The starting point for this video work is an interview with Pier Paolo Pasolini, in which he criticized postwar consumer society as a new form of fascism that destroyed tradition and culture in Italy. He stated, “It destroyed the different realities of each person, and removed reality from the various existential styles which Italy has created throughout its history.”*¹ These words resonate strongly with the postwar trajectory of my home country of my home country, where, after its defeat in WWII, a hyper-developed consumer society emerged, dismantling traditional values and reconstructing culture in a new form.

In his film La Ricotta (1963), Pasolini presents a collage of high art, filmmaking, and real poverty, which I take as a key reference point for my video collage work Go! Go! Heaven (2017). Drawing from this film, I interpret and incorporate the following elements into this work: WWII, consumer society as a new form of fascism, and Christian symbols and metaphors. In his film, we can identify some Christian metaphors, such as bread, grapes, wine, and the seven deadly sins, including gluttony and lust of the flesh. While gluttony and lust are classified as forms of evil passions as well in a Japanese Buddhism, It is one of the societies with the highest level of curiosity toward gluttony and sexual desire in the world.societies.

In the film’s climax, the protagonist, an actor portraying Christ dies on the cross, accompanied by the sound effect of a bomb explosion. While Pasolini’s intention in using this sound remains unclear, however, it evokes for me the historical fact that the atomic bomb ending WWII exploded directly above a Catholic church in Nagasaki. Inspired by this association, I collected commercial footage featuring grapes, along with anime and film scenes depicting gluttony, and combined them with poems translated into Japanese and narrated by a synthesized voice, echoing the scene in which Orson Welles reads a poem in La Ricotta.