Parky at the Pictures (DVD 13/12/12)

Lang spent two years in pre-production and a further nine months filming his remarkable two-part epic. His new wife, Thea von Harbou, primarily based her screenplay on the fabled  medieval verse saga, although she also drew on Wagner's Ring Cycle and 19th-century playwright Friedrich Hebbel's Die Nibelungen, in which she had once acted.

Part One, Siegfried, sees the eponymous hero (Paul Richter) return from the Wood of Woden having vanquished a dragon and the dwarf king Alberich (Georg John) to marry Kriemhild (Margarethe Schön), the sister of the Burgundian king, Gunther (Theodor Loos). He is determined to conquer and wed the Icelandic warrior queen, Brunhild (Hanna Ralph) and his scheming advisor Hagen (Hans Adalbert von Schlettow) persuades Siegfried to participate in the campaign. However, he is undone by a combination of sexual duplicity, court intrigue and the weak spot on his shoulder that prevents him from being entirely invincible.

In Kriemhild's Revenge, Siegfried's widow learns that Hagen has stolen the cursed Nibelungen treasure that her husband had acquired from Alberich. However, her brethren refuse to help her recover it and, so, she accepts the invitation of Rudiger von Bechlorn (Rudolf Rittner) to marry his master, Etzel, King of the Huns (Rudolf Klein-Rogge). In gratitude for bearing him a son, Etzel invites Kriemhild's kinsmen to his palace, where they are attacked by warriors loyal to their new queen. However, Rudiger and Kriemhild's younger brothers Gerenot (Hans Carl Mueller) and Giselher (Erwin Biswanger) perish in the ensuing battle and, when Kriemhild murders Gunther and Hagen to learn the whereabouts of the missing treasure, she is killed by Sword Master Hildebrand (Georg August Koch) and the dying Etzel insists her body is taken for burial alongside her beloved Siegfried.

Despite its origins, this was less a literary enterprise than a demonstration of German cinematic might. Keen to brandish its prowess after the merger with Decla-Bioscop made it the biggest film studio outside Hollywood, UFA encouraged Lang and set designers Otto Hunte, Karl Vollbrecht and Erich Kettelhut to indulge their imaginations and, inspired by artists like Wilhelm von Kaulbach, Caspar David Friedrich and Arnold Böcklin, they created an imposingly mythical neverland that epitomised the project's self-conscious grandeur.

But while the art direction and the picture's sheer ambition were praised by many critics, others accused Lang of stressing the monumental over the human. Indeed, later scholars, including Siegfried Kracauer, suggested that the film's architecture had influenced Albert Speer's design of the Nuremburg Rallies and Leni Riefenstahl's notorious documentary, Triumph of the Will (1935). However, many non-fascists espoused poetic patriotism and while Lang admitted that his intention had been to restore German pride after the Great War, he was not responsible for the Nazis championing Siegfried (rather than its sequel, which depicted Aryans succumbing to Asians) or the release of a propagandist sound version, complete with a Wagnerian score.

Ironically, Die Nibelungen disappointed at the domestic box-office, with audiences finding the complex narrative confusing and the pacing ponderous. The meticulously choreographed acting certainly tends to the grandiloquent. But Margarethe Schön persuasively passed from being lovesick to hate-fuelled in a display of duality than anticipated Maria and the Robot's in Metropolis (1926). Moreover, the dragon slaying and the 45-minute battle with the Huns were impressive set-pieces, with the latter being handled with laudable formal and rhythmic precision. Consequently, this remains a silent landmark, whose technical ingenuity and fantastical scope finds echo in Peter Jackson's takes on Tolkien.

`I have recently seen the silliest film,' wrote HG Wells in May 1927, on seeing a bowdlerised version of Fritz Lang's sci-fi prototype, Metropolis. `I do not believe it would be possible to make one sillier.' The author, whose futuristic tales, `The Sleeper Wakes' and `A Story of Days to Come', had clearly influenced screenwriter, Thea Von Harbou, went on to claim that the film was a concoction of `almost every possible foolishness, cliché, platitude and muddlement about mechanical progress and progress in general, served up with a sauce of sentimentality'.

He was not alone in resisting a picture that took 17 months to shoot and strained to breaking point the resources of the famous UFA studios. The German public stayed away in droves, prompting the film to be pulled shortly after its glittering premiere and cut down from 150 to 120 minutes for an unsuccessful summer reissue.

But such tinkering was nothing compared to the savaging it received in the States. Fearing for the picture's box-office prospects, even in its truncated form, Paramount hired dramatist Channing Pollock to completely rework the storyline for US consumption. What emerged was a melodrama about an army of steel workmen whose lack of souls proved their undoing. This version ran a mere 107 minutes, but it still underwhelmed audiences reared on a diet of slapstick, swashbuckling and schmaltz.

Only in the 1980s, after a meticulous reconstruction was undertaken using archive prints, old scripts and production shots, was Metropolis restored to something approximating Lang's original vision. Yet, in the interim, this much maligned movie was seized upon by cinematic grave robbers, who appropriated its futuristic architecture, its Expressionist interiors and its Constructivist underworld for their own, invariably lesser, flicks.

So why did this expensive flop come to exert so much influence and why has it so belatedly earned classic status?

Primarily, it was just too audaciously spectacular to ignore. From the opening cityscape onwards, there was an endless procession of grandiose set-pieces, each of which required countless extras and weeks of exhaustive preparation. For example, a thousand men, culled from the Depression bread queues, had their heads shaved for the Tower of Babel sequence. Many more stripped to the waist, at the height of the Berlin winter, in order to haul rocks into the mouth of Moloch, the city's giant furnace. Others had to swim for their lives as the catacombs were flooded during the industrialist Fredersen's desperate bid to punish his rebellious workforce, while the film's debuting star, Brigitte Helm, had to endure the scorching danger of real fire during the frenzied burning of the treacherous robot, Maria.

Lang always claimed that he had been inspired to make Metropolis after seeing the New York skyline for the first time. However, this was just another of the old fabricator's fancies, as Von Harbou had already completed the script before the couple took their transatlantic cruise. Yet, there's no doubt that the trip galvanised his ambition to produce the greatest film ever made.

Consequently, he demanded first use of Eugen Schüfftan's freshly patented mirror process for combining miniatures and painted artwork with live-action, which he employed on 13 separate scenes. In another, he utilised a primitive back projection system. But he was also dependent on the design genius of Otto Hunte, Erich Kettlehut and Karl Vollbrecht, whose monumental sets not only captured the city's fascistic modernity, but also augmented its forbidding scale.

However, the film's single most memorable image was created by cinematographer Karl Freund's assistant, Gunther Rittau. With its jagged flashes of light and its hovering concentric circles disguising an ingenious slow dissolve, the creation of the robotic Maria proved the template for every Frankensteinian sequence shot in Hollywood over the next decade and beyond.

It was certainly the physical aspects of the film that impressed director-in-waiting, Luis Buñuel. Although he considered the plot `trivial, bombastic and pedantic', he felt the industrial and scientific segments formed a `captivating symphony of movement....From the photographic angle, its emotive force, its unheard of and overwhelming beauty is unequalled.'

Adolf Hitler was also reckoned to be an admirer of the picture, although he would undoubtedly have been at odds with its rather twee political message - `Between the mind and the hands, the heart must meditate.' Indeed, the philosophising throughout has a fortune cookie feel to it, with the screenplay's combination of scripture, Marx, Wells and Verne earning Von Harbou merited criticism for her intellectual shallowness.

Yet it remains a cornerstone of screen science fiction. Metropolis originated the `utopian' sub-genre, which attempted to predict the shape of future civilisations. It defined the character of the mad scientist whose fixation with creating life resulted in an alliance with the forces of darkness. And it reinforced sci-fi's predilection for fantastical machinery and state-of-the-art special effects. It's far from flawless, but it did establish one of sci-fi's key principals - the need to take artistic, technical and commercial risks in order to astonish the audience.

As for the reconstruction, there are currently two available on DVD and Blu-ray. The first was released in 1984 by Giorgio Moroder and runs for 82 minutes. Cobbled together from what were then considered the best surviving prints, the picture quality leaves something to be desired. However, it is fascinating to see how Moroder and musical collaborator Pete Bellotte complement the visuals with a mix of electro-pop and a songtrack that comprises Freddie Mercury's `Love Kills', Pat Benatar's `Here's My Heart', Jon Anderson's `Cage of Freedom', Cycle V's `Blood From a Stone', Bonnie Tyler's `Here She Comes', `Loverboy's `Destruction'; Billy Squier's `On Your Own' and Adam Ant's `What's Going On'.

Given that Jeff Wayne has just re-recorded his War of the Worlds concept album with new artists, perhaps Moroder could come up with a new accompaniment to the most recent restoration, which comes as close as we are likely to get to Lang's original intentions. The discovery of a negative in Buenos Aires in 2008 has enabled archivists to piece together pristinely restored footage with badly striated snippets that fill in gaps that have previously left the scenario feeling more confusing, fascistic and unintentionally gauche than it actually is.

The relationship between Fredersen (Gustav Fröhlich) and Rotwang (Rudolf Klein-Rogge) is clarified by the revelations about their mutual love of Freder's mother, Hel (which echoed Lang's liaison with Von Harbou, who was Klein-Rogge's ex-wife), while Freder (Alfred Abel) is made to seem less of a headstrong ninny by his heroic deluge rescue of the mutinying workers' children. His ally Josaphat (Theodor Loos), 11811 doppelgänger (Erwin Biswanger) and Thin Man nemesis (Fritz Rasp) are also more fully rounded in the new version.

It's even possible to get a better understanding of the film's political message, which has long been the subject of conjecture. Von Harbou, who later became a committed Nazi, has Maria longing for a `Mediator' (or `Mittler' in German - sound familiar?), Lang is clearly more interested in telling a modern-day myth than finding dialectical meaning in the deliverance of the oppressed masses or the rise of a Nietzschean superman. Indeed, the invocation of the Joan of Arc story in the robot Maria's burning at the stake suggests this is either a Nibelungen with forbidding skyscrapers and subterranean caverns or an updating of the biblical story of the Whore of Babylon, who is both warned against in the monk's still-missing cathedral sermon and embodied by the rabble-rousing Maria in her highly sensual nightclub dance. Whatever the truth, Metropolis has lost none of its ability to inspire awe and provoke debate.

While Eureka is responsible for the Lang and Pasolini releases, Artificial Eye has collected five little-seen features in Classic Bergman, a slightly misleading title, as this set only contains one picture worthy of the epithet. Nevertheless, no film directed by Ingmar Bergman is without interest, with even a minor offering like his second outing, It Rains on Our Love (1946), blending elements from French Poetic Realism, Italian Neo-Realism and Hollywood film noir. Despite admitting in his memoirs to frustration at having to work with critic Herbert Grevenius's adaptation of Norwegian Oscar Braathen's play, Good People, Bergman was probably relieved to have been offered an assignment after the disappointing box-office performance of his debut, Crisis (1946). However, it took a stern reminder from producer Lorens Marmstedt that he should find his own style instead of trying to copy Marcel Carné for the sophomore to settle into the material.

The storyline is hardly complex, with ex-prisoner Birger Malmsten recognising a fellow lost soul in the homeless and pregnant Barbro Kollberg when they meet at a railway station. Following a tryst in a nearby hotel room, the pair decide to take a train into the countryside and make a fresh start away from the temptations of the city. Things get off to a bad start when Ludde Gentzel threatens to have Malmsten arrested. But he offers the couple a place to stay, while Malmsten finds a job with Douglas Håge, even though his wife, Hjoerdis Pettersson, heartily disapproves of the strangers and takes great pleasure in their struggle to find acceptance.

Unsurprisingly, the hypocritical neighbours learn about Malmsten's past and Kollberg's condition and, led by pastor Åke Fridell, they bring charges against the lovers, who find an unexpected supporter against pitiless prosecutor Benkt-Åke Benktsson in Gösta Cederlund, who had been serving as the omniscient (and possibly ethereal) narrator. But, while he avoids melodramatic miserabilism, Bergman can't quite prevent the denouement from feeling formulaic or coax his leads into capturing the sort of doomed decency that their French or American counterparts were then exhibiting. However, cinematographers Göran Strindberg and Hilding Bladh convey the drizzly oppressiveness of the locale, while future members of Bergman's stock company, Erland Josephson and Gunnar Björnstrand, take bit parts as the parish clerk and a doltish intermediary.

Producer Lorens suggested another stage transfer for Bergman's third feature, A Ship Bound for India (1947). However, he was so unimpressed with Martin Söderhjelm's scenario that he cut a deal with Lorens to rewrite the entire thing while staying in the lap of luxury in Cannes. In the event, Lorens found the drama heavy going and recommended that Bergman cut it by several minutes. However, it was warmly received at Cannes and earned Bergman his first distribution deal in the United States, where the picture was known as Frustration.

Opening with hunchbacked sailor Birger Malmsten returning home after seven years at sea, the action is essentially an elongated flashback that is prompted by his reunion with Gertrud Fridh, who no longer resembles the sensual chorus girl from Åke Fridell's variety hall who had bewitched him when he was still a callow youth. However, while Malmsten's passion had been pure, his tugboat captain father, Holger Löwenadler, had regarded Fridh as a plaything and he had humiliated long-suffering wife Anna Lindahl by openly consorting with her.

But Fridh is dismayed both by the way Löwenadler treats his wife and son and rules his crew with a rod of iron. So she jilts him for Malmsten and they embark upon a hesitant romance. However, Malmsten feels guilty when Löwenadler starts to go blind and retreats into a small room full of maritime mementoes. Consequently, he ships out on the first available passage and returns to the news that his father has died of pneumonia and that Fridh despises his pity and would rather be alone than his charity case.

Seemingly influenced by Jean Vigo's L'Atalante (1934), Bergman does another passable impression of Poetic Realism, right down to the authenticity of PA Lundgren's cramped sets and cinematographer Göran Strindberg's misty monochrome imagery. Bergman also has more luck with his cast, with Löwenadler seething with malice and menace and Fridh and Lindahl conveying the lack of options open to women in such a male-dominated community. But Lorens was right in complaining to Bergman that while he might have aspirations of becoming the Scandinavian Carné, Malmsten was never going to match the brooding intensity of his favourite anti-hero, Jean Gabin. Thus, while this has its compelling moments, it's hard to detect the `world of blinding cinematic purity' claimed by esteemed French critic André Bazin.

Fresh from completing what would be his international breakthrough, Summer with Monika (1953), Bergman devoted himself to the Municipal Theatre in Malmö. His production of August Strindberg's The Crown-Bride was proclaimed a triumph and Nordisk suggested a screen version. But delays in securing the rights meant that Bergman opted instead for Sawdust and Tinsel (1953).

Inspired by a dream and written in a hotel room above Stockholm's South Theatre, the picture went through a tortuous pre-production process, with several studios  rejecting the screenplay before the Sandrews company agreed to produce. Moreover, Bergman's chosen cinematographer, Göran Strindberg, was called away shortly after filming commenced and he had to use Hilding Bladh for the location sequences in the Black Sea resort of Arild and a young Sven Nykvist for the interiors. Yet the shoot turned out to be an enjoyable experience, with the cast and crew living in cramped quarters with various circus performers and animals. The scenario itself, however, was much more sombre, as it explored Bergman's horror of being disgraced. As he once confessed, `one of the wounds I've found hardest to bear in my adult life has been the fear of humiliation and the sense of being humiliated', and several characters were subjected to very public indignities in this pitiless scenario.

The story starts with Åke Grönberg arriving in his home town with his circus troupe in the hope of repairing his relationship with his wife Annika Tretow and the sons he abandoned for a life on the road. However, they reject him and he returns to discover that his equestrienne mistress, Harriet Andersson, has been having an affair with Hasse Ekman, an arrogant actor who regards her merely as a cheap trinket. Determined to exact his revenge, Albert attempts to whip Frans during the evening performance, only to be subjected to a shameful beating in front of his family and former neighbours. As the film ends, Grönberg and Andersson leave town, bound by their miserable abasement and the knowledge that their unhappy union is little more than a dismal convenience.

At the outset, Grönberg hears a story that foreshadows his own degradation, involving clown Anders Ek, who had to carry naked wife Gudrun Brost over his shoulder in a grotesque parody of Christ's journey to Calvary, after she had been goaded into swimming in the sea by a band of mocking soldiers. With its bright bleached light and incessant soundtrack of drums and cannons creating a nightmarish feel, this was not only a bravura piece of staging that demonstrated Bergman's mastery of symbolism and technique, but it also revealed the bleak attitude to religious iconography that he had formed in reaction to his austere upbringing.

Despite Bergman's protestations to the contrary, the style and tone clearly seem to have been influenced by E.A. Dupont's 1925 drama, Variety, in which acrobat Emil Jannings abandons his wife for exotic foreigner Lya de Putti, only for her to be seduced by the handsome Warwick Ward. But Sawdust and Tinsel was essentially a chamber drama. In addition, it was also the first Bergman film to use a journey as a metaphor for life. The Seventh Seal, Wild Strawberries (both 1957), The Magician (aka The Face, 1958) and The Virgin Spring (1960) would all adopt a similar circular structure, in which a character returns to the point of departure having learned much about themselves and the vagaries of existence.

Despite its narrative intricacy and the fact that it's one of Bergman's most primal explorations of human nature, the majority of Swedish critics savaged the film on its release and he was devastated by their hostility. Yet Sawdust and Tinsel - which is also known as The Naked Night and The Clowns' Evening - is now ranked among Bergman's most impressive early works. It certainly left its imprint on Woody Allen, who borrowed its Expressionist atmosphere for Shadows and Fog (1992), in which a clown (John Malkovich) cheats on his sword-swallowing sweetheart (Mia Farrow) with an acrobat (Madonna).

During the early part of his career, Bergman struggled to find any consistency. Thus, he followed Summer With Monika with Secrets of Women (1952), Sawdust and Tinsel with A Lesson in Love (1954) and Smiles of a Summer Night with Dreams (both 1955), which was considered too sombre for mainstream audiences and insufficiently complex to attract an arthouse following. In later years, Bergman dismissed the picture as a resounding misfire and the critics have tended to follow his lead. Yet there is a slickness to the plotting here and some fine performances by a cast that senses the absurdity moiling beneath the melodrama.

Eva Dahlbeck is the fashion manager of a Stockholm photographic studio and Harriet Andersson is her hottest new model. Still stung by married lover Ulf Palme ending their year-long affair, Dahlbeck accepts an assignment in his hometown of Gothenburg and Andersson is so convinced that this will lead to her big break that she dumps working-class boyfriend Sven Lindberg. Neither woman particularly enjoys the train journey across Sweden, but they revive as they make their plans for the evening.

When Dahlbeck arranges to meet Palme in her hotel room, Andersson goes out window shopping and is soon spotted by mournful consul Gunnar Björnstrand, who offers to buy her an expensive dress, as well as a necklace and some shoes. Sampling consumerism for the first time, the naive Andersson accepts his generosity and agrees to accompany him to a nearby fairground. However, Björnstrand is badly shaken by a ride on the ghost train and asks Andersson if she would help him home. But, before Andersson can make herself comfortable, Björnstrand's daughter, Kerstin Hedeby, arrives on a mission to borrow some money and is appalled that her father is flirting with a girl of her own age, while the mother who lost her mind on giving birth to her is languishing in an asylum.

Meanwhile, Dahlbeck is having an equally miserable time, as Palme insists he must remain loyal to wife Inga Landgre. However, it only becomes clear why when the suspicious spouse bursts into the suite and reveals that Palme's business has failed and he now lives on her inheritance. Disgusted with herself for falling for such a weasel, Dahlbeck takes out her frustration on Andersson by sacking her when she is late for the shoot next morning. Having endured another interminable train journey, the pair return to the capital, where Andersson gives Lindberg a second chance, although it is clear from her excited chatter about the high life that their reunion isn't going to last long.

Also known as Journey Into Autumn, this study of strong women being prevented from achieving their goals by weak men feels surprisingly modern with its asides on affluence, celebrity, careerism, infidelity and loneliness. Having once been a bright young thing herself, Dahlbeck is happy to settle for an unprepossessing chap who can care and provide for her. But good men are in short supply and, even though she is well aware of his flaws, Landgre would rather be disappointed with Palme than alone in the knowledge he has found the happiness he denied her. Similarly, Hedeby refuses to allow Björnstrand to spoil Andersson after she has endured so much and received comparatively little in compensation.

Rounding off the quintet is So Close to Life (1958), which was made to fulfill a pledge to Nordisk rather than out of any artistic imperative. Also known as Brink of Life and adapted from a short story in Ulla Isaksson's collection The Aunt of Death, it charts the progress over 24 hours of three women - Ingrid Thulin, Eva Dahlbeck and Bibi Andersson - as they await developments in a Stockholm maternity ward. Yet, while the response of the Swedish critics spoilt by The Seventh Seal and Wild Strawberries (both 1957) was lukewarm, the picture earned Bergman the Best Director prize at Cannes, while his stars shared the Best Actress award. Furthermore, it caused something of a stir on its release, as few men at this time were present at the birth of their children and many male patrons reportedly fainted during screenings on discovering some previously unsuspected facts of life.

Scripted by Isaksson and marking Bergman's shift to the `chamber dramas' that would become his trademark, this is both a sobering insight into middle-class marriage and the Cold War world in which the women hope to raise their children. The performances are exemplary, with Thulin's secretary being worn down by the emotional sterility of husband Erland Josephson before miscarrying and becoming increasingly self-recriminatory and angry with the uncertain world for causing her distress. By contrast, Dahlbeck's happily married housewife revels in her condition and the affection of gentle spouse Max von Sydow and is certain that her delivery is going to go well, while Andersson's frightened teenager debates whether to abort a child already disowned by its father and likely to cause her parents to reject her. Barbro Hiort af Ornäs and Ann-Marie Gyllenspetz also impress as the attendant nurse and the social worker whose own infertility helps Andersson reach her decision.

But, while this was the first film in which Bergman had prioritised characterisation and dialogue over setting and technique, he seems constricted by Bibi Lindström's antiseptic sets and the occasional purple passage in Isaksson's script. Moreover, he also disliked working with journeyman cinematographer Max Wilén. Yet, for all its flaws, this is an often moving human interest drama that confronts reality rather than cosier contrivance and it enabled Bergman to forge an alliance with Isaksson, who would also work on the screenplay for The Virgin Spring (1960) and the 1986 teleplay, The Blessed Ones.

Around the time this feature was released, Bergman began to explore issues of faith and spirituality on a more regular basis and, along with Robert Bresson and Carl Theodor Dreyer, he is regarded as one of the great religious film-makers. Yet, perhaps the most intriguing interpretation of the Christian message, The Gospel According to Matthew (1964), came from a gay Marxist.

Despite their obvious differences, it's surprisingly easy to draw parallels between Pier Paolo Pasolini and Christ. Both abandoned the religion of their youth and so alarmed the authorities with their outspoken views that they were charged with blasphemy. Both presented fresh interpretations of established texts - Christ the Old Testament scriptures, Pasolini the plays of Sophocles, the masterworks of medieval literature and, of course, Matthew's gospel. And both lived among society's outcasts and perished at the hands of the very people they sought to champion.

It's not difficult, therefore, to see why the gay, Marxist poet and film-maker would be drawn to the life and teachings of a Palestinian carpenter. Pasolini was inspired to make the film after reading the New Testament on a visit Assisi.  He rejected Mark's gospel for being `too obviously written for people of little education', while Luke and John were dismissed for respectively being `too literary and mellifluous' and `too much of a mystic to be transmitted visually'.

Matthew, however, presented a `purely poetical and natural, non-denominational' account that afforded Pasolini the opportunity to `re-consecrate' and `re-mythicise' a remarkable story that he believed was becoming increasingly unfamiliar to most Italians. Moreover, by removing the gospel from its biblical context, he was able to focus on its political nature. As a `rank-and-file Communist without a card', he had always shared intellectual Antonio Gramschi's faith in the revolutionary potential of the Italian peasantry and his Christ delivers a message that is as politicised as it's compassionate.

What makes this interpretation all the more remarkable is that Pasolini quotes directly from the gospel throughout. There are a couple of borrowings from Isaiah, while Salome's dance is imported from Mark. But, apart from the odd shift in chronology, this is a faithful rendition of the text, which received a sort of tacit establishment approval by dint of the fact that the English subtitles were provided by the respected theologian, Monsignor Ronald Knox (although Pasolini resented the inclusion of `St' in the original translated title). This, too, is rather remarkable, considering Pasolini had incurred Catholic wrath with `La ricotta', his contribution to the 1963 portmanteau picture RoGoPaG (see below), in which he'd shown an actor playing the crucified Christ in a crassly commercial movie die from a surfeit of cheese while left hanging on the cross during a lunchbreak.

A dedication to the recently deceased Pope John XXIII and a visual style that astutely combined the revolutionary and the reverential also went some way to deflecting Vatican criticism. The tableaux owed much to the devotional art of Piero della Francesca, Rouault, Masaccio and Botticelli, while the restrained depiction of the miracles and the crucifixion meants it avoided the sentimental pictorialism of Hollywood offerings like Nicholas Ray's King of Kings (1961). But the employment of handheld cameras and zoom lenses enabled Pasolini to achieve a modernity that had its roots in Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), neo-realism and the nouvelle vague. His use of music was similarly eclectic, switching from Bach's St Matthew's Passion to the Congolese Missa Luba and such blues standards as `Motherless Child' and `My Oh My'.

More contentious was his decision to shoot in southern Italy rather the Holy Land (which he considered too commercialised) and his choice of cast. A Spanish architecture student, Enrique Irazaoqui was selected for Christ on account of his El Greco-like demeanour (although his lines were dubbed by Enrico Maria Salerno), while the director's mother, Susanna, was cast as the Virgin Mary. Other roles were taken by Calabrian peasants, while Judas was played by Roman trucker Otello Sestili, Andrew by poet Alfonso Gatto and Mary of Bethany by novelist Natalia Ginzburg.

There was an inevitable Marxist backlash against the film's `reactionary ideology' and Pasolini admitted to being ashamed of some moments of `disgusting pietism'. Yet it won the Special Jury Prize at Venice and an award from the International Catholic Film Office. But its finest achievement was in fulfilling Pasolini's aim to depict `the life of Christ plus two thousand years of storytelling about the life of Christ'.

Doctrine and ideology clashed once more in Hawks and Sparrows (1966), a slapstick picaresque that borrows from Dante and Beckett to produce an absurdist allegory whose satire is both highly specific to mid-60s Italy and curiously timeless in its insights into humanity's conflicting needs to belong, be superior, be cruel and be kind. Starring the much-loved clown Totò in one of his last roles and Pasolini's teenage muse Ninetto Davoli, this often feels like a father-son reworking of a Laurel and Hardy comedy. But the inclusion of a talking crow, a medieval digression and copious philosophising brings this purgatorial peregrination closer to the kind of intellectual provocation associated with Peter Greenaway, who would attempt his own variation on the theme in A TV Dante in 1989.

Following some hilariously cod-operatic credits, the action opens with Totò taking a stroll around the outskirts of Rome with Davoli, who is one of his 18 children. They stop at a café, where Davoli joins some other kids in rehearsing a dance routine. A little further on,  Totò watches a couple of corpses being loaded into an ambulance, while Davoli pays a call on girlfriend Rossana Di Rocco, who is dressed in a shabby angel costume for an upcoming pageant. Suddenly, the pair are joined by a garrulous crow, who informs them that his parents were `Mr Doubt and Mrs Conscience' and that his family home was Seventy Times Seven Karl Marx Street.

Quoting freely from, amongst others, Marx, Mao and Brecht, the crow asks Totò and Davoli where they are going. When they fail to provide a satisfactory answer, the bird transports them back to the 13th century, where they take on the guise of monks being instructed by St Francis to preach brotherhood to the `arrogant hawks and humble sparrows'. However, the mission proves trickier than Totò and Ninetto anticipated, as while they can persuade each family can be convinced to love their own kind, they find the concept of acceptance much harder to comprehend. Indeed, even when the hawks do make progress, they still cannot resist preying on their smaller cousins.

Disappointed with Totò for allowing himself to become the subject of a cult, Francis refuses to listen to their excuses and the duo are relieved to return to the present, where they take refuge in a thatched hut until they are chased away by its impoverished owners. Showing they have learnt little from their encounter with a saint, Totò and Davoli browbeat mother Rosina Moroni about her unpaid rent before witnessing the female lead in a travelling theatre troupe give birth in the middle of a performance.

Pressing on, they call on landlord Ricardo Redi, who is preparing to host a Conference of Dentists for Dante and he treats them with disdain before ejecting them from his villa. Undaunted, father and son watch footage of the funeral of Communist Party leader Palmiro Togliatti before realising they have arrived back where they started. Much to the dismay of the crow, they bump into feisty prostitute Femi Benussi and disappear into a cornfield with her. Hungry after their exertions, Totò and Davoli kill the crow and agree that it tastes better than it sounded.

Pasolini always cited this as the film that disappointed him least. Drolly scored by Ennio Morricone, it's certainly his most playful outing, even though its message that hawks will always devour sparrows (and that convictions will always lead to conflict rather than harmony) is more realistic than optimistic. The veteran Totò and the juvenile Davoli make splendid foils and it's a shame they only got to team once more, in Pasolini's `The Earth Seen from the Moon' contribution to the 1967 anthology, The Witches, before Totò suffered a fatal heart attack.

By this time, Pasolini's search for truth had taken him into the realms of mythology. The story of the Greek king who murdered his father and married his mother had been filmed three times before Pasolini's Oedipus Rex (1967). Compatriot Giuseppe de Liguoro produced a 1909 film d'art adaptation before director Theo Frankel starred opposite Suzanne de Baere's Jocasta in a 1911 British version, while 46 years later, Tyrone Guthrie brought his acclaimed stage interpretation to the screen, complete with masked characters and Douglas Rain (later the voice of HAL in Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, 1968) as the messenger.

Guthrie used WB Yeats's respected translation of Sophocles, while Philip Saville used one by Paul Roche for Oedipus the King, which went into production around the same time as Pasolini's picture and headlined Christopher Plummer, Lilli Palmer and Orson Welles as Tiresias, the blind soothsayer. A prize-winning poet before he turned to film, Pasolini personally translated Oedipus Rex and Oedipus at Colunus (replacing Antigone with Angelo in the process) and bookended them with episodes set in the Po Valley that extended the themes of the Sophoclean dramas.

As Jocasta, he cast Silvana Mangano - who had dazzled in Giuseppe De Santis's rose-tinted neo-realist classic Bitter Rice (1949) and would go on to work with Pasolini on Theorem (1968) and The Decameron (1970) before playing the mother in Death in Venice (1971), the first of her three collaborations with Luchino Visconti - as she `might have the same scent of primroses about her that my mother had when young'. The title role went to Franco Citti - a Pasolini regular after Accatone (1961), who took the minor role of Calo in Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather (1972) and its 1974 sequel - even though he `has nothing in common with me - save his slightly raised cheek bones' and in spite of `his monstrous inferiority and guilt complexes'.

The principals were completed by Pasolini himself as the high priest, avant-garde film and theatre director Carmelo Bene as Creon and Julian Beck of the New York Living Theatre as Tiresias. Shooting primarily took place in the Moroccan desert, although the codas were filmed in the Po Valley.

In his introduction to the published screenplay, `Why That of Oedipus Is a Story', Pasolini taunted both novelist Alberto Moravia for believing that cinema was merely an aggregation of `images' and Bernardo Bertolucci for suggesting that realism should not preclude the putting of philosophical statements into the mouths of everyday characters. To clinch his point, he averred that `I too, like Moravia and Bertolucci, am a bourgeois, in fact a petit-bourgeois, a turd convinced that my stench is not only scented perfume, but is in fact the only perfume in the world. I too am thus endowed with the characteristics of aestheticism and humour, the typical characteristics of a petit-bourgeois intellectual.'

This aestheticism (which he defined as `the contemplative and slightly lazy taste for beauty') and humour (`the desire to go on smiling, no matter what, though our eyes be full of anguish') were to influence his choice of the typical elements of Oedipus's life and - because their common denominator is the fear of death - he was able to cast these events in a tragic light. He further conceded that while he had striven to relate the narrative in a detached manner he had `composed the frames in a much more cinematic way than usual' - although he couldn't be certain that `they turned out beautiful or ugly'. 

However,  his main reason for allowing this aestheticism and humour to predominate was that he was `no longer terribly interested in the subject of the researches of Freud and Marx' that had helped turn Oedipus into a `whipping boy'. Indeed, he was at pains to `stress the fact that now, at forty-five years of age, I have emerged from the wilderness of Freudian and Marxist dogma'. Yet, in the next sentence, he mischievously hinted that if one had to view the film through the theories of these discarded mentors `Freud would seem to have come out with more points'.

Clearly, there's an element of denial at work here, as Pasolini could also claim that `the relationship of hatred and love between father and son is what produces history'. It's also hard to escape the autobiographical aspect of the prologue, which centres on an army officer's jealousy of his new born baby. Pasolini's own father, Carlo Alberto, was a soldier with whom he feuded incessantly. Born into a noble family from the Romagna, he was, according to his son, `overbearing, egoistic, egocentric, tyrannical and authoritarian'. Moreover, because he was also a committed fascist, he was also `extraordinarily naive'.

In contrast, he confessed to an `excessive almost monstrous love' for his mother, Susanna, who was of Friulan peasant stock. Indeed, he named his first volume of verse, Poesie a Casara (1942), after her birthplace and the town to which Pasolini would also flee after escaping from the Nazis having been captured, along with the rest of his regiment, by two lone troopers in a tank just days after the Italian surrender in August 1943.

`I have certainly never dreamt about making love to my mother,' he wrote in his screenplay essay. `If anything, I have dreamt rather of making love to my father (against the chest of drawers in the wretched bedroom my brothers and I shared) and perhaps to my brother. And I have dreamt of making love to women of stone.'

Yet the dreams that haunted him most were those in which he climbed `endless, dreary flights of stairs in dreary homes...looking for my mother who has disappeared.' These visions would be echoed in the modern-day bookend finale, which shows Oedipus playing his flute first outside a cathedral and then in a patch of greenery before an industrial landscape before he reaches the rural idyll that is identical to the place where, in the main story, he first recognised Jocasta as his mother.

The blasted expanses that provided the backdrop for Oedipus Rex would recur in both of Pasolini's 1969 features: Medea and Pigsty. Indeed, when the latter was still entitled Orgy, its entirety was going to be set in a barren wilderness. But Pasolini opted instead to incorporate scenes from his 1966 play, Pigsty, and the result was one of his most shocking denunciations of the bourgeoisie and its part in Europe's recent fascist past, which set the tone for what would be his last offering, Salò, or The 120 Days of Sodom (1975).

Although the scenarios are interwoven, it's easier to describe them individually. Out in the wasteland, Pierre Clémenti comes across a small band of soldiers wearing antiquated armour. He steals some discarded weapons and picks off a straggler, whose pleas for mercy he ignores before decapitating him. Tossing the head into a sulphur pit, Clémenti begins to feast on the corpse and soon finds a kindred spirit in Franco Citti, who assists him in an attack on the troops escorting a cart-load of women.

A couple on a donkey joins their swelling numbers, as does Ninetto Davoli, whom they meet dancing outside a church to the flute music being played by a young boy. However, the naked lovers they encounter in the scrub shortly afterwards prove to be part of a trap mounted by the soldiers and, as the captives are being tied to stakes by monks, Clémenti repeats the hideous confession (which are the only words spoken in the entire segment): `I killed my father. I ate human flesh. I quiver with joy.'

Some far from subtle cross-cuts plant the suggestion that the wilderness scenes are part of a dream that well-to-do Jean-Pierre Léaud experiences when he slips into a coma. He lives with parents Alberto Lionello and Margarita Lozano and is engaged to liberal-leaning Anne Wiazemsky, who seems not to mind about his fixation with the pigs kept in a sty in the grounds of the family's luxurious villa. Lionello plays the harp to soothe his sleeping son, but stops when industrialist friend Ugo Tognazzi drops in with his associate Marco Ferreri and they reminisce cheerfully about the good old days during the Third Reich.

As the old comrades discuss the death camps and the plastic surgery that has transformed Tognazzi's appearance, Léaud appears to come round and agrees to break off his relationship with Wiazemsky, who is disappointed that he does not wish to participate in a revolutionary protest at the Berlin Wall. Far from being distressed by the separation, Léaud greets neighbour Ninetto Davoli with a cheery wave as he strides out towards the pigsties. Within minutes, however, Davoli is rushing to the villa, where Lionello and Tognazzi are celebrating the merger of rheir companies, to break the awful news that Léaud has been consumed by the swine. But, instead of being appalled, Tognazzi suggests it would be best to forget about the whole thing.

This treatise on the bestial gluttony of modern capitalism may not be Pasolini's most nuanced achievement. The contrasts between the two plotlines is laboured, while the casting of such popular stars as Tognazzi and Lionelli as self-satisfied Nazis is as gauche as the parody of Léaud and Wiazemsky's exchanges in La Chinoise (1967), which had been directed by her husband, Jean-Luc Godard. Nevertheless, there is something irresistibly scurrilous about the enterprise, with the brutal dumbshow often feeling like an extreme lampoon of a sword-and-sandal adventure or a Spaghetti Western. Moreover, this is also technically subversive and its self-reflexivity reconnects Pasolini with the ethos of the nouvelle vague that he had previously embraced by joining Godard, Roberto Rossellini and Ugo Gregoretti in RoGoPaG.

One of the stalwarts of neo-realism, Rossellini had worked in the omnibus format before, with his 1948 picture L'Amore comprising the short stories `The Miracle' and `The Human Voice', while he had also contributed `Envy' to The Seven Deadly Sins (1952), `The Chicken' vignette starring Ingrid Bergman to We, the Women (1953) and `Napoli 1943' to Mid-Century Loves (1954). It's all the more disappointing, therefore, that `Chastity' is such a lightweight tale that sees air hostess Rosanna Schiaffino attract the unwanted attentions of milquetoast American passenger Bruce Balaban.

Finding themselves in the same hotel during a stopover in Bangkok, businessman Balaban is taken by Schiaffino's demure demeanour. However, this is largely an act put on at the insistence of her jealous fiancé, for whom she regularly makes little home movies to reassure him she is behaving herself while not under his watchful gaze. But, what finally deters Balaban is not mumsyish modesty but a display of unabashed vampishness that sends him scampering back to his room like the overgrown child he is and decisively changes her mindset, too.

Nest to tackle the central theme of `the beginning of the end of the world' is Jean-Luc Godard, whose `The New World' takes place in Paris in the aftermath of a nuclear explosion some 120,000 metres above the city. Although the landmarks have remained intact, the residents have started behaving very oddly, as they pop pills and start acting illogically. Jean-Marc Bory is convinced that he alone has noticed these aberrations and scribbles down his impressions in a notebook. But his bemused smugness drives a wedge between himself and unconcerned girlfriend Alexandra Stewart.

Anticipating his use in Alphaville (1965) of the present to suggest the future, Godard shoots in a largely vérité manner that he knowingly contradicts by replacing natural dialogue with off-screen narration. Yet, for all the gravity of its Cold War scenario, this is marbled with mischievous references to such everyday notions as the alienating ennui of urban existence and the chasm between the sexes.

Pasolini has fun at the expense of the church, the Italian political hierarchy and cinema itself in `La Ricotta', which is beautifully photographed by Tonino Delli Colli and takes place on the Cinecittà backlot where Orson Welles is trying to film a Crucifixion sequence in the manner of two Mannerist paintings for his next masterpiece. No sooner does Welles call cut, however, than the components of the tableau begin behaving in ways scarcely befitting the cast of a biblical epic. One takes his angelic trumpet and mimes along to the pop record playing in the background, while another starts performing a striptease.

All that bothers extra Mario Cipriani, however, is the contents of the catering table. Having already given his rations to his wife and children, he skulks around trying to find something to eat. Growingly increasingly desperate as his break time elapses, Cipriani dons a dress and a wig in order to be served a second time. But, no sooner has he found somewhere to sit than he is called back to the set and has to hide his provisions.

By the time he returns, the meagre snack has been eaten by leading lady Laura Betti's lap dog and the now ravenouos Cipriani loses his temper and sells the creature to a bystander and uses the money to buy a generous helping of curd cheese that he proceeds to guzzle greedily in front of his colleagues, while Welles answers inane questions from simpering reporter Vittorio La Paglia. As he resumes his place, it becomes clear that Cipriani is playing the Good Thief being put to death beside Christ. But the angle at which his body is positioned on the cross causes a bout of gastric congestion that kills him.

The denouement landed Pasolini in court, as he was charged with `an outrage against the established religion'. However, his three-month suspended sentence was later quashed on appeal, but, because the segment was cut by the censor, he made sure that audiences were fully aware of its scathing message - that the poorest person in a big-budget picture about the supposed Saviour of the world was allowed to die because he was too insignificant for anybody to care about his fate

Finally, Ugo Gregoretti satirises the mid-60s economic miracle in `Free Range Chicken', in which a lecture on sales strategies delivered by a marketing executive using a voicebox is cross-cut with the experiences of Ugo Tognazzi and his family, as they drive from Milan into the Lombard countryside to see the real-estate development they have been convinced will contain the house of their dreams. As the speaker explains how the personal touch in corner shops gave customers an excuse not to buy, we see Ricky Tognazzi and sister Antonella Taito pester Tognazzi and wife Lisa Gastoni into buying them sweets and toys in the service station store so that they don't appear cheap to the onlookers.

Tognazzi is careful with the lire, however, and tries to persuade the waitress in adjoining café to only serve his with a single egg instead of the two listed on the menu. This leads to an explanation of the difference between battery and free-range hens and the irony is not lost when the family arrives at the plot and the sales agent explains how the open space will be filled with little detached boxes. Reinforcing the point, the agent angrily kicks the vegetable patch that the southern workers have planted. However, his action seems to turn Tognazzi against the investment and he is on his way home when he crashes his car in what seems to be a serious accident.

This morality play will be 50 years old in 2013. But it remains relevant in our recessional times and it's only a shame that Gregoretti (who went on to spend much of his later career in television) should hammer the metaphor home so lumpenly. Even so, the sight of the suits cheering after picking up tips on how best to fleece their patrons brings a sour smile to end this typically patchy, but essentially engaging quartet.