Among his film projects, Pier Paolo Pasolini has a black "Oresteia". With this in mind he travels through Uganda and Tanzania, looking for Africans who could embody the tragic Greek heroes Orestes, Agamemnon, or Clytemnestra. At the same time, he reads passages from Aeschylus and theorizes about ancient Greece and Africa - both archaic and modern. Back in Italy, he presents the images he recorded to a group of African students at the University of Rome. For convinced "pasolinophiles" only. For the others, listening to Pier Paolo pontificate on ancient tragedy, on archaic Africa tipping over into modernism, will not be electrifying. All the more so since the images Pasolini shot of the Dark Continent are far from outstanding. Polite boredom will be the lot of the "pasolinophobe" with one exception, that of the interesting dialogue between the maestro and a group of African students from the University of Rome. Less formalist and opinionated than the rest, these two sequences are the only ones where the concrete manages to find a little space in that sterile ocean of intellectualism. This "filmed notebook" was the preparatory stage for a future film to be entitled "African Oresteia". It was never filmed. Should we regret it or rejoice in it?

Aeschylus's ancient play Orestes details the fabled founding of Athenian democracy - the old tribal chief Agamamnon returns home after his victory at Troy only to get slain by his adulterous wife and her lover; his children Elektra and Orestes take bloody revenge, but are subsequently forgiven by the gods who select Orestes as the founding father of a new societal order. Don't ask me why, but in the 60ies many Western Marxists believed that the African struggle for independence and the overcoming of colonial rule would somehow compare to the dawn of a new age detailed by Aeschylus. Pasolini feeds on this notion by taking cinematic notes while visiting Tanzania and Uganda, planning an all-African version of "Orestes". Taking into account that throughout Africa its peoples were ruled by cruel despots and Soviet puppets, this idea appears to be ridiculous. So the best part of this film essay is a discussion between Pasolini and a group of African students at Rome University who predominantly agree, that the western concept of Africa is generalist, fuzzy and most of all fundamentally flawed. This documentary seems to drag on for hours perpetuating a non-idea. Luckily, Pasolini never filmed "Orestes".