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.
Fabienne Liptay (Wed,) studied this question.