Rogopag (Blu-Ray and DVD)

Conceived by the Italian producer Alfredo Bini, the multi-director portmanteau film Let’s Wash Our Brains: RoGoPaG [Laviamoci il cervello: RoGoPaG] brought together four esteemed European directors to contribute comic episodes reflective of the swinging post-“boom” era.

The resulting omnibus collectively examines social anxieties around sex, nuclear war, religion, urbanisation – and the promise of a modern cinema. Roberto Rossellini’s Illibatezza [Virginity] follows an airline stewardess plagued by an obsessed American tourist whose 8mm camera enables the indulgence of a personal, and solipsistic, vision of the Ideal. Jean-Luc Godard’s Il nuovo mondo [The New World] takes place in an Italian-dubbed Paris beset by nuclear fallout, and wittily chronicles the changes that take place in the lives – and medicine cabinet – of a handsome young couple. Pier Paolo Pasolini’s scandalous La ricotta [Ricotta, as in the curded cheese] presents the goings-on around a film shoot devoted to the Crucifixion and presided over by none other than Orson Welles (playing a kind of stand-in for Pasolini himself); it is this episode that landed Pasolini with a suspended four-month prison sentence. Lastly, Ugo Gregoretti’s Il pollo ruspante [Free-Range Chicken] depicts a middle-class Milanese family flirting with the purchase of real-estate and engaging catastrophically with an antagonistic consumerist infrastructure.

Let’s Wash Our Brains: RoGoPaG remains one of the definitive entries of the Sixties vogue for the multi-auteur anthology film, and The Masters of Cinema Series is proud to present it for the very first time on Blu-ray (in a Dual Format (Blu-ray + DVD)), and standalone DVD editions