the faCe of innoCenCe

By Paolo Patui

Innocence are the fields of the town of Casarsa, the bed of the Tagliamento river, the bicycles (certainly not electric!) that travelled through the Friuli region in the second post-war period. Pasolini's innocence lies in the world that seems barely touched by progress, in the world in which human relations, time that runs away and returns, and the unalterable presence of Nature, are still perceived through thoughts and attitudes, gestures and souls that are not corrupted and therefore free to exist outside the schemes of a purely mercantile logic. But that innocence, even idyllic in its innocent purity, appears with these characteristics only for a few fragments of time, before taking off its mask and revealing all its illusory deceit. It is that same almost bucolic rural world that betrays him, condemns him, forces him to escape, and pushes him into the depths of a discordant and clashing universe in which the Roman underclass preserves the innocent gaze and childlike smile of the Italian actor Ninetto Davoli. However, it uses that smile as a shield to ignore the cruel crudity of a reality born from a petty and vulgar bourgeoisie. Therefore Pasolini, who nostalgically chased the fields of Friuli, its thunderstorms, and its primroses for a long time, has ended up condemning that sense of regret and unveiling the deceit of a purity that maybe he has never experienced. Can a contradiction or an inconsistency exist that is more disconcerting than a guilty innocence? The answer would undoubtedly be no, if Pasolini did not exist. There is no time to look with innocence at the world. Now we need the force of condemnation. Innocence for him is nothing but the guilt of those who do not want to see and know, of those who leave behind the cruel injustice of the world, falling into the mystifying trap of progress. "The innocent will be condemned because they no longer have the right to be so," Pasolini writes in the screenplay of one of his film episodes that was unjustly considered as one of his minor works. It is 1969 and Marco Bellocchio, Bernardo Bertolucci, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Jean-Luc Godard and Carlo Lizzani are asked to produce five episodes that represent a laic and contemporary reinterpretation of the Gospel texts under the title of Love and Anger. Pasolini directed The Paper Flower Sequence and described it this way: 'There are moments in history when you cannot be innocent, you must be conscious; not to be conscious means to be guilty. So while a thoughtless and completely innocent Ninetto is walking down Via Nazionale, a series of images of some of the most important and dangerous things happening