapses,

a great history,

with its thoughts and its poetry.

I fly towards the Occident, and my life

is like an enemy which invades peaceably the sky.

Washington holds back its fury

against the advancing people,

and you can see the surge of love

through my purifying flight,

even in this hopeless world.

I come down to earth

among my comrades of hearts simple

and great, for great is my nation.

And I bring with me the conscience of a new sun,

until now lost in the future

and conquered today, old hope

of an unforeseen love.

I return from the cosmos, comrades.

My humble technical experience takes over, presently,

that which will be yours,

your enemies', the political leaders'

and the poets'.

Up there, comrade Krouchtchev, everyone was my brother,

bourgeois and worker, intellectual and sub-proletarian,

Russian and American!

I know, comrade Krouchtchev,

that this was an optical illusion,

and, on the contrary, immense and irremediable

is the abyss between us who fly the cosmos,

and the billions of miserables attached to the earth

like desperate insects.

Therefore, the roads of heaven

must be the roads of fraternity and peace.

Telling you this is my ultimate and greatest duty,

because, comrades and enemies,

politicians and poets,

the revolution wants just one war,

the war which is waged by the spirits

who leave to the past

the old ways of the earth, full of blood.

END OF PART I BY PIER PAOLO PASOLINI