Pier Paolo Pasolini, Marxist, Catholic, and gay, plays the role of the director as a conveyor of human experience in this experimental documentary film. The director is constantly watching, thinking, and feeling the world events around him as he films the Passion of Jesus as well as mundane and historic events, all in the hope that the film, once done, will be whole and sufficient to convey human suffering and decadence through interconnections. But on the director is the burden of showing through the art of cinema the human experience of transcendence.