The Anger (La Rabbia) is a thorny thing to contemplate from a 21st century perspective. The 1963 film, seldom seen in its own era and only recently issued on DVD with an informative booklet and bonus materials, was intended as a left-right debate on the state of the world. Sadly, the leftist, Pier Paolo Pasolini, was a Stalinist, and the rightist, Giovannino Guareschi, a racist. One defended the assault by Soviet tanks on the Hungarian rebels in 1956; the other defended the suppression of Africans by European colonial empires.
The film is interesting nonetheless for what it says about European intellectual debate at the height of the Cold War and the many uses of newsreel and documentary footage. Both directors stitched together their portions of The Anger from snippets of existing film, often depicting the same events from recent history. Their editing and voiceover narrations were their original contributions, and in their choice of images and commentary emerge the contrast between worldviews. Pasolini's narrative was poetic and Guareschi's sarcastic. A naïve apostle for the Soviet Union, Pasolini believed it was a land of freedom, culture, even fun! Guareschi lambasted the political hypocrisy of both the USSR and the USA.
While Guareschi was at his worst on the subject of race, it's here that Pasolini shines, saying that all of us will become familiar “with other faces, other dances—all will become familiar and enlarge the earth.” In many other respects, Guareschi seems oddly prescient, denouncing environmental degradation by developers, dependency on oil, declining educational standards and even the envious eye China would one day cast on Africa. Pasolini condemns the decadence of jazz like an old-fashioned Stalinist, even as jazz was receding from the forefront of popular culture. By contrast, Guareschi includes fascinating footage of an Italian rockabilly band, doing their best Gene Vincent impersonation, and the attendant riot in the auditorium. Guareschi wasn't a fan, seeing the phenomenon as a symptom of “the hasty rhythm” of modern life, but at least he was aware of where modernity was heading.
