Scene of Contamination. Pasolini's "Appunti per un'Orestiade africana"

#8 2025 Transforming the Anthropo(s)cene INSERT Artistic Practices as Cultural Inquiries 1 FABIENNE LIPTAY Scene of Contamination. Pasolini’s “Appunti per un’Orestiade africana” This essay examines Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Appunti per un’Orestiade africana as a “film about a film to be made”. Pasolini deliberately includes himself within this project, not as its author or director, but as the intellectual subject emerging from it. Within this context, the “scene of contamination” refers not only to his attempt to stage the ancient Greek drama of the Oresteia – a text he had previously translated – in post-independence East Africa. It is also rendered the site of a troubled relationality in the wake of decolonisation. Contamination Decolonizing Fieldnotes Film as Theory Location Scouting Performative Film Scene Script Fabienne Liptay Scene of Contamination. Pasolini’s “Appunti per un’Orestiade africana” INSERT Artistic Practices as Cultural Inquiries 2 Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Appunti per un poema sul Terzo Mondo [Notes for a poem on the Third World] (1968) is an unfinished project.1 It was conceived as a film in five episodes, which Pasolini imagined to be filmed in different places: India, Africa, Arab countries, South America and the Black ghettos of the United States.2 This project marks a transition in Pasolini’s artistic work, in which he shifts his focus from the rural and suburban regions of postwar Italy and the sub-proletarian life on the periphery of Rome to other parts of the world undergoing decolonisation.3 Yet, this shift was consequential, since for Pasolini, the agricultural and pastoral South of Italy – like the Roman borgate – belonged on the imaginary map of ‘the wretched of the earth’.4 In an interview for the left-wing afternoon newspaper Paese Sera in 1961, he states: “I have seen that across entire continents, the most pressing issue, and therefore the most capable of aesthetic equivalence, is the transition of the sub-proletariat to a state of consciousness, with its blind struggles, its unexpressed vitality. Throughout India, throughout Africa, I have found situations sociologically similar to those of the Roman and Southern Italian sub-proletariat […]. In short, while the Italian bourgeoisie, with its television and its magazines, is a provincial unknown whose problems are entirely marginal, the Italian peasantry, especially in the South, is invisibly and inexpressibly linked to the vast underdeveloped rural masses of Africa, the Middle East and India, and its problems appear as global problems.”5 While Pasolini’s interest in India and Africa is indicative of his expanding concept of a transnational sub-proletariat, as well as his intellectual investment in the process of decolonisation,6 it remains deeply entangled with the legacies of colonial thought. As I will argue, the ‘scene’ becomes the site of displaying and reflecting this entanglement – the unresolvable ambivalence of regarding the process of decolonial liberation and emancipation through a European lens. Pasolini embarked on his first journey to India and Africa (Kenya) as early as 1961, together with his friends Alberto Moravia, who had recently been elected president of the writers’ association PEN International, and Elsa Morante. In a poem, written in the months following this journey, Pasolini explicitly relates his engagement with the liberation struggle in these regions to the Bandung Conference, which called for the cooperation of the newly independent states of Asia and Africa and paved the way for the creation of the non-aligned movement to guard their integrity and sovereignty. Under the poem’s title L’uomo di Bandung [Bandung Man] (1961–1962), he stages his intellectual displacement from Italian bourgeois society: “I shall not return from the periphery of Rome or of the World, to accept the destiny of the Prodigal Son, for all you’d bet money against it, Fabienne Liptay Scene of Contamination. Pasolini’s “Appunti per un’Orestiade africana” INSERT Artistic Practices as Cultural Inquiries 3 my bourgeois brothers, coarse and delicate, or rather, I shall return, since that is man’s way, but only by fleeing ever further away.”7 Two literary works, both written in 1962, grew out of Pasolini’s journeys to India and Africa. In these works, the protagonists of the poem L’uomo di Bandung – the Indian boy Revi and the Kikuyu Davidson ’Ngibuini – are reimagined respectively. One is L’odore dell’India [The Scent of India] (1962), a novel assembled from his travel diary. The other is Il padre selvaggio [The Savage Father] (1975), a scenario for an unmade film published posthumously just after Pasolini’s murder, which tells the troubled story of the encounter between a young African student and a European school teacher – a mirror image of the author – amidst the tribulations of the Congo.8 Although these written works were never turned into films, two related film projects emerged: Appunti per un film sull’India [Notes for a Film on India] (1967) and Appunti per un’Orestiade africana [Notes Towards an African Orestes] (1970). However, neither of these films is actually part of Appunti per un poema sul Terzo Mondo,9 but rather an approximation of, or a further prevention of, this unmade project. Seen together in a constellation, these projects explore the potential of preliminary and subsequent ‘notes’ on a missing work, as well as the various intermediary forms between filming and writing, travelling and location scouting, in response to all the “dramatic ambiguities and unsolvable problems”10 inherent in a decolonial cinema of European provenance. This becomes most evident in the attempt to film an ‘Orestiade africana’ by setting the classical Greek tragedy in contemporary East Africa, whereby the ‘scene’ becomes the site of interrogating the project’s fallibility. Pasolini’s first encounter with East Africa was shortly after his translation of Aeschylus’ Oresteia from ancient Greek into Italian,11 which he was asked to do by Vittorio Gassman for his production of the play at the Greek theatre in Syracuse in 1960.12 Rather than providing a translation in the common sense, Pasolini radically recomposed the Greek drama in his own poetic language.13 Contested by many contemporary critics, the translation neglects fidelity to the original text in favour of an adaption that seeks to connect with contemporary concerns. In a commentary, published alongside the text as a “letter of the translator”, Pasolini remarks that his aim was to transform the “sublime tones” of the ancient drama into more “civil tones” for a contemporary audience in order to create a more accessible and politically explicit version of the classical text.14 Through his reworking of language, by inscribing a polyphony of voices – including his own – into the text, Pasolini produced what he referred to as linguistic ‘contamination’. In his writings on the Italian language, he frequently used this term to describe the inclusion of elements of spoken and dialectal language into the high language of literature, thereby causing a contamination “that will obliterate the linguistic social division between bourgeois language Fabienne Liptay Scene of Contamination. Pasolini’s “Appunti per un’Orestiade africana” INSERT Artistic Practices as Cultural Inquiries 4 and lower-class dialect that literary Italian has always perpetuated.”15 In his address to the reader, which opens the essay collection Empirismo eretico [Heretical Empiricism] (1972), he also clearly states how linguistic contamination resonates with the unaligned movement, since Italian dialects “no longer belong to a particularistic national world but belong to a world […] that includes approximately half the human race, and which is placed in a scandalous dialectic relationship with the entire neocapitalistic or socialistic industrialized world. In short, the Italian linguistic question makes sense only if it is analyzed comparatively: […] with the various relationships between concrete but particular languages and languages that are abstract but communicate widely, relationships which present urgent problems in the Arab countries, in the new African nations, in India, etc.”16 In the title sequence of Appunti per un’Orestiade africana, the book containing Pasolini’s heretical translation of the Oresteia – published by the National Institute of Ancient Drama (INDA) – is placed on an open world atlas displaying a map of Africa (fig. 1), thereby transposing the practice of contamination into a film that stages the play in an African setting. The story of the Oresteia – as it is summarised in the film by Pasolini, whose voice-over adds commentary to the otherwise silent footage – is that of the Erinyes, or Furies, who are “transformed by the goddess Athena from the goddesses of ancestral terror into, let’s say, goddesses of dreams, of the irrational that persists alongside the rational democracy of the new state.”17 FIG. 1 Pier Paolo Pasolini, Appunti per un’Orestiade africana, 1970, still. © Cineteca di Bologna. Fabienne Liptay Scene of Contamination. Pasolini’s “Appunti per un’Orestiade africana” INSERT Artistic Practices as Cultural Inquiries 5 In Pasolini’s reading of the Oresteia, Athena’s transformation of the Erinyes into Eumenides is an act that does not entirely overcome the existential uncertainty of archaic society, but rather preserves it.18 Upon the creation of the assembly and the institution of legal justice, irrational forces are contained within the new state order. These forces are the remains of affective energy now governed by reason, survivals within the democratic state to which Pasolini ascribes political potential. This idea is already fully established in his translation of Aeschylus’ text from ancient Greek into an Italian that speaks to the people,19 which he adapts for a film that sets the play in post-independence Africa. Here, the transformation of the Erinyes into Eumenides is imagined as analogous to the transformation of African tribal culture upon the establishment of democratic states following independence and the end of colonial rule in the 1960s. Pasolini described the ‘Orestiade africana’ as an attempt “to recreate analogies, however arbitrary and poetic, and partly irrational, between the archaic Greek world, in which Athena appears to establish, through Orestes, the first democratic institutions, and modern Africa.”20 Yet, the ‘Orestiade africana’ was never made. Pasolini instead filmed the notes for this project, which became a film of their own – Appunti per un’Orestiade africana. FIG. 2 Appunti per un'Orestiade africana , Pier Paolo Pasolini on the set, 1968. © Reporters Associati & Archivi – Rome. Appunti per un’Orestiade africana appears to be something like a making-of, documenting the scouting of locations in Tanzania and Uganda (fig. 2–6), but was intentionally conceived as a “film about a film to be made” in its own right.21 Drawing on the notion of appunti or ‘notes’, the film addresses the Fabienne Liptay Scene of Contamination. Pasolini’s “Appunti per un’Orestiade africana” INSERT Artistic Practices as Cultural Inquiries 6 impossibility and failure in attempting these analogies, lending the project a self-reflexive and critical stance that is conveyed in the film’s very first scene when Pasolini turns the camera at his own reflection in a shop window in Dar es Salaam, thereby inscribing his presence in the film. Taking the form of a notebook or a script in progress, the notes relate to what Pasolini, in his writing on the screenplay as a “structure that wants to be another structure”, calls the sceno-testo or “screenplay-text”.22 The sceno-testo invites the reader “to think in images, reconstructing in his own head the film to which the screenplay alludes as a potential work”,23 or, in other words, to “empirically reanimate the passage […] from the literary stage to the cinematographic stage”.24 Like the sceno-testo, the appunti – as a concept – constitute a provisional, but autonomous structure, a movement towards a potential film.25 Yet, contrary to a screenplay, the notes for a film are taken with a camera, reflecting not on the differences between literature and cinema, nor between writing and filming, but within cinema itself as “the written language of reality”.26 FIG. 3 Appunti per un'Orestiade africana , Pier Paolo Pasolini on the set, 1968. © Reporters Associati & Archivi – Rome. We may describe the notes, unlike a screenplay, not as a movement towards, but a retreat from a potential film. The process of location scouting27 is pivotal here, as it explores the difference between the potential scenery of a film and the encounter with the space of lived reality. If an “action of imagined reality and an action of imagined audio-visual language are exactly identical”, as Pasolini suggests in his writings on cinema, giving the example of himself as a director imagining a scene or describing it in the screenplay “as if it were real”,28 then the locations scouted for an ‘Orestiade africana’ introduce a hesitation or resistance to the imagination of cinematic action as such. In Fabienne Liptay Scene of Contamination. Pasolini’s “Appunti per un’Orestiade africana” INSERT Artistic Practices as Cultural Inquiries 7 Appunti per un’Orestiade africana, Pasolini directs our attention away from the action of the characters – Orestes, Agamemnon, Clytemnestra, Electra, Cassandra, or the gods Apollo and Athena – and towards the actions of imagination upon different East African landscapes and their people, performed by Pasolini through speech. With the camera, Pasolini traverses the landscapes of sub-Saharan Africa – from the shores of Lake Victoria and the markets of Kigoma to the cities of Dar es Salaam and Kampala – tracing rather than pursuing the idea of filming an ‘Orestiade africana’. This journey – in the guise of location scouting – resembles what Édouard Glissant has termed errantry (errance). In fusing the notions of ‘wandering’ and ‘mistaking’, both resonating in the French errer, Glissant describes a movement that is neither invasive like that of Western conquerors, discoverers and settlers, nor nomadic like that of colonised peoples subject to impossible settlement and exile.29 Rather, it is a movement of relating, which evades nationalist expansion and the pursuit of rootedness.30 The “thinking of errantry”, writes Glissant, “silently emerges from the destructuring of compact national entities that yesterday were still triumphant and, at the same time, from difficult, uncertain births of new forms of identity that call to us.”31 Since Glissant sees errantry expressed in the epic literature of Greek antiquity,32 as well as in the founding myths of communities in other parts of the world, the Oresteia seems to provide an appropriate ground for uprooting or unsettling the national and cultural identities of the colonial order. Setting out to contaminate a foundational text of European bourgeois culture and humanistic education, Pasolini’s Appunti per un’Orestiade africana seeks to oppose the coloniality of power that it cannot avoid reproducing when imagining an independent Africa from within Western categories of thought.33 Fabienne Liptay Scene of Contamination. Pasolini’s “Appunti per un’Orestiade africana” INSERT Artistic Practices as Cultural Inquiries 8 FIG. 4 Appunti per un'Orestiade africana , Pier Paolo Pasolini and Dacia Maraini, 1968. © Reporters Associati & Archivi – Rome. Pasolini’s film constitutes a hybrid between political theory, poetic imagination and social experimentation – all of which prevent rather than prepare the actual making of an ‘Orestiade africana’. This becomes most evident in a note that documents a conversation between Pasolini and a group of African students at the Sapienza University of Rome. The students question the film’s analogy between ancient Greece and contemporary Africa, objecting to Europeans’ preoccupation with tribalism, their failure to recognise the differences among the nations that make up the African continent, and the idea that European civilisation brought democracy to Africa. In making these objections part of the “film about a film to be made”, Pasolini creates a structure that is open to interference. His film remains deliberately inconclusive, proposing a “revolutionary pedagogics”34 that invites the audience to participate in an unresolved conflict. The concept of the ‘scene’ is of particular relevance here. In the history of ancient Greek theatre, Aeschylus’ Oresteia was the first known tragedy to make elaborate use of the scene.35 As part of the theatre’s architectural space, the scene, from the Greek skēnē, was located at the back of the stage. Fabienne Liptay Scene of Contamination. Pasolini’s “Appunti per un’Orestiade africana” INSERT Artistic Practices as Cultural Inquiries 9 Archaeological findings, as well as evidence from dramatic texts, suggest that it initially took temporary, and later permanent, shape mostly as a tent or hut. Separated from the performing space, it served as a functionally versatile area for costume and mask changes, as well as for the passage and entrance of the actors from the sides, while its roof could also be scaled to stage certain actions and allow the gods to appear as deus ex machina. In its dramatical use in the Oresteia, performed in 458 BC, the scene came to present much more than an architectural element of the theatre, providing a dramatic space for interior action hidden from sight, which was narrated to the spectators and became audible through dialogue and songs. The novelty of this use of the scene was the possibility to create an enclosed interior space within the open space of the ancient stone-built outdoor theatre, and to use this interior space in a scenic form. In later tragedies of ancient theatre, the concept of the scene expanded beyond its role as a mere architectural element, becoming the space in which dramatic action, the inner drama of the characters – their often tormented thoughts and emotions – was enacted. The modern concept of the scene, which refers to everything that is staged, thus originated from an architectural element of ancient Greek theatre which, upon its birth as a dramatically active space in the Oresteia, “contributed to revolutionizing both the dramatic text and all ancient theatrical techniques”.36 FIG. 5 Appunti per un'Orestiade africana, Pier Paolo Pasolini and Alberto Moravia, 1968. © Reporters Associati & Archivi – Rome. In the Oresteia, Aeschylus arranged all the dramatic action around the interior space of the scene – for example, towards the end of its first part, the Agamemnon (vv. 1072–1330), in which Cassandra, before her own death, envisions the blood revenge in the palace of the Atreides in Argos. This Fabienne Liptay Scene of Contamination. Pasolini’s “Appunti per un’Orestiade africana” INSERT Artistic Practices as Cultural Inquiries 16 In: Materiali e discussioni per l’analisi dei testi classici , no. 77, 2016, pp. 177–231. Pier Paolo Pasolini: “Appunti per un’Orestiade africana.” In: Walter Siti/Franco Zabagli (eds.): Pasolini. Per il cinema . 2 vols. Milan: Mondadori, 2001a [1968–1969], vol. 1, pp. 1175–1196. —: “Appunti per un poema sul Terzo Mondo.” In: Walter Siti/Franco Zabagli (eds.): Pasolini. Per il cinema . 2 vols. Milan: Mondadori, 2001b [1968], vol. 2, pp. 2677–2686. [English translation: Pasolini: “Notes for a poem on the Third World.” In: Michele Mancini/Giuseppe Perrella (eds.): PASOLINI’S bodies and places . Trans. by Stephen Sartarelli. Zurich: Edition Patrick Frey, 2017 [1968], pp. 34–43.] —: “Appendice ad ‘Appunti per un’Orestiade africana’.” In: Walter Siti/Franco Zabagli (eds.): Pasolini. Per il cinema . 2 vols. Milan: Mondadori, 2001c [1968–1969], vol. 1, pp. 1197–1201. —: “Comments on Free Indirect Discourse.” In: Heretical Empiricism . Ed. by Louise K. Barnett. Trans. by Ben Lawton/Louise K. Barnett. Washington, D.C.: New Academia Publishing, 2005a, pp. 79–101. —: “Introduction.” In: Heretical Empiricism . Ed. by Louise K. Barnett. Trans. by Ben Lawton/Louise K. Barnett. Washington, D.C.: New Academia Publishing, 2005b, pp. xxvii–xlii. —: L’odore dell’India . Milan: Longanesi, 1962. — (trans.): L’Orestiade di Eschilo . Ed. by Istituto Nazionale del Dramma Antico. Turin: Einaudi, 1960. —: “L’uomo di Bandung / Bandung Man.” Trans. by Robert S. C. Gordon. In: Luca Di Blasi/Manuele Gragnolati/Christoph F. E. Holzhey (eds.): The Scandal of SelfContradiction: Pasolini’s Multistable Subjectivities, Traditions, Geographies . Vienna: Turia + Kant, 2012 [1961–1962], pp. 279–301. —: “[Intervista rilasciata a Lino Peroni].” In: Walter Siti/Franco Zabagli (eds.): Pasolini. Per il cinema . 2 vols. Milan: Mondadori, 2001d, vol. 2, pp. 2931–2936. [First published in: Inquadrature , no. 15–16, autumn 1968, pp. 33–37.] —: Il padre selvaggio . Turin: Einaudi, 1975. —: “To the Reader.” In: Heretical Empiricism . Ed. by Louise K. Barnett. Trans. by Ben Lawton/Louise K. Barnett. Washington, D.C.: New Academia Publishing, 2005c, pp. 1–2. —: “The Rheme.” In: Heretical Empiricism . Ed. by Louise K. Barnett. Trans. by Ben Lawton/Louise K. Barnett. Washington, D.C.: New Academia Publishing, 2005d [1971], pp. 288–292. —: “The Screenplay as a ‘Structure that Wants to Be Another Structure’.” In: Heretical Empiricism . Ed. by Louise K. Barnett. Trans. by Ben Lawton/Louise K. Barnett. Washington, D.C.: New Academia Publishing, 2005e [1965], pp. 187–196. —: “The Written Language of Reality.” In: Heretical Empiricism . Ed. by Louise K. Barnett. Trans. by Ben Lawton/Louise K. Barnett. Washington, D.C.: New Academia Publishing, 2005f [1966], pp. 197–222. Anna Piva: “Pasolini traduttore di Eschilo: Appunti su Pasolini e l’ Orestiade del 1960.” In: Studi Pasoliniani , no. 14, 2020, pp. 37–50. Alessia Ricciardi: “Umanesimo e ideologia: Pasolini e la genealogia intellettuale del film Appunti per un’Orestiade africana .” In: Forum Italicum , vol. 34, no. 2, September 2000, pp. 501–517. Oswald Stack: “ Sopralluoghi in Palestine and The Gospel According to St Matthew .” Interview with Pier Paolo Pasolini. In: Oswald Stack: Pasolini on Pasolini . Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1969, pp. 73–98. Noa Steimatsky: “Pasolini on Terra Sancta : Towards a Theology of Film.” In: The Yale Journal of Criticism , vol. 11, no. 1, spring 1998, pp. 239–258. Giovanna Trento: Pasolini e l’Africa. L’Africa di Pasolini: Panmeridionalismo e rappresentazioni dell’Africa postcoloniale . Milan: Mimesis, 2010. Maurizio Viano: A Certain Realism: Making Use of Pasolini’s Film Theory and Practice . Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. Laura Vitali: “Fortuna dell’ Orestea nel teatro della seconda metà del Novecento: Pasolini, Gassman, Lucignani, Ronconi, Stein.” In: Quaderni del ’900 , vol. 8, no. 8, 2008, pp. 13–61. Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff: “Die Bühne des Aischylos.” In: Hermes , vol. 21, no. 4, 1886, pp. 597–622. CREDITS Fig. 1: © Cineteca di Bologna. Fig. 2–6: © Reporters Associati & Archivi – Rome. AUTHOR Fabienne Liptay is a professor of film studies at the University of Zurich. Currently, she is directing the research project Exhibiting Film: Challenges of Format (2017–2026), which was awarded an excellence grant by the Swiss National Science Foundation. Fabienne Liptay has published widely on the theory and aesthetics of the moving image, film exhibition, time-based artistic practice and cinema expanded. Her publications include the monograph Telling Images: Studien zur Bildlichkeit des Films (DIAPHANES, 2016), as well as the co-edited books Taking Measures: Usages of Formats in Film and Video Art (Scheidegger & Spiess, 2023, in collaboration with the Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst), and Eco-operations (DIAPHANES, 2024, in collaboration with the documenta Institut). Together with Dorota Sajewska, she founded the Institute for Performance and Film Expanded, an experimental research laboratory that brings together Fabienne Liptay Scene of Contamination. Pasolini’s “Appunti per un’Orestiade africana” INSERT Artistic Practices as Cultural Inquiries 17 researchers, artists and curators for non-disciplinary explorations of performance and film.