Il Cinema Ritrovato at Brown and Film-Thinking featured La Ricotta, a 1963 short film by Pier Paolo Pasolini. La Ricotta follows Stracci (Rags), a starving man who works as an extra (ironically, the “good thief”) in his desperate search for food on the set of a film of the Passion of Christ directed by a Pasolini-alter ego played by Orson Welles. The film is one of the four segments of Ro.Go.Pa.G., a French-Italian omnibus film also featuring work by Roberto Rossellini, Jean-Luc Godard, and Ugo Gregoretti.
A post-screening conversation included Brown University faculty members Timothy Bewes (English), Massimo Riva (Italian Studies), and Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg (Comparative Literature and Italian Studies), as well as guest speakers filmmaker Alina Marazzi and, from the University of Maryland, Mauro Resmini (Italian and Cinema and Media Studies).
About the Film
La ricotta, episodio di Ro.Go.Pa.G.
Italy-France, 1963 (35 mins)
Written and directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini
Cast: Orson Welles (il regista), Mario Cipriani (Stracci), Laura Betti (la ‘diva’), Edmonda Aldini (un’altra ‘diva’), Vittorio La Paglia (il giornalista), Maria Bernardini (la stripteaseuse), Rossana Di Rocco (la figlia di Stracci) | Production: Alfredo Bini per Arco Film | Cinematography: Tonino Delli Colli | Film Editing: Nino Baragli | Production Design: Flavio Mogherini | Music: Carlo Rustichelli | Language: Italian
Restored in 4K in 2022 by Cineteca di Bologna in collaboration with Compass Film at L’Immagine Ritrovata laboratory, from the original camera negative and the up & down soundtrack positive, both provided by Studio Cine.
About the Speakers
Timothy Bewes is professor of English and interim chair of the Department of English at Brown University. Among his many publications are the books Cynicism and Postmodernity (Verso Books, 1997); Reification, or The Anxiety of Late Capitalism (Verso Books, 2002); The Event of Postcolonial Shame (Princeton University Press, 2011), and Free Indirect: The Novel in a Postfictional Age (Columbia University Press, 2022). He convenes the Film-Thinking series at the Cogut Institute for the Humanities.
Alina Marazzi is an award-winning Italian filmmaker. Her films explore events of the recent past and present in Italy through a gendered perspective based on women’s biographical experiences. Her most critically acclaimed work is her trilogy on female subjectivity, motherhood, and memory: Un’ora sola ti vorrei (For One More Hour With You, 2002), Vogliamo anche le rose (We Want Roses Too, 2007) and Tutto parla di te (All About You, 2012), starring Charlotte Rampling.
Mauro Resmini is associate professor of cinema and media studies and Italian at the University of Maryland, College Park, where he also serves as core faculty in comparative literature. He is the author of Italian Political Cinema: Figures of the Long ’68 (University of Minnesota Press, 2023) and has published essays on Italian and European cinema and media, psychoanalysis, critical theory, and the relationship between cinema and politics. He earned his Ph.D. in Italian studies and modern culture and media at Brown University in 2014.
Massimo Riva is professor of Italian studies at Brown University. He is the author of four books, published in Italy: on literary maladies in the 18th century, national identity in the 19th century, post-humanism and the hyper-novel, and literature in the digital age. His digital monograph, titled Shadow Plays: Virtual Realities in an Analogue World (part of Brown University Digital Publications) was published by Stanford University Press in 2022.
Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg is professor of comparative literature and Italian studies and chair of the Department of Italian Studies at Brown University. She is the author of the books Sublime Surrender: Male Masochism at the Fin-de-Siecle (Cornell University Press, 1998), The Pinocchio Effect: On Making Italians (1860–1930) (University of Chicago Press, 2007), and Impious Fidelity: Anna Freud, Psychoanalysis, Politics, (Cornell University Press, 2012). She is currently working on a manuscript with the working title “Grounds for Reclamation: Fascism, Postfascism, and the Question of Consent.”
Film-Thinking is a series of conversations hosted by the Cogut Institute for the Humanities, asking how cinema can help us to think the many challenges facing our moment. According to the novelist Jonathan Coe, “A movie is something we should only see when somebody else shows it to us.” In the spirit of Coe’s remark, each Film-Thinking event comprises a curated screening of a film and a post-screening conversation. A pre-circulated Film Note offers a point of departure for the screening and the discussion. The aim of Film-Thinking is to enlarge our sense of the politics of cinema and collectively expand our understanding of film’s capacity for thought. This project has been made possible, in part, by the Brown Arts Institute. Read more.