Director Pasolini traverses Italy in 1963 with camera and microphone interviewing people in public places about sex, marriage and gender roles.
Rescued from abandonment and raised by the King and Queen, Oedipus is still haunted by a prophecy – he'll murder his father and marry his mother.
Louis Valentin: Do you love life?
Pasolini’s obsession was with finding a world outside of all the commodifications of capitalism, including, prominently, the bodily.
“Despite all the writings, and they are voluminous, by Pasolini and about Pasolini, there is little reference to the fact that his work is an outstanding example of artistic Modernism. Perhaps the silence is due to his fierce dislike and rejection of Modern society.
“My hatred for the bourgeoisie is not documentable or arguable. It’s just there and that’s it. But it’s not a moralistic condemnation; it is total and unmitigated, but it is based on passion, not on moralism.
I am a force of the Past.
My love lies only in tradition.
I come from the ruins, the churches
the altarpieces, the villages
abandoned in the Apennines or foothills
of the Alps where my brothers once lived.
I wander like a madman down the Tuscolana,