The film Comizi d’amore grew out of the enquiry Pier Paolo Pasolini carried out in 1963 on Italians and sexuality: a choral representation of the country, with contributions from intellectuals and with the answers he himself collected in the streets, in courtyards and on beaches, questioning people of different ages and social conditions. It takes the form of a journalistic enquiry, apparently sociological in nature — a long series of interviews taken almost as a sample, on the model of a statistical survey. The reality is something else: to set two conflicting facts grating against each other, dramatically and poetically — the orgasm and culture, or rather natural, sacred, profane love and the Italian subculture of those years, as Vincenzo Cerami puts it. "People answer," Pasolini wrote. "A whirl, a chaos, a babel of different opinions. The most ridiculous, inconceivable and contradictory. And naive, childish, scandalised, apparently sensible, in reality without any logical sense. People answer. It is clear that the frame of the enquiry will have to be very sharp, almost mathematical, but the making of it will necessarily have to be the most unexpected, the most unforeseen, the most chaotic possible."