Appunti per un'Orestiade africana

Among his film projects, Pier Paolo Pasolini has a black "Oresteia". With this in mind he travels through Uganda and Tanzania, looking for Africans who could embody the tragic Greek heroes Orestes, Agamemnon, or Clytemnestra. At the same time, he reads passages from Aeschylus and theorizes about ancient Greece and Africa - both archaic and modern. Back in Italy, he presents the images he recorded to a group of African students at the University of Rome. For convinced "pasolinophiles" only. For the others, listening to Pier Paolo pontificate on ancient tragedy, on archaic Africa tipping over into modernism, will not be electrifying. All the more so since the images Pasolini shot of the Dark Continent are far from outstanding. Polite boredom will be the lot of the "pasolinophobe" with one exception, that of the interesting dialogue between the maestro and a group of African students from the University of Rome. Less formalist and opinionated than the rest, these two sequences are the only ones where the concrete manages to find a little space in that sterile ocean of intellectualism. This "filmed notebook" was the preparatory stage for a future film to be entitled "African Oresteia". It was never filmed. Should we regret it or rejoice in it?

The late Pier Paolo Pasolini's "Notes for an African Orestes" documents on film his 1970 location hunting and local casting tour of Tanzania and Uganda for a never-realized feature adaptation of the Greek tragedy "The Oresteia". Home-film quality of the footage suggests a written essay would have sufficed, but resulting pic will interest film historians and find usage in college film courses.

Pasolini shoots many close shots of African faces staring curiously at his roving camera. His commentary is voiced-over on the soundtrack in dubbed, unaccented English, while African students he questions in a classroom setting respond in unfortunately untranslated Italian and French. The filmmaker also interjects Biafran war newsreels to show inspiration for planned flashbacks of the Trojan War.

The concept is to set "The Oresteia" in Africa circa 1960, when many colonies were following Ghana's lead in achieving independence. Pasolini saw the play's transformation of the Furies into the Eumenidies paralleling Africa moving from tribalism to democracy. He hoped to portray the Furies in non-human guises, shown in a montage of bizarre trees and also in the sad image of a wounded lioness in the film. The modern cities of Kampala and Dar es Salaam would serve in composite as old Athens. Recalling the simplicity of his "The Gospel According to St. Matthew" (for which Pasolini also shot and released a location-hunting documentary film), he presents on film an actual run-through for a scene in "Black Orestes", using a non-pro as Orestes visiting his father's grave. Unfortunately, this footage is flat and unpromising.

The oddest notion here is Pasolini's concept of using Black Americans to sing an operatic libretto in the film (hoped by the filmmaker to build upon what he hoped to be Afro-Americans' potential natural leadership for the Third World). In a recording studio, Gato Barbieri's trio plus two U. S. vocalists record music for a scene involving Cassandra at the beginning of the tragedy. Tenor saxophonist Barbieri's music here is highly derivative (recalling the John Coltrane work of the mid-'60s) and an embarrassing, out-of-it performance by vocalist Yvonne Murray is dubiously preserved on film for posterity. Considering the impressive vocals/jazz of Afro-Americans such as Archie Shepp around this time, Pasolini's choice of Rome-based South American Barbieri is one of expediency. The resulting single music track is played repetitiously as backing throughout the film, alternating with a Russian (equal time?) chorus.

My review was written in January 1981 after a screening at NY's Thalia theater.