Heretical anachronisms: framing temporality and tradition in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s essay films

Abstract

Pier Paolo Pasolini’s ventures into the essay film form provide, in films such as La Rabbia (The Rage, 1963) and Appunti per un’Orestiade africana (Notes towards an African Orestes, 1970), an interrogation on the experience of temporality and the ways in which it redefines notions of cultural memory and tradition. The aim of this article is to theorize, within Pasolini’s essayistic practice, a conception of temporality based on an expanded notion of writing, in the context of the essay film’s peculiar position in the history of film cultures. Looking at the ways in which tradition as intertexuality is constructed in La Rabbia and how cultural mediation is transformed into poetic necessity in Appunti per un’Orestiade africana, I argue that Pasolini’s essayistic films should be considered as reflections on the way in which we intellectually and historically experience time in our modern world.