Notes Toward an African Orestes

Director: Pier Paolo Pasolini

1970 / 65min / DCP

Pasolini’s thrillingly freeform, intellectually adventurous documentary, narrated in the style of thoughts dashed off in a notebook, charts his preparations to make a film of Aeschylus’s Oresteia trilogy in Tanzania, Ethiopia, and Uganda. Forming a trilogy of sorts with previous Greek tragedy adaptations Oedipus Rex and Medea—a trilogy that, in the phrasing of scholar Daniel Humphrey, encapsulates Pasolini’s paradoxical “archaic modernism”—Notes Toward an African Orestes proposes metaphorical parallels between the source texts and events following the emergence of many African nations into independence, and also finds the filmmaker testing his own presumptions and prejudices against the lived experience of African students at the University of Rome.

Distributor: Cinetica di Bologna

Part of Classical Cinema