Pasolini wrote the poem “La rabbia” (the anger) in 1960, describing the emotion of anger, felt as a small demon that poisons the soul. When one is angry, one cannot focus on anything else: one of the most physical and powerful emotions, which radiates from the viscera and makes us become something other than ourselves, if we are not able to control it. All the idiomatic expressions related to anger have a connection with the most exuberant physicality and instinct: blindness, fire, the belly… In a word, the impulse that, uncontrollable, needs to transform itself into action, to be unleashed outside of us to free us. Can such an emotion become poetry?
In this poem Pasolini explores in depth the emotion of anger that he feels inside himself like a “small, deaf, dark” demon. An anger that Pasolini compares to that of young people against the old world. An anger that does not make him master of himself, that tears him to pieces, until it makes him a “wreck”.

This publication "La rabbia" is a filmic poem in prose and verse in which Pier Paolo Pasolini condenses childhood memories and existential reflections in a state of mind that addresses the malaise of the Cold War years and beyond, up to the threshold of the economic boom, questioning the meaning of events such as the bloody Soviet repression of Hungary, the Cuban revolution, the liberation of the former European colonies, the election of Pope John XXIII, the death of Marilyn Monroe.

The text is published here in its entirety and re-proposed in its tight dialogue with the images, to restore the impressive visual force of the work. The themes of Pasolini's critique of modernity already emerge: television is lucidly defined as a "new weapon" for the diffusion of "insincerity, of lies", and while a technological development without progress looms, the features of the "new Prehistory" emerge.