NOTES FOR AN AFRICAN ORESTEIA
Italy, 1970
Original title: Appunti per un’Orestiade africana
Director: Pier Paolo Pasolini. Narration: Pier Paolo Pasolini. Screenplay: Pier Paolo Pasolini. Cinematography by: Pier Paolo Pasolini, Giorgio Pelloni, Mario Bagnato, Emore Galeassi. Photography: uno. Editor: Cleofe Conversi. Film score: Gato Barbieri, performed by Gato Barbieri (sax), Donald F. Moye (drums), Marcello Melio (contrabasse) and sung by Yvonne Murray and Archie Savage. Sound manager: Federico Savina. Production: Gian Vittorio Baldi and IDI Cinematografica (Roma) I Film dell’Orso. Length: 73’.
Format: DCP. Source: Cineteca di Bologna under licence from Surf Film.
Original version. Subtitles: English
Restoration by Cineteca di Bologna in its L’Immagine Ritrovata (Bologna) workshop, thanks to film footage made available by the producer Gian Vittorio Baldi. From the 16mm scenes and score negatives, 35mm conservation matrix film were printed.
The director, travelling through Uganda, Tanzania and Tanganyika, looks for places and characters that allow him to set Aeschylus’ Oresteia in today’s Africa. The images of possible interpreters of the tragedy are mixed with scenes of everyday life. The material is then presented to some African students residing in Rome, who discuss the film with Pasolini.
“The search for the open form of the notes, the” unfinished “, which contaminates the diary annotation with the anthropological documentary, the poetic ellipsis with the narrative breath, inspired Pier Paolo Pasolini some fascinating” impure” films. In the ‘Notes for an African Oresteia’, the poet-director imagines setting a modern version of the Aeschilean tragedy in the tormented body of an Africa that is still tribal, but which is taking on the first signs of modernity. The transformation of the Furies – which Pasolini decides to evoke in the shapes of the trees – in the Eumenides, therefore overshadows the conversion and pacification of the ancestral impulses rooted in archaic Africa. For the first time, the director is the operator of all the original shots, but also uses dramatic war footage. ” (Roberto Chiesi)
Sunday 22 May 2022, h. 6:00 pm