Small semi-documentary exercise on the traditional slaughter of the pig in the countryside shot with the usual Paillard-Bolex in the courtyard of the family farmhouse of Baccanelli. Unlike The Cable, where everything had been established before shooting, the experience is marked this time by the discovery, by the apprentice director, of the beauté accidentelle – to say it with Cocteau –, when the innocent victim of sacrifice suddenly escapes. from the hands of his executioners.
The theme of the pig’s death, which the owner’s nephew witnessed many times since childhood, will explicitly come back to the surface both in the never-completed project The pigs (1965) – from the homonymous story by Anna Banti – and in the twentieth century and in Tragedy of a ridiculous man. Furthermore, the memory of the flight into the snow of the blood-soaked animal inspired in its own way the terrible scene of the murder of Professor Quadri’s wife at the end of The Conformist.
