Conceived by the Italian producer Alfredo Bini, the multi-director portmanteau film Let’s Wash Our Brains: RoGoPaG [Laviamoci il cervello: RoGoPaG] brought together four esteemed European directors to contribute comic episodes reflective of the swinging post-“boom” era. The resulting omnibus collectively examines social anxieties around sex, nuclear war, religion, urbanisation – and the promise of a modern cinema.
Roberto Rossellini’s Illibatezza [Virginity] follows an airline stewardess plagued by an obsessed American tourist whose 8mm camera enables the indulgence of a personal, and solipsistic, vision of the Ideal. Jean-Luc Godard’s Il nuovo mondo [The New World] takes place in an Italian-dubbed Paris beset by nuclear fallout, and wittily chronicles the changes that take place in the lives – and medicine cabinet – of a handsome young couple. Pier Paolo Pasolini’s scandalous La ricotta [Ricotta, as in the curded cheese] presents the goings-on around a film shoot devoted to the Crucifixion and presided over by none other than Orson Welles (playing a kind of stand-in for Pasolini himself); it is this episode that landed Pasolini with a suspended four-month prison sentence. Lastly, Ugo Gregoretti’s Il pollo ruspante [Free-Range Chicken] depicts a middle-class Milanese family flirting with the purchase of real-estate and engaging catastrophically with an antagonistic consumerist infrastructure.
Let’s Wash Our Brains: RoGoPaG remains one of the definitive entries of the Sixties vogue for the multi-auteur anthology film, and The Masters of Cinema Series is proud to present it for the very first time on Blu-ray, in a Dual Format (Blu-ray + DVD) edition.
SPECIAL FEATURES:
• Gorgeous new HD restoration of the film in its original aspect ratio, in 1080p on the Blu-ray
• Newly translated optional English subtitles
• Original Italian theatrical trailer
• 56-PAGE BOOKLET featuring new essays by Tag Gallagher, Arthur Mas, Martial Pisani, and Pasquale Iannone; a new translation by Tag Gallagher of excerpts from an oral history about the film; and rare archival imagery
Oedipus Rex
Three years after The Gospel According to Matthew, Pier Paolo Pasolini resumed his series of classical adaptations with a savage, highly personal take on Sophocles’ ancient Greek tragedy Oedipus Rex [Edipo Re]. As his first colour feature, Oedipus Rex makes brilliant use of wildly alternating Moroccan landscapes to transpose collective myth into a particular vision that is at once tender, sensual, and wholly unsparing.
The film is divided into three sections set in different eras. The opening takes place in 1920s Italy, and recounts a birth that echoes that of the director himself, the product of a beautiful bourgeoise’s affair with a military officer. The mid section depicts a time “outside of history” – it is here that the myth of Oedipus (portrayed by Franco Citti of Accattone and Coppola’s The Godfather), one of patricide and incest, plays out opposite the young man’s mother/lover (Silvana Mangano). An epilogue shot on the streets of present-day Bologna finds Oedipus playing his flute for a bustling citizenry.
With its kinetic handheld camerawork and strikingly primeval costumes, Pasolini’s film rattles its art-genre framework in the enduring quest to exorcise repressive emotional forces. The Masters of Cinema Series is proud to present Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Oedipus Rex for the very first time on Blu-ray, in a Dual Format (Blu-ray + DVD) edition.
SPECIAL FEATURES:
• Gorgeous new HD restoration of the film in its original aspect ratio, in 1080p on the Blu-ray
• Newly translated optional English subtitles
• Original Italian theatrical trailer
• 28-PAGE BOOKLET featuring vintage writing by Pasolini, excerpts from an interview with the director by Oswald Stack about the film, and rare archival imagery
