For the fourth session we’ll have a screening of Ro.Go.Pa.G. from 1963 , which consists of four short films, each written and directed by one of four film directors – Roberto Rossellini, Jean-LucGodard, PierPaolo Pasolini and Ugo Gregoretti.

RoGoPaG: Let’s Have a Brainwash is the film that recounts the joyous beginning of the end of the world. As the opening title puts it: ‘The four stories limit themselves to recounting the things that in this era condition man, and the stimuli that slowly transform him into a weak and defenceless being.’

From the mechanisms of production and consumption in which man is immersed up to his neck, this man must accept the rhythm and the imperious logic of the mechanical society that pervades and dominates him. Man is the protagonist of the story narrated in this film made up of four stories. The prototype of the protagonist of this film could be, as described by a top sales theorist speaking within the film itself: “… the Italian who gained from the economic miracle, who in just a few years doubled his income and overcame the psychological need to save.”

Rosselini’s ‘Chastity’ (‘Illibatezza’) deals with an attractive air hostess Ana Maria who receives the unwelcome attentions of a middle aged American. A psychiatrist advises her fiancee to instruct her to behave more promiscuously, since the maniac is attracted by her chastity. Godard’s ‘New World’ (‘Il Nuovo Mondo’) illustrates a post-apocalypse world the same as the pre-apocalyptic one but for an enigmatic change in attitude in most people. He feels that a new world without logic and freedom may be arising. In Pasolini’s ‘Curd Cheese’ (‘La Ricotta’), a lavish film about the Crucifixion of Christ is being made in a poor area. The impoverished people subject themselves to various indignities in the name of movie making in order to win a little food, which in turn leads to the death of Stacci a central character. The last segment is Gregoretti’s ‘Free Range Chicken’ (‘Il Pollo Ruspante’) in which a family of the materialist culture inadvertently illustrate the cynical, metallic voiced doctrine of a top sales theorist.

Advanced reading: an essay from Frederic Jameson’s 2005 book, ‘Archaeologies of the Future’. (to follow shortly)

“In an age of globalization characterized by the dizzying technologies of the First World, and the social disintegration of the Third, is the concept of utopia still meaningful? Archaeologies of the Future, Jameson’s most substantial work since Postmodernism, Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, investigates the development of this form since Thomas More, and interrogates the functions of Utopian thinking in a post-Communist age. The relationship between utopia and science fiction is explored through the representations of otherness … alien life and alien worlds … and a study of the works of Philip K. Dick, Ursula LeGuin, William Gibson, Brian Aldiss, Kim Stanley Robinson and more. Jameson’s essential essays, including The Desire Called Utopia, conclude with an examination of the opposing positions on utopia and an assessment of its political value today.” – Verso Books