It’s an inconspicuous first sentence: “I am someone,” is how Pier Paolo Pasolini begins his autobiographical poem who I am. His friend, the Italian novelist Alberto Moravia, said of him at the funeral after Pasolini’s assassination in November 1975: He was a poet, of whom there are at most three born in a century. The Communist Party, which had expelled him as a member in 1947 for homosexual debauchery, solemnly returned his party book to him at the funeral.
Pasolini’s century expires on March 5th. He only lived 53 of those years. Today, except perhaps in circles of left-wing intellectuals in Italy and among film freaks, he is forgotten. I’m reluctant to repeat all the superlatives that were coined about him at the time of his death and in the first decade or two that followed. In the face of the onset of oblivion, they sound like phrases.
Born in Bologna, he comes from Friuli. Even if Italy’s north is the most industrialized and economically far more potent part of the country, the landscape of Friuli in the early years of its century was one of farmers, artisans and petty traders. He loved this homeland with its own language all his life. He wrote poems in this language because, for him, it represented the original state of Italy. He adored ordinary people. Especially the young men among them whom he visited night after night. First in Casarsa in Friuli, where he lived as a teacher together with his beloved mother, later in the outskirts of Rome, where the sub-proletariat was at home. His first film took place there in 1961, in the milieu of petty criminals and pimps Accatone.
When the Italian economic miracle gradually broke out in the 1960s, he saw this world disappear behind consumerism. He and television were his opponents because, in his judgment, they were to blame for the “anthropological mutation.” It turned the Italian petty bourgeoisie into self-forgotten consumers and Catholicism into blasphemy. One remembers the beginning of Silvio Berlusconi, who as a building contractor first created the uniform satellite town of Milano 2 and shortly afterwards delivered the television to the living room. The petty bourgeois who strives after the hedonism of the rich was Pasolini’s enemy. When he saw how the sub-proletariat itself was affected by the mutation in the course of the 1960s, a disappointed Pasolini went to the “Third World” to film the Orestie to prepare.
Pasolini has in his films The 1st Gospel – Matthew (1964), Oedipus Re (1967) and Medea (1969) repeatedly took up great mythological subjects. Now it should Orestie in which Orestes kills his mother Clytemnestra for murdering his father Agamemnon, the hero of Troy.
fulcrum of civilization
Aeschylus tells this story in such a way that the avenger Orestes is not punished with death for this act, but is brought before a court for the first time in history and Athenes is acquitted through clever pleading. For the first time, the chain of violence and counter-violence is broken. Pasolini shifted the fulcrum of civilization from Greece to Africa. In the people there, he saw the purity he needed to realize such emancipatory material. With this plan he traveled to Africa in 1969. He didn’t make the film himself. He has finished Notes on an African Oresteia, as text and parallel as a one-hour documentary (1970). The first part of the film shows a big casting: This is my Orestes! This is my Elektra! The viewer sees an expressive man’s face or a young woman with a hat sitting diagonally on her head, who proudly walks past his camera. It goes like this for minutes. Pasolini did not see Africa as an exotic world of adventure for Europeans, but as prehistory from which the rebirth of democracy will follow like a sacred act.
The fact that he doubted the realization of this film is not due to technical or financial overstrains. He doesn’t hide the reason. At the University of Rome he meets African students. In the film you can see many African students in a small lecture hall. If I remember correctly, it’s only young men, not women. It takes some time for a conversation to materialize. It takes even longer for a contradiction to Pasolini’s film to be formulated. The camera focuses on each individual, who calmly but confidently explains to him that Africa is a continent with more than fifty countries and even more nations. They are unwilling to serve the film director as the setting for archaic life and to have Europe and America contrasted as hotbeds of hedonistic depravity. They orientate themselves towards China and the Soviet Union or towards American culture.
What human and artistic sovereignty to make the objection to his project part of the film. Only an artist can do that who does not want to depict the world in his own image, but seeks the true image in the world. The viewer looks into the faces of Africans, many in suits and ties, who are studying in Italy because they want to support their countries of origin. Pasolini’s social romanticism fails, as does the pathos of his art. But his conviction that Africa is somewhere else, with which modernity must be reconciled, does not fail. Prophets are seldom recognized in their time. He foresaw that asylum seekers, uprooted, sub-proletarians from Africa would end up on the Italian coast. Counting him among the dreamers does not abolish his visions. An artist, prophet and heretic is to be celebrated.