I quote in the preface one of his newspaper articles about Accattone (1961), in which he writes “…religiosity lies not in the need for personal salvation…not in the fatality that determines the entire story … It is found in [the film’s] very mode of seeing the world, in the technical sacrality of seeing itself.” I mean – these are bewildering statements from someone who was (or wanted to be, mostly…) a fully paid up member of the Communist party!

Nonetheless, let’s say that Pasolini’s strategies in relationship to Catholicism were unique! But again, even that won’t quite do … As usual, there’s nothing new under the sun. I’m a tremendous admirer of The Gospel According to St Matthew (1964), an extraordinary attempt to try and remake Jesus Christ as proletarian revolutionary. But of course Rossellini had done the same thing, or tried to with The Flowers of St. Francis (1950). The relationship in that earlier film between the Franciscan text and the cinematic image is spell-binding. All the way through (from the first unforgettable images of the brothers trudging through the rain) Rossellini is saying “What do we think St Francis was, or is? Can we reimagine him as a real historical character?” “What would a Franciscan cinema be like?” I think Pasolini looked hard at The Flowers.