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connection between the characters in The Grim Reaper is limited to their presence in a park
around the time of a prostitute's murder, the narrative returning to square one each time a
new character is introduced. In addition, the depiction of each character's life (apart from
Francolicchio) is so transitory that they resemble fragments of humanity who are sporadically
highlighted before sinking back into social oblivion. Hence the film's difference from
Accattone lies in its implied socio-political orientation, a perspective that dispassionately
depicts the socio-culrural alienation caused by the Italian post-war economic boom, and
which distances The Grim Reaper from Pasolini's compassion towards the 'sub-proletariat'.
In The Grim Reaper, the landscape also seems bereft of any synergy with the characters who
inhabit it, Bertolucci preferring a more distant and stylized representation that directs the
visual experience towards a more descriptive mode.
Plot summary
From The Grim Reaper onwards, Bertolucci established the custom of giving viewers clues
about a film's topics - and thereby setting in motion cognitive forms of viewer engagement -
by presenting key information within its opening credits. In Tlte Grim Reaper this consists of
images of a distant, unwelcoming city situated beyond a huge bridge at the forefront of the
frame, filmed from a low angle. Torn newspaper pages float down towards an eroded river
bank, where a woman's corpse - identifiable as a prostitute by a 1960s audience - lies. The
film starts with the interrogation of the first of five suspects, whose explanations about their
circumstances differ from the visual re-enactment of them, constructed through flashbacks.
The detective is heard in voiceover and never shown. Each re-enactment is introduced by
repeated images of the prostitute's daily routine as she gets ready for work. Within this
framework, the murder merely functions as a mechanism to depict the lives of marginalized
people living in Rome's anonymous outskirts, so that the re-enactments form the real body of
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