Pasolini's La Ricotta: Sacred Art and Cinematic Blasphemy

In the 1963 film Rogopag, Pier Paolo Pasolini's segment La Ricotta offers a meta-cinematic critique of Cinecittà and the sacred. The episode follows Giovanni Stracci (Mario Cipriani), a starving extra playing one of the two thieves in a film about the Passion of Christ. After giving his lunch to his family, he desperately seeks food, eventually buying ricotta with money from a journalist (Vittorio La Paglia). Mocked by the cast, he gorges on the Last Supper banquet and dies of indigestion during the crucifixion scene, prompting the director (Orson Welles) to coldly remark: 'Poor Stracci, to die, he had no other way to remind us that he too was alive.' Pasolini recreates two Renaissance tableaux vivants: Rosso Fiorentino's Deposition from the Cross (1521, Pinacoteca di Volterra) and Pontormo's Transport of Christ (1526-28, Santa Felicita, Florence). These are shot in color against the black-and-white film, but the sacred imagery is disrupted by anachronistic twist music and laughter from the cast, including the actor playing Jesus. The film was accused of 'vilipendio against the state religion' and brought to trial in 1962. The Catholic Film Center did not ban it, seeing Stracci's death as a 'Christian redemption.' Pasolini's work desacralizes the divine while sacralizing the humble, prefiguring his 1964 The Gospel According to St. Matthew.