O cinema trágico-poético de Pier Paolo Pasolini: Appunti per un Orestiade africana, Édipo Rei, Medeia

Abstract

The objects of the present work are texts about Man: the tragic-poetic cinema of Pier Paolo Pasolini and the classical Greek tragedies. That cinema author dedicated much attention to tragic texts, in which he saw a political foundation: the overcoming, by reason, of man s archaic past, which caused his existential uncertainty. After having translated Aeschylus s Oresteia, the Italian director identified in this text what he, as a humanist, hoped that modern man would achieve: the overcoming of the fear caused by the irrational that has always dwelt in the human mind. This interpretation of the Oresteia, coupled with other convictions held by the poet/director that the naïve could form a new ideology, and the persistency, in modern man, of rationally-tamed irrationality led him to film Appunti per un Orestiade africana (1967), an optimistic film as concerns the triumph of reason. After having taken down the notes, Pasolini would never come to make the Oresteia film, but moved on towards a pessimistic perspective my filming Medea (1969), the last sentence of which, said by the protagonist Nothing is possible any longer points towards Salò, his last film, as he was murdered shortly afterwards. Oedipus Rex (1967) was the first of his tragic films, and the most mythical of all. In it, some of Pasolini s early convictions mentioned above can be seen to persist, so that, in a sense, Oedipus Rex is evocative of Accattone (1961), as, in fact, has been confirmed by the director himself. The critical approach taken in the present work has been inspired on this. By resorting to specialized criticism (Canevacci, Fusillo) it was possible to demonstrate the peculiar adaptation of the ancestral tragic that takes place in Pasolini s poetry cinema by means of a filmography that remained ideologically contrary to concessions to the culture industry