The script of the Teta Veleta is composed of the quotations from Pasolini’s early letters before he became famous author and film maker.
Screen writing of the video is based on Pier Paolo Pasolini’s early letters and texts “The Red Notebooks” (Quaderni rossi). Footages are filmed in Casarsa and Rome, where he lived while writing the texts.
Pasolini was born into a Catholic bourgeois family in Bologna, 1922. He got a classic education and studied literature and art history. He also knew his homosexuality in a very early phase. It caused a moral conflict with his Catholic faith. He evaluated himself with heterosexual criteria, which led to feelings of guilt and inadequacy. He was against unifying mass and consuming culture throughout his life.
Pasolini joined the Italian Communist Party in 1947, being strongly aware of his own bourgeois background. Marxism gave him tools, to reflect on the problems of the oppressed as well as his own Catholic guilt. Part of a minority himself, he supported other minorities: the blacks, the Jews, the immigrants, the thieves and others. Psychoanalysis was also one means to criticize bourgeois values. He tried to write down all his childhood memories, dreams and fantasies into The Red Notebooks. It helped him to understand his own homosexuality, even though the psychoanalysis of that time pathologized it.
Pasolini was charged by the courts because of having sex with minors. He lost his teaching job and he was separated from the Communist Party in 1949. The publicity brought by the scandal forced him to leave Casarsa and move to Rome with his mother in 1950. The course of the events was typical for those days: detection, shame and a new start in a new place. He changed Friulian language to Roman slang in Rome and published his book Ragazzi di vita (1956), which gave him a new start.