Appunti per un’Orestiade africana

Pier Paolo Pasolini filmed Notes towards an African Orestes in 1969, after Teorema, Medea and Porcile. At the same period, Jean-Luc Godard, Jean-Pierre Gorin and Jean-Henri Roger were driving Godard’s filmmaking towards more radical zones. Anne Wiazemsky starred in La Chinoise, Week-end, Le Gai Savoir, One plus One. But also in Teorema and Porcile. Pasolini wrote to Jacques Tati offering him one of the lead roles in Porcile. The filmmakers drew inspiration from each other’s freedom and the breath of liberty pervated the cinema of the time. With Notes towards an African Orestes, Pasolini imagined a film that he would not make. ‘Filmed notes on a film to be made’, to quote his own words. By moving his filmmaking to Africa, Pasolini transgresses and shatters the frontiers of improvisation, documentary and fiction, to make a film seen at the time as radically ‘formless’ and which questions Pasolini’s cinema as much as it critiques it. For many filmmakers in the following generations, this cinematic notebook will remain a powerful accelerator of mutant forms and thinking. (Nicolas Klotz and Élisabeth Perceval)