The 1960s anthology film, RoGoPaG, is being re-released on a brand new HD transfer for the first time ever on Blu-ray (also available in DVD) by the ever-brilliant Masters of Cinema. 2012 is the Year of Pasolini with Gospel According to Matthew already released along with Accattone. Up next is Pigsty and Hawks and Sparrows on 23rd July before RoGoPaG on 27th August.

Pasolini’s contribution, La Ricotta, got him into trouble and he received a suspended sentence after being found guilty of offending the Vatican over a depiction of the Passion. Just to think a few years earlier they lavished praise on him for his master work The Gospel According to Matthew.

La Ricotta also stars Orson Welles. Pasolini was joined by illustrious filmmakers Roberto Rossellini, Jean-Luc Godard and the possibly forgotten Ugo Gregoretti. This will definitely be a curiosity for some and a must-see for others. The bonus material is light but a 58-page booklet should be very interesting to read.

Conceived by the legendary Italian producer Alfredo Bini, the multi-director portmanteau film Let’s Wash Our Brains: RoGoPaG [Laviamoci il cervello: RoGoPaG] brought together four giants of European cinema 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.

Special Features:

• Gorgeous new HD restoration of the film in its original aspect ratio, in 1080p on the Blu-ray
• Newly translated optional English subtitles
• Original Italian theatrical trailer
• 56-page booklet featuring new essays by Tag Gallagher, Arthur Mas, Martial Pisani, and Pasquale Iannone; a new translation by Tag Gallagher of excerpts from an oral history about the film; and rare archival imagery

UK Release Date: 27th August