Gli alberi della savana: le sopravvivenze del passato

In his work Pasolini shows great interest in the past and in otherness as represented by the farmers and labourers from Friuli, underclass Romans, and the poor of the Third World. This essay focuses on the documentary Appunti per un’Orestiade Africana, which can be interpreted as using the concept of the trace as it was theorized by the philosopher Paul Ricoeur in his Les tempes et récit, and illustrates what Pasolini meant by the idea of the survival of the past in the present. The aim of the essay is to demonstrate the importance of taking Appunti per un’Orestiade Africana as the turning point in Pasolini’s career, marking the change from his early representations of the Friulian and the Roman to the later apocalyptic writings of Scritti corsari and Petrolio.