directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini
Pier Paolo Pasolini: 40th Anniversary
The film
explores, through poetry and cinema, Pasolini’s love for Africa and his hope of
finding there the authenticity of peasant life and revolutionary force he had
sought in vain in his native Friuli and in the villages around Rome. It was an
Africa with frayed and indefinite boundaries, one that was born – in the poet’s
words – in the same suburbs described in his first film Accattone. This is where Prophecy starts out: the place where the
Roman lumpen proletariat used to live is filled today with thousands of
immigrants from outside Oedipus Rex and The
Gospel According to St. Matthew testify to the poet’s love for Africa, as
does the conversation in Paris with Jean-Paul Sartre on The Gospel According to St. Matthew. Above all, though, it was in The rage that he depicted an Africa
bearing all the marks of injustice and showing all the signs of hope. These too
were to be disappointed: Africa was a repository of irremediable contradictions
that would erupt into degradation, into dictatorships, into the massacres of
yesterday and today, whose violent images are contrasted with the sober and
stark ones of Pasolini, in black and white. The prophetic quality of Pasolini’s
observations continues to disturb us, in particular when he describes—thirty
years before it actually began to happen—the exodus of Africans on ramshackle
boats and their “conquest” of Italy. But the prophet was destined for a
premature death, like Accattone, to
which the beginning and the tragic end of the film are dedicated.