Whilst it may lack the universality needed to make it accessible to those unfamiliar with the context it references, acting as a counterpoint in the attempt to process the unfathomable, Angelus Novus remains a riveting cinematic anomaly. Pasquale Misuraca’s language is at once laconic and lyrical. His Rome is eerie, almost empty—or rather, filled with a melancholic sense of m dystopia. The marble of the churches, the stone of the newer constructions, the metal of the few cars that sparsely populate its streets—all running aimlessly, like a society that seems to have lost its paradigms within times where consumerism has established a subtler form of fascism. In this city, one he could have only imagined, wanders ten years after his death the tormented soul of Pasolini. Whether the anachronism is deliberate or dictated by production constraints, the persistence of the artist as a physical presence renders a vivid metaphor. He is often seen in silhouette, hard lights casting darkness across his inscrutable expressions, echoing distant, intermittent traces of Storaro’s visual language in Il conformista—quite the irony, for a figure who was the very antithesis of conformism. A sense of carnal violence, whose ultimate victim is a naked, vulnerable youth, becomes increasingly palpable as the story approaches its almost prophetic epilogue—that bloodied, mangled face, and the incredulous gaze. ‘Death lies not in the inability to communicate, but in no longer being understood.’