The genre [of Uccelacci e uccellini (The Hawks and the Sparrows)] is the picaresque. And very much the moral-pointing literary picaresque of Eulenspiegel or Simplicius Simplicissimus. This, Pasolini states quite openly, is the Journey of Life. The three parts into which the film is divided mark the stages of awareness of the human intellect. The parable is further underpinned by drawing on the fable tradition of La Fontaine. Father and son on their dusty journey play out the business of living; their attempts to come to terms with social reality are either equivocal or outright failures. But at the end of the film, they have, hopefully, learned about their condition. The road is ended but the journey is just beginning; for Pasolini the marxist, freedom is the knowledge of necessity. And Uccelacci e uccellini is his latest gloss on that text. (pp. 28-9)

In terms of technique, it...