Ancient Greece according to Pasolini

An Analysis of Pasolini’s Greek Films Edipo Re, Medea and Appunti per un’Orestiade Africana

Io sono una forza del Passato.

Solo nella tradizione è il mio amore.

[Pas. 1964]

Introduction

The second stasimon of Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus contains a verse which has aroused

particular interest among scholars. The Chorus sings: “τί δεῖ µε χορεύειν;” (cf. Oed. Tyr. v. 896),

translated by Dodds as: “Why should I continue to serve in a Chorus?”1. The preceding scene has

shown us a mistrustful Jocasta who calls the Oracle’s veracity into question: in order to reassure

Oedipus that Teiresias’ assertions are not true, she claims that divination should not be taken

seriously (cf. Oed. Tyr. vv. 857-858), as the prophet has already demonstrated his unreliability by

predicting that Laius would have been killed by his own son (thought to have been murdered

immediately after his birth). The Chorus is intensely disturbed by Jocasta’s words, as the failure of

the Oracle would represent a breach in the line of communication between humans and gods: and,

in a world like the Greek one in which reality is deeply filled with sacredness, this marks a collapse

in the harmonic balance between man, nature and divinity.

Pasolini’s representation of Greek tragedy on the screen really takes this aspect of Greek culture

into account: “In every direction you look, there is a god hidden!”, explains the Centaur to a young

1
 See Dodds (1966: 46).  
  1  
Jason at the beginning of the Medea. Pasolini repeatedly criticised the absence of this ancient sense

of holiness in the contemporary Italian panorama, in which consumerism and capitalism started to

prevail after the economic boom of the sixties. And this is what he wants to capture in his

cinematographic representations of Greek dramas: a barbaric world2, in which a fusion between

Apollonian and Dionysiac, between rational and irrational, cannot exist, as their collision would

lead to catastrophe.

The attempt to realise this kind of synthesis is in fact what causes the interior devastation of the

main characters in his Edipo Re (1967) and Medea (1970). A possible fusion of polarities, able to

maintain the old in the new, is identified by Pasolini in the transformation of the Erinyes into

Eumenides in the Aeschylean tragedy of the same name which concludes the Oresteia, mentioned

by the director in Appunti per un’Orestiade Africana (1970), a documentary inspired by the

Aeschylean trilogy. The documentary, however, never became a film, and it is not by chance that

Pasolini’s last work inspired by a Greek myth was Medea, where the cultural conflict is not solved,

but it rather appears as tragically inescapable; at the very end of the movie, Medea significantly

cries out: “Nothing is possible anymore!”. The Oresteia, consequently, does not represent a

synthesis, but the “utopia of a synthesis”3.

Oedipus is, par excellence, the man who embodies the conflict between irrational human impulses

and man’s necessity to understand his inner nature while Jocasta incorporates the feminine Eros, the

pure sensuality which rejects the rational human drive to know 4 (cf. Oed. Tyr. v. 1068, “ὦ

δύσποτµ᾽, εἴθε µήποτε γνοίης ὃς εἶ.”). The Medea represents the collision of two incompatible

cultures: Medea belongs to a primitive world, regulated by natural rhythms, whose inhabitants

celebrate the holiness in everything (to quote Pasolini’s Centaur) by practicing magical rites. Jason

is instead characterised by the pragmatism typical of the modern man, who has lost the perception

of sacredness. Pasolini in his Medea skilfully depicts the antithesis which will bring the tragedy to

2
 See Fusillo (1966: 3 ff.).  
3
 See Fusillo (1966: 181 ff.).  
4
 See Fusillo (1966: 3 ff.).  
  2  
its final conclusion. On the other hand, the figures of the Eumenides in the Appunti symbolically

bring together the values of an archaic society with the new, rational principles which lay the

foundations for a democratic polis. This fusion wants to maintain, alongside the new elements

instituted by the goddess of reason, the ancestral ones represented by the Furies; but the one who

wins the trial is Orestes, whose defender is Apollo, the symbol of that Apollonian influence

identified by Nietzsche in his masterpiece The Birth of Tragedy (1872) as the counterbalance of the

Dionysiac force. We can argue that Pasolini summarises in the Appunti all the polarities he had tried

to represent in the Edipo and in the Medea, finally realising that their coexistence is not possible in

the real world.

The aim of this paper is to analyse the Pasolinian representations of these Greek plays: in

particular, we will emphasise the originality of Pasolini’s angle of interpretation, comparing his

versions with Sophocles’, Euripides’ and Aeschylus’ models.

Edipo Re

The autobiographical stamp of Edipo Re is clear enough5. Of the four acts into which the film can

be divided 6, only the third one conforms to the Sophoclean plot. The first one is set in a village in

Lombardia which aims to recall Pasolini’s infancy, while the last scene occurs in Bologna. Both

these sections take place in modern times. The central episodes narrate the story of Oedipus, from

the moment he is found on mount Cithaeron to the tragic end of Sophocles’ play. The mythological

tale is framed by the enactment of a modern child’s experience of the Oedipus Complex, so that

myth permeates reality and reality permeates myth.

5
 Fusillo (1966); MacKinnon (1986); Schironi (2009).  
6
 See Schironi (2009: pp. 484-500); see also K. MacKinnon (1986: pp. 126-131).  
  3  
 “Il primo episodio rappresenta un bambino piccolo di oggi, tra padre e madre, cristallizzando quello che viene

comunemente chiamato <<complesso edipico>>. Egli realizza, ad un’età in cui nulla è ancora cosciente, la prima

esperienza della gelosia. […] Dopo di che, nella seconda parte, inizia la proiezione del mito di quel fatto

psicoanalitico. Edipo Re si presenta in questa seconda parte, come un enorme sogno del mito che termina con il

risveglio, con il ritorno alla realtà.”    7

Pasolini’s Oedipus struggles between the necessity to understand human nature and the desire to

live it as it comes. At the beginning of the movie, he is the little child who wants to spy on his

parents dancing together, although this sight disturbs him and he feels threatened by watching his

father embracing his mother. Abandoned because of the prediction that he would kill his father and

sleep with his mother, when grown up he hears that he is not the son of his adoptive parents. As a

result he feels the necessity to investigate, and decides to go to Delphi in order to interrogate the

oracle. He is disconcerted by the prophet’s revelation and decides to escape. If in Sophocles

Oedipus’ flight is a rational reaction with the precise aim of evading destiny, in Pasolini this act

arises from instinctive impulses, so that he incoherently laughs at the words of the oracle. At the

same time, it seems to me that the murder of Laius on Oedipus’ way to Thebes appears to be a mere

loss of control, primitively accompanied by the barbaric shouts of the main character; in Sophocles,

on the other hand, it is depicted as a logical reaction to the lack of respect he has been subjected to.

In the Edipo Re, Oedipus is the innocent victim of irrational and inevitable drives which lead him to

bring to completion the plan traced by his own sacredness, represented by the prediction. Both in

Sophocles8 and in Pasolini9 he is not perceived to be guilty, but if Sophocles stresses his cunning

intelligence, a quality that permits him to solve the riddle of the Sphinx, Pasolini disregards this

aspect, so that the famous enigma is not even mentioned in the movie. In representing Oedipus, he

neglects every kind of intellectualism; his nature is in fact principally expressed by a visual and

auditory language which aims to translate the contradictory impulses experienced by the main

7
 See Pasolini (1983: p. 100).    
8
 See Dodds (1966: pp. 37-49).  
9
 See Fusillo (1966: pp. 94-96).  
  4  
character. Pasolini’s Oedipus is depicted as strangled by his interior abyss. In order to kill the

Sphinx and free Thebes he is not put to the test, as it is his own individuality which constitutes the

most difficult puzzle, and this is not solvable with the aid of rational skills. “The abyss you thrust

me into is inside of you”, the Sphinx screams when she is about to die at the hands of Oedipus. In

the Edipo Re, Oedipus covers his eyes (a recurring gesture in the movie) in front of the mystery

which clouds his origins, and cries out: “I don’t know it, I don’t want to know it!”. The Greek word

ἀνάγκη (force, constraint, necessity) appropriately expresses the kind of destiny in which Oedipus

is entrapped: both in Sophocles and in Pasolini it is (according to fifth-century Greek tradition) an

external force which surrounds human life, and, despite all the attempts which can be made in order

to avoid it, at the end the circle is always completed. Oedipus’ destiny is, from Sophocles’ angle,

that divine project which men must embrace without hoping to fully understand: in order to do that,

they have to observe those unwritten, divine laws which prescribe “the purity of all words and

deeds” (cf. Oed. Tyr. vv. 864-65, τὰν εὔσεπτον ἁγνείαν λόγων / ἔργων τε πάντων). We find in

Aeschylus, Sophocles and Herodotus a sense of “religious anxiety”10, represented by the constant

tension between the human necessity of acting freely and the inevitable completion of the divine

will. In Pasolini, this anxiety is instead connected to the sphere of sacredness composed of primitive

human instincts, articulated by those unconscious desires which constitute the archetypes of the

human race.

I would also like to highlight another aspect present in Pasolini but not in the original play: the

figure of Teiresias appears in Sophocles when Oedipus interrogates him about the identity of the

slayers of Laius (cf. vv. 300 ff.), identified by the oracle as the cause of the plague which is

afflicting the city. In the Edipo Re, on the other hand, the blind seer comes into view for the first

time when Oedipus arrives in Thebes, before he kills the Sphinx. This scene, set in a green meadow,

is dominated by an atmosphere of spirituality, emphasised by the sound of the flute which Teiresias

is playing. It seems to me that this is the most evocative episode of the plot as it introduces that idea

10
 See Dodds (1959: p. 30).  
  5  
of cyclicity on which the whole movie is structured: blindness will, in fact, be the final result of

Oedipus’ inner tragedy.

Fig. 1 Teiresias playing the flute in the meadow.

Oedipus is deeply shaken by this sight, and, as happens in all the most significant moments of the

story, the character’s thoughts are projected on the screen so as to momentarily interrupt the events:

“Your fellow citizens and your brothers, suffer, weep, seek salvation together… and you are here,

blind, alone, and you are singing” … “I wish I were you, you sing what’s beyond destiny!”.

Oedipus is shocked and fascinated at the same time by the image of the seer: he appears to be

outside the dramatic events, outside that thread of destiny in which Oedipus feels he is enmeshed.

The main character fights an inner struggle in order to not face up to reality, while Teiresias, in his

state of blindness, is able to look through the mere appearance of things and to find salvation in

himself. The theme of “seeing-blindness”11 is of central importance both in Sophocles’ Oedipus

Tyrannus and, in particular, Oedipus at Colonus. Oedipus’ final act of blinding himself is, in

Sophocles, motivated by his wish to interrupt any kind of contact with humanity (cf. Oed. Tyr. vv.

1369 ff.), but it must also be considered that in Greek the verb ὁράω (to see), assumes in its perfect

tense the meaning of “to know”. Consequently, it can be affirmed that with this symbolic penance

11
 See Schironi (2009: p. 490).  
  6  
Oedipus, having acknowledged his real nature, decides to withdraw into himself, his personal

enigma finally solved.

The devastating power which in the Edipo Re upsets Oedipus’ universe is the incontrovertible

force of the incestuous Eros, embodied by Jocasta. Sophocles’ tragedy emphasises Jocasta’s

tendency to accept life as it is (cf. Oed. Tyr. v. 979, “εἰκῆ κράτιστον ζῆν, ὅπως δύναιτό τις”), in

contrast to Oedipus’ continuous attempts to investigate it, while in Pasolini’s version she represents

that element which from the outset disturbs the equilibrium in Oedipus’ life. Sophocles’ main

character is the solver of riddles, the great man who tries to go beyond human boundaries through

acuteness of mind; Pasolini’s, on the other hand, is the man of strong emotions and uncontrollable

impulses, and Jocasta does not only represent his opposing counterpart in the pursuit of the truth,

but is instead the point of departure of those inexplicable drives which have led him to be where he

is. His Oedipus does not follow a rational path in order to unmask his identity, but finds himself in

his mother/wife persona. This is the key to interpreting Pasolini’s Edipo Re - the cyclicity, the

necessity of going back to the origins, as expressed in the last words of the main character: in the

fourth section of the movie, a blind Oedipus (of the modern day) travels through the places of his

infancy and finally arrives in that meadow where he met Teiresias for the first time: “I have

arrived. Life ends where it begins”.

Medea

It could be argued that the central figure in the Medea of Pasolini, the character who helps the

viewer to make sense of the film, is the Centaur. The Medea, more than the Oedipus Rex, is built on

the foundations of opposite binomials. Medea represents the force of life, balanced by the

equilibrium between ἔρος and θάνᾰτος; she embodies the primitive force of the land and the

ancestral rites of the human race. Jason, on the other hand, incorporates the pragmatism and

  7  
rationality of civilization, and the utilitarian perspective of the modern man. These contradictions

are both contained in the personality of the double Centaur.

“Questo incontro, ossia questa compresenza dei due centauri, significa che la cosa sacra, una volta dissacrata,

non per questo viene meno. L’essere sacro rimane giustapposto all’essere dissacrato. Con questo intendo dire che,

vivendo, ho realizzato una serie di superamenti, di dissacrazioni, di evoluzioni.”12

Pasolini’s Medea symbolises the power of sacredness as opposed to the desecrating pressure of

Jason, who arrives in Colchis (represented in the movie by the arid and savage beauty of

Cappadocia) with the aim of conquering the Golden Fleece and achieving power. His arrival

violates the harmony of a land still tied, unlike Greek city-states, to the cyclicity of life: “You will

go to a distant land across the sea. There you will find a world whose use of reason is different from

our own. Life there is very realistic. As only those who are mythical are realistic, and only those

who are realistic are mythical”, says the Centaur to Jason before he starts his journey. The “realism

of the mythic” is explained by the notion that the µῦθος represents the common imagery of a

community, which expresses its real essence through precise archetypes contained in the myth. In

this logic, myth explains reality, and reality explains myth.13 Western rationalism does not find a

place in a primitive society whose inhabitants live reality through spiritual experiences. Medea

makes her first appearance during a human sacrifice: in this scene the director focuses on the ritual

nature of the event, experienced by the community as a propitiatory act carried out for fertility

purposes. Pasolini puts emphasis on the anthropological features of the event, such as the dyed

faces and the sounds of ritual singing and dancing. Medea’s world is not made of words, but of

physical expressions: it should be noted that the movie lacks dialogues, and Pasolini’s strength in

communication principally derives from the evocative power of the framing and the intensity of

Medea’s body language. Maria Callas is, in fact, able to convey a complex state of mind through a

simple gaze. Her encounter with Jason occurs in the temple which contains the Fleece, and the
12
 See Pasolini (1983: p. 76).
13
 See Morford, Lenardon and Sham (2011: pp. 14-29).  
  8  
emotive impact of the event is expressed by Medea’s sudden faint: the sacred balance of the main

character’s universe has already been profaned and she has no choice but to follow her interior

impulse which leads her to go with Jason to a foreign land. But Pasolini’s intention is to

communicate more than a mere amorous passion: Jason’s appearance in Medea’s world (and vice

versa) represents the violent invasion of their existences by an opposite force, as in Teorema (1968)

when the stranger’s arrival upsets the established schemes of a bourgeois family, in an irreversible

way. The antithetical Apollonian and Dionysiac impulses are in this way counterposed and their

collision causes an irreparable breach in the life of those who experience these polar forces; one

completes the other, and makes sense in relation to the other. This is symbolised metaphorically in

the movie by the character of the double Centaur who appears to Jason in Corinth, when he has

already decided to abandon Medea in order to marry Creon’s daughter:

“ Jason: - But I’ve known only one centaur.

Desecrated Centaur: - No, you’ve known two: a sacred one when you were a boy, and a desecrated one,

when you became a man. But what was sacred is preserved within the new desecrated form. […] He doesn’t

speak, of course. His logic is so different from ours that it is incomprehensible. But I can speak for him. It is

influence, despite your schemes and your interpretations, that causes you to love Medea. […] In reality, you love

Medea […] and you understand her spiritual catastrophe, […] the disorientation of an archaic woman in a world

that does not believe in any of the things she always believed in”.

Fig. 2 The double Centaur.

  9  
Pasolini chose to shoot this scene in the magnificence of Piazza dei Miracoli in Pisa; the contrast

with the barren background of Cappadocia is clear enough. The limpid, rational architecture of the

famous piazza recalls the wondrous, terrible skills of man’s intellect, so much praised by fifth

century BC Greek humanism. Medea cannot find a place in Jason’s world and she suffers a violent

“conversion” (“a spiritual catastrophe”), represented by the transition from a magical to a

pragmatic universe.

On the other hand, in the Euripidean model, the main character’s origins are barely mentioned.

Rather, Euripides places his emphasis on the mental process which leads Medea to the murder of

her sons. His Medea goes through a succession of psychological states, expressed in reasoned

monologues in which she is able to make, even when in a fragile emotional condition, general

considerations on strangers and women. The focus is not placed on her primitive culture, but rather

on the rational ability to manage her vulnerability. She is not even the expression of a contrast

between reason and passion14, as Medea’s intentions are controlled by the force of the θύµος, which

rationally takes her purposes into account and realises them (cf. Med. vv. 1079-1080 “θυµὸς δὲ

κρείσσων τῶν ἐµῶν βουλευµάτων,/ ὅσπερ µεγίστων αἴτιος κακῶν βροτοῖς”). In Pasolini, Medea’s

plan of revenge is set in an oneiric dimension, so that it is first planned and represented in a vision,

then concretely realised; it also recalls the sacred rites of her motherland, shown at the beginning of

the movie. In contrast, Euripides focuses more on Medea’s capacity for self-analysis, and her

magical skills only constitute the sinister background of an action planned by her intellect. In both

the plots we can notice, however, the inevitability of Medea’s action: in Pasolini it is linked to

Medea’s inability to “find a place within a civilised society”15, in Euripides to the character’s

necessity to bring her θύµος to completion, while the final words of Pasolini’s Medea “Nothing is

possible anymore” refer to Euripides’ Medea verse 1404: “οὐκ ἔστι: µάτην ἔπος ἔρριπται”.

14
 See Di Benedetto (1997: pp. 12 ff.).  
15
 See MacKinnon (1986: p.153).  
  10  
Fig. 3 Medea’s spiritual catastrophe.

Appunti per un’Orestiade Africana (Notes towards an African Orestes)

Of the tragedies we have thus far discussed, the trilogy of the Oresteia represents beyond a doubt

the splendid literary colossus able to depict the shift from a primitive human status - where the

chain of blood crimes committed within a γένος finds its conclusion in the judgement entrusted to

the terrible power of the Furies (cf. Eum. v. 262 “You’ll give me blood for blood, you must!”) - to

the development of a rational order, in which men acquire a freedom of decree, guaranteed by a

democratic tribunal (cf. Eum. vv 498/99 “I will appoint the judges of manslaughter,/ swear them in,

and found a tribunal here for all time to come”). What is more interesting for Pasolini, however, is

the opposition of forces embodied in the trilogy, which reach their tragic ἀκµή in the Eumenides:

this play centres around the resolution of the struggle between rational and irrational, male and

female, λόγος and φύσις, Olympian and Chthonic, law-court and ritual16. Athena, by instituting the

rite of the Eumenides, does not deprive the Furies of their condition of divinities, but rather directs

16
 See Zeitlin (1985: p. 112).  
  11  
their power towards positive purposes, favourable for the city. Pasolini makes a journey to Uganda

and Tanzania in order to shoot the documentary that he would have used as a starting point for

making the film (a film which, in fact, was never produced). He chose Africa as a location

considering it the physical example of the gradual passage from an underdeveloped condition to a

more civilised one - made possible by European colonisation - which could form the background to

Aeschylus’ trilogy. At the same time, Pasolini hoped for an evolution that could preserve the

ancient values of African culture, which he highlighted in his documentary. As in his previous

work, the film director decided to give his plot a popular taste, in which physical and natural

features represent the main motif. For this reason, his intention was to give great importance to the

chorus, which, he argued, is enclosed in a “mythical, holy, moment”17. Another aspect of the

Oresteia he wanted to emphasise was its strong mythical nature: the trilogy is grounded on

continuous changes, which involve the characters of Agamemnon, Clytemnestra and their son

Orestes, who experience an evolution made possible by the tragic principle of πάθει µάθος. This

progressive process results in the myth of the creation of the Eumenides. As Zeitlin argues,

“The Eumenides is therefore everywhere concerned with change and transformation on every level, both for the

son Orestes and for the mother. For the archaic mind, as Mircea Eliade points out, it is a characteristic belief

that a state cannot be changed without first being annihilated and then regenerated. Life cannot be repaired, it

can only be recreated by a return to sources.”18

We have already noted how Pasolini tended to focus on the theme of cyclicity in his productions,

and it is significant that the first word of the last tragedy of the trilogy is πρῶτον19 (cf. Eum. v. 1):

the Eumenides is concerned with beginnings, and more precisely with ends which give birth to

origins and define the aetiological myths of a society. This point brings us back to the last sentence

that Oedipus pronounces in the Edipo Re, “life ends where it begins”. This force of life flourishes

17
 See Pasolini (2001: p. 1180).  
18
 See Zeitlin (1985: p. 101).  
19
 See Zeitlin (1985, ibidem).  
  12  
everywhere in the African country: through his camera Pasolini admires the multi-coloured tattoos

on people’s faces and the majestic, imposing power of nature, trying to grab onto the tracks of an

archaic sense of magic and poetry which has its roots in still-living ancient cities. The harmony

between human kind and nature - so important for the Greeks as the symbol of a balance between

men and gods - was still intact in the countries of the third world, and visually representable. The

visual impact was, as we have seen, taken into great account by Pasolini yet on the other hand, the

ὄψις 20 has an immense force in the Aeschylean trilogy: the scarlet tapestries Clytemnestra

persuades her husband to walk on following his return from Troy, Agamemnon’s tomb in the

Choephoroi, the chorus of the Erinyes, which all evoke powerful images that permit the reader to

physically project the written word in their minds.

Pasolini meditates on how to represent the Furies in a modern film, considering Aeschylus’

intention to strike his audience with the appearance of these goddesses who brought such horrific

connotations: for a 5th century Athenian citizen, in fact, the Erinyes were not literary fiction, but

present realities (cf. Pasolini’s Medea, “Only what is mythic is realistic”). At first Pasolini

considered native inhabitants for the role, endowed with that ancestral charge which he aimed to

represent. However, he finally realised that the Furies could not be portrayed by human actors: their

connotations go beyond anthropological features. In fact, they are irrational, dark, primitive entities,

only representable through natural forms. It has to be considered that Aeschylus’ Choephoroi ends

with a tempest: Orestes, after having murdered his mother, starts to visualise the Furies shaken by

wrath, due to the matricide. At this stage, however, they are δόξαι, hallucinations, and the chorus

cannot see them. The perspective is, in this part of the tragedy, deeply psychological, as the Erinyes

reveal themselves on an inner, and consequently more authentic, level of reality. Clytemnestra’s

blood is still fresh on Orestes’ hands when he starts experiencing an interior upheaval, expressed by

two of the most striking verses of the play:

πρὸς δὲ καρδίᾳ φόβος

20
 See Medda (2002: p. 117).  
  13  
 ᾁδειν ἕτοιµος ἠδ᾽ ὑπορχεῖσθαι κότῳ.

(cf. Coe. vv. 1024-25)

The Erinyes are connected to an image of terror located inside the main character’s heart (καρδίᾳ

understood as the source of emotions) and the image of the act of singing and dancing, associated

with tragic fear, is proposed. At this point the chorus’ anxiety reaches its highest peaks, and Orestes

escapes, trying to evade the Furies’ terrible punishment. In the documentary, Orestes starts

wandering in the African landscape, while Pasolini’s camera focuses on a sequence of trees in the

background, shaken by the wind, just as the murderer is shaken by interior confusion; the

soundtrack is the trembling jazz tune of a sax. This is the beautiful metaphor through which the

director chooses to depict the Erinyes.

“Le Furie sono irrappresentabili sotto l’aspetto umano e quindi deciderei di rappresentarle sotto un aspetto non

umano. Questi alberi, per esempio, perduti nel silenzio della foresta, mostruosi, in qualche modo, e terribili. La

terribilità dell’Africa è la sua solitudine, le forme mostruose che vi può assumere la natura, i silenzi profondi e

paurosi. L’irrazionalità è animale. Le Furie sono le dee del momento animale dell’uomo.”21

It is impressive how the Tanzanian wind recalls the Greek πνεῖν in “πνέω τοι µένος ἅπαντά τε

κότον” (cf. Eum. v. 840). The Furies are goddesses of the earth, and their anger is also represented

by damage to vegetation and herds. At the end of the trilogy, the Eumenides, the goddesses

instituted by Athena as new divinities to be venerated by the city, promise to forget their wrath and

to protect Athens against famine (cf. Eum. vv. 938 ff.). As Pasolini states in the Appunti in a

dialogue with a group of African university students, the democracy instituted by Athena in the

temple of Apollo (which would have been metaphorically represented in the film by the university

of Dar-es-Salaam22), is a “formal democracy”, to be filled by a “real democracy” in order to

become concrete. The same, he argues, can be affirmed regarding the condition of modern Africa,

21
 See Pasolini (2001: p. 1183).  
22
 See Winkler (2005: pp. 387-388).  
  14  
which has experienced progress towards a democracy which is still formal. Africa is a country of

contradictions, as the Eumenides are goddesses of contradictions. This would have been clearly

symbolised by Pasolini’s final choice of location in the movie, in which the Delphic sanctuary is

depicted by a university, symbol of Anglo-Saxon neo-capitalism23. African students, native to that

magical and realistic environment so much praised by Pasolini, arrive, like the young Orestes in the

tragedy, in the developed world. “Do you identify yourselves with Orestes?”, asks Pasolini to the

students he is interviewing in the documentary.

Fig. 4 Pasolini interviewing a group of African students.

They are subjected, just like Orestes and the Furies, to a process of initiation: the fact that the

Erinyes become Eumenides in the seat of learning, which parallels the African university, in some

way degenerates their original nature. Athena promises the new goddesses a religious cult (cf. Eum.

807, “ὑπ᾽ ἀστῶν τῶνδε τιµαλφουµένας”). But she also declares, at verse 835 “αἰεὶ τόνδ᾽ ἐπαινέσεις

λόγον”, where the word she uses is “λόγον”, that the counsel which the Eumenides will praise,

Athena’s counsel, is of a rational kind. At the end, is the synthesis accomplished? The answer is

problematic and still pending; after the dialogue with the young students, Pasolini’s camera

significantly focuses on the university bookshop, where books of African history are placed side by

side with volumes about the American educational system.

23
 Pasolini (2001: p. 1190).
  15  
 Another point worth investigating further in Pasolini’s interpretation of the Oresteia is the popular

aspect he wants to give the movie. This complies with the Aeschylean model, because of the choral

depth of the poet’s tragedies. The chorus expresses24, according to Pasolini, those archetypes which

represent the roots of a culture. The individuals he captures through his camera conserve in

themselves an untouched ancestral memory. They are not gathered in a single combination, as in a

traditional chorus, but distributed throughout the entire movie as women drawing water from a well,

fishermen, children whose gazes reflect amazement. As Pasolini notes, in their realism they

represent the African sacred myth. In parallel the odes of the Oresteia lead us back to the mythical

past which constitutes the tragic αἰτία of the narrated events. In the Agamemnon, in particular, the

choral stasima communicate the knowledge of the events which have preceded Agamemnon’s

return from Troy. In the parodos, known as the Hymn to Zeus, the chorus narrate Iphygenia’s

murder (cf. Ag. vv. 137-38, “A woman/ trembling young, all born to die”), and a growing terror is

readable in these verses: in a primitive community like that of the native Africans, popular wisdom

is combined with ancestral, instinctive beliefs. “The pain of pain remembered comes again”, the

chorus sing: they conserve in their mind the stratified memory of a past which gives a shape to the

future, and enriches a community with ripeness (σωφρονεῖν). But wisdom can be acquired only

through suffering (πάθει µάθος): the development of a society is a gradual process based on the

obstacles it has had to face. The sense of holiness is imposing and the fact that “to know” means to

recognise the gods and to respect their laws is celebrated. The future cannot be understood until it

comes (cf. Ag. vv. 248 ff., “What comes next? I cannot see it, cannot say…We will know the future

when it comes”). From this moment the tension is growing and the chorus’ dread reaches its highest

peaks in the ode that precedes the κοµµός of Cassandra, permeated by that irrational, frenetic fear,

which will result in Orestes’ vision of the Furies. Cassandra, the young seer, visualises what is

happening inside the palace, where Clytemnestra is performing Agamemnon’s murder (cf. Ag. vv.

977-78, “Why, why does it rock me, never stops/ this terror beating down my heart, this seer that

24
 See Medda (p. 18).  
  16  
sees it all”). At this stage the characters experience that sense of deep “religious anxiety” which

has been discussed above. As Pasolini asserts in the last part of his documentary, the future of

Africa resides in its “anxiety for the future”. This anxiety includes in itself elements of rational and

irrational, holy and unholy, primitive and modern, and fights in its attempt to preserve the antithesis

in the synthesis. But, to quote one more time Pasolini’s Appunti, “problems are not to be solved, but

to be lived”. In the Appunti, a final conclusion does not exist; it is suspended, just as in Aeschylus’s

trilogy. Greek tragedy never gives precise answers, but rather leaves its readers in doubt. Will the

formal democracy instituted by Athena be able to safeguard, in real democracy, the traditional cult

of the Erinyes, emblem of an archaic Greece? And, in parallel, will Africa be able to protect its

primordial divinities? It can be affirmed beyond a doubt that Aeschylus, in the pages which narrate

the birth of the new Athenian goddesses, the Eumenides, lays the foundation for a “new” world: a

world which interrogates itself about what is right and what is wrong, what has to be preserved, and

what has to be lost.

Conclusions

Pasolini’s Greek films do not have to be judged from a philological angle: rather, the director

utilised ancient dramas as a substratum into which he could insert contemporary themes. The final

result is an intense syntony, fraught with poetry and enriched with a clear personal mark. He felt it

necessary to communicate the mythical and hieratical essence which is at the root of all of human

beings. He believed in the importance of preserving the traditions of a society like that of ancient

Greece, in which the essence of things went beyond their mere appearance, in which nature was

never “only natural”25 but a declaration of sacredness. But on the other side of the camera, he saw a

world where this intensity of thought was vanishing and the deeper essence of things was becoming

25
 See Eliade (1959: p. 116).  
  17  
lost, being substituted by an ideology of wealth and power. This world is the world of ratio, the

world of Athena born from the head of Zeus; it is the civilised society of Jason, which penetrates

Medea’s universe and irreversibly mutates it. It is a system which refutes the idea that “life ends

where it begins” and that the past is our point of departure, and what unconsciously attracts us the

most. In fact, man is by his nature always inexplicably led to where he comes from, and this is why

Oedipus goes to Thebes, his fatherland, without rationally knowing why, and later sleeps with

Jocasta, his mother. This force is strong enough to go beyond our capacity of discernment. In the

Pilade (1967), a theatrical piece again inspired by Aeschylus’ trilogy, Pilade - the revolutionary

rival of the rational system introduced by Orestes in Argo after the trial - states: “E invece tutto

torna indietro./ La più grande attrazione di ognuno di noi/ è verso il passato”26. “Everything goes

back to the beginning”, and modern confidence in progress and evolution is often blind in front of

its limits. Oedipus is divided between his illusory self-assurance and the attracting force of his

mysterious past; Medea and Jason represent the two halves of the same whole, and one is bound to

annihilate the other; Orestes is the one who does justice, but he is tormented by the vision of the

Furies and by the irrational moment which takes him back to his past, to the memory of his mother.

Athena, on the other hand, represents the goddess without a past, born already adult. The great

characters of Ancient Greek literature in Pasolini’s cinema symbolise the opposition between polar

forces that he aimed to represent in his works, in order to make visible those interior contradictions

which he himself experienced (cf. Le Ceneri di Gramsci, “Lo scandalo del contraddirmi”). He was

able to translate these ancient, universal texts into remarkable productions, unique in language and

images.

WORDS COUNT: 5997.

26
 See Pasolini (2001: p. 389).  
  18  
 FILMOGRAPHY

- Silvana Mangano and Franco Citti in Edipo Re a film by Pier Paolo Pasolini (1967).

- Silvana Mangano and Terence Stamp in Teorema a film by Pier Paolo Pasolini (1968)

- Maria Callas in Medea a film by Pier Paolo Pasolini (1969).

- Appunti per un’Orestiade Africana, a documentary by Pier Paolo Pasolini (1969).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

PRIMARY SOURCES

- Aeschylus (1950), Agamemnon edited with a comment by E. Fraenkel (Oxford).

- Aeschylus (2009), Oresteia edited and translated by A. H. Sommerstein (Loeb Classical

Library).

- Euripides (1994), Medea edited and translated by D. Kovacs (Loeb Classical Library).

- Euripides (1997), Medea edited and translated by V. di Benedetto (Milano).

- Pasolini, P.P. (1957), Le Ceneri di Gramsci (Milano).

- Pasolini, P. P. (1983), Il sogno del Centauro (Firenze).

- Pasolini, P.P. (2001), Per Il Cinema (Meridiani Mondadori).

- Pasolini, P.P. (2001), Per Il Teatro (Meridiani Mondadori).

- Sophocles (1888), The Oedipus Tyrannos edited with a comment by Jebb, R.C.,

(Cambridge).

- Sophocles (2008), Antigone, Oedipus the King and Electra translated by H.D.F. Kitto,

introduction and notes by E. Hall (Oxford).

  19  
 SECONDARY SOURCES

- Angelini, F. (2000), Pasolini e Lo Spettacolo (Roma).

- Brevini, F. (1981), Per Conoscere Pasolini (Mondadori Milano).

- Carey, C. (1986), The Second Stasimon of Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus (The Journal of

Hellenic Studies, Vol. 106, pp. 175-179).

- Castaldo, B. (2012), Usare la Non Ragione Contro la Ragione: ‘Pilade’ e ‘Medea’ in

Pasolini e il Teatro, a cura di Stefano Casi, Angela Felice e Gerardo Guccini (Venezia).

- Clauss, J. J. (1966), A Course on Classical Mythology in Film (The Classical Journal, Vol.

91, No. 3, pp. 287-295).

- Dodds, E. R. (1959), The Greeks and The Irrational (California).

- Dodds, E. R. (1966), On Misunderstanding the ‘Oedipus Rex’ (Greece & Rome, Vol.

13, No. 1, pp. 37-49). 

- Eliade, M. (1959), The Sacred and the Profane: the Nature of Religion (London).

- Foley, H. (1989), Medea’ Divided Self (Classical Antiquity, Vol. 8, No. 1, pp. 61-85).

- Fusillo, M. (1966), La Grecia Secondo Pasolini, (Firenze).

- MacKinnon, K. (1986), Greek Tragedy into Film (Rutherford).

- Medda, E. (2002) Rappresentare l’Arcaico: Pasolini e Eschilo negli ‘Appunti per

un’Orestiade Africana’ in Il Mito Greco nell’Opera di Pasolini (Udine).

- Santato, G (2013), Pier Paolo Pasolini: l’Opera Narrativa, Cinematografica, Teatrale e

Saggistica. Ricostruzione Critica (Roma).

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“Edipo Re” (International Journal of the Classical Tradition, Vol. 16, No. 3/4, pp. 484-

500).

- Syrims, M. (2012), Pasolini’s Erotic Gaze from “Medea” to “Salò” (Italica, Vol. 89, No. 4,

pp. 510-531).
  20  
 - Trento, G. (2010), Pasolini e l’Africa, l’Africa di Pasolini: Panmeridionalismo e

rappresentazione dell’Africa Postcoloniale (Mimesis Edizioni, Milano).

- Van Sten, G. A. H. (2002), Rolling Out The Red Carpet: Power ‘Play’ in Modern Greek

Versions of the Myth of Orestes from the 1960s to the 1970s (International Journal of the

Classical Tradition, Vol. 9, No. 2, pp. 195-235).

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Journal of Classical Tradition, Vol. 11, No. 3, pp. 383-423).

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Oresteia in Playing the Other: Gender and Society in Classical Greek Tragedy (Chicago).

  21