A rare and fundamental film by Pier Paolo Pasolini!

Pier Paolo Pasolini arrives in an African country. He takes notes, with his camera, to prepare his next film, a transposition of The Oresteia, the tragedy of Aeschylus, in today's Africa. Back in Italy, he showed his first images to a group of African students from the University of Rome. He asks them their opinion...

Fragments of a work forever suspended, Notebook for an African Orestia recounts both a film in the making and a film that was never made. Photographed in sumptuous black and white, this unique, essay-like visual document illustrates the intellectual and formal research of a great filmmaker. Visionary, Pier Paolo Pasolini (Salò or the 120 days of Sodom) combines ancient myths and African postcolonial societies, making the reality of the 1970s resonate with ancient history.

NOTEBOOKS FOR AN AFRICAN ORESTIA
(1970 – B&W – 71 mins)

SUPPLEMENTS

. NOTES FOR A FILM ABOUT INDIA : THE UNPRECEDENTED NOTEBOOK BY PIER PAOLO PASOLINI (1968 – B&W – 33 mn – VOSTF)
A Hindu legend tells how a maharajah gave his body to tigers to satisfy their hunger. Wishing to adapt this story in the context of modern India, Pasolini goes there to do research, camera in hand, to check if this idea for a film is feasible.

. POETICS OF INCOMPLETION: INTERVIEW
Hervé Joubert-Laurencin, lecturer and specialist in Italian cinema, discusses the Notebook for an African Oresteia and the essential, although little-known, role of "notebooks" in the filmography of Pier Paolo Pasolini.

. 4 INTERVIEWS CONDUCTED BY THE BOLOGNA CINEMATHECA
Dacia Maraini, writer and friend of Pasolini, and Gian Vittorio Baldi, producer of Carnet de notes pour une Orestie africaine , recall the filming and the release of the film, and return to the political dimension of the work and its author

At the same time, the composer Gato Barbieri evokes the creation of the original music of the film, while Stefano Zenni, musicologist, studies this music and the choices made by the composer and Pasolini.

In addition, Massimo Fusillo, a specialist in comparative literature, analyzes Notebook for an African Orestia in connection with the translation of the text of The Orestia that Pasolini produced in 1960 for Vittorio Gassman's Théâtre Populaire.

Edition without scabbard

Released April 22, 2009