Review by guy-bellinger

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?