A lecture by Rhiannon Noel Welch, Rutgers University.
Italy’s renowned poet, novelist, cultural theorist, and filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini dedicated much of his cinematic production to exploring the archaic trace—the ontological, epistemological, and material remnants of a past that had resisted appropriation by consumerist postmodernity. If Derrida’s notion of spectropoetics most aptly defines Pasolini’s film theory and practice (Ricciardi 2003), scholars of the Italian postcolonial have used the spectral to describe the nature of collective memory, by calling attention to the return of Italy’s colonial past in the figure of the contemporary immigrant. ‘Eclipse,’ ‘evaporation,’ and ‘displacement’ have likewise been used to describe the peculiar nature of Italian films about decolonization and contemporary immigration.
Pasolini’s 1970 film Notes for an African Orestes is situated at the intersection of these two strands of spectral thinking, as it represents at once the poet-filmmaker’s quest to capture the last traces of what he terms African premodernity before its violent confrontation with consumer capitalism, and a displacement of the colonial encounter to imperial nations other than Italy (he travels to Uganda and Tanzania). In the film, as in many of his most memorable works, from The Gospel According to Matthew (1964), through the Trilogy of Life (1971-1974) and Salò (1975), metaphor, analogy, and allegory emerge as the privileged modes with which to address the spectral trace.
This talk explores postcolonial spectrality and the endurance of Pasolini’s metaphorical or analogical mode in what is often called Italy’s first ‘postcolonial’ film, Gianni Amelio’s Lamerica (1994).
In ENGLISH.
Lower Manhattan, New York, NY