Synopsis
When producer
Gastone Ferranti invited
Pasolini to make a feature-length film essay out of archive newsreel footage reflecting on "modern Italy",
Pasolini set out to make a film as "a show of indignation against the unreality of the bourgeois world." Ferranti cut half of
Pasolini's work and invited the right-wing
Giovanni Guareschi to add a 'balancing" episode.
Pasolini disowned the result, apart from the closing meditation on
Marilyn Monroe. This reconstruction by
Giuseppe Bertolucci and the Cineteca di Bologna restores his original intentions.