One of Pasolini's most difficult films, Pigsty is made up of two parts that are intercut throughout the film. In Orgia (Orgy), set in a seemingly timeless Dark Age, Pierre Clementi plays a young outcast reduced by hunger to cannibalism. Porcile (Pigsty) is set in contemporary West Germany. Jean-Pierre Léaud plays the son of a powerful industrialist with Nazi ties. Unable to join or rebel against a world that repulses him, he indulges in his fetish for pigs. Clementi is ultimately set out as hyena fodder by an angry populace, while Léaud is devoured by his porcine companions. Rosalind Delmar wrote for Monthly Film Bulletin: “It is certainly not a naturalistic film about cannibalism and bestiality, but much more about consumption and consciousness. . . . Innocence, guilt, expiation, human isolation, the relation between social determination and human will, are again (Pasolini's) themes.” On the film's U.S. premiere at the New York Film Festival in 1969, Richard Roud noted, “What is certain is its compulsive and disturbing beauty. It may be unlovable, but it is triumphantly unforgettable.”