FILM SCREENINGS

Notes on an African Orestes

1970. Italy. Written, directed, and photographed by Pier Paolo Pasolini. Music by Gato Barbieri. The poet-filmmaker Pasolini scouted locations throughout Uganda and Tanzania for this modern retelling of Aeschylus's Oresteia, among his most riveting and complicated "impure" films. The tragedy, Pasolini suggests, lies in Africa's painful and violent path toward modernity and the eradication of its ancestral roots. Argentine tenor saxophonist Barbieri, who composed the film's tortured score, also performs in it with his band. Preserved by the Cineteca di Bologna. In Italian, English subtitles. 73 min.