Notes Towards an African Orestes

Director: Pier Paolo Pasolini
Cast: Gato Barbieri, Donald F. Moye, Marcello Melis
Italy, 65’, 1970, siyah-beyaz
İtalyanca Türkçe altyazıyla 

Narrated in the style of a cinematic notebook, Pasolini’s interest in adapting the ancient tragedy for the screen using African actors is mixed with a stubbornly colonial look at realities in Tanzania, Uganda and Ethiopia. The documentary is a preparatory documentary to the "film to be made", and it could be described as a real notebook of moving images. It is divided into three different types of film material. The first is a travel documentary, shot during two stays in Uganda and Tanzania (respectively in December 1968 and in February 1969) integrated with several newsreels of the war in Biafra (1967/69); the goal was to track down the places, faces, objects to the film adaptation of the Oresteia by Aeschylus. The second is a debate / confrontation between Pasolini and some African students at the University "La Sapienza" of Rome on the idea of the Aeschylus tragedy setting, and the implications of post-colonial African affairs. The third is a sort of variation on the theme and consists of a jazz session performed by Yvonne Murray and Archie Savage at FolkStudio in Rome.