Self-parody in Pasolini’s La ricotta and Appunti per un’Orestiade africana

Abstract

This article explores the practice of self-parody in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s films La ricotta (1963) and Appunti per un’Orestiade africana (1970). A rarely addressed aspect of Pasolini’s work, self-parody challenges the reverential view of Pasolini as one of Italy’s most influential artists. It refers not merely to self-mockery but to the filmmaker’s wish to perplex the viewer by proposing competing ideological standpoints. The viewer is encouraged to distrust Pasolini’s discourse but also to re-examine his/her own ideological investment in the work and engage in a process of self-reflection. In La ricotta, Orson Welles’s role as a film director who is making a film about Christ’s Passion provides a caricature of Pasolini’s auteur status. Appunti is a documentary-like film on Africa the aestheticism of which Pasolini subjects to criticism through the interplay of diverse formal elements. As two films that deviate from the feature-length narrative structure that predominates in Pasolini’s cinema, La ricotta and Appunti allow the filmmaker the flexibility to experiment with specific elements of film form – parallel editing, color or black and white, standard speed or fast-motion, staged or documentary footage, and a rupture between sound and image – toward the articulation of his competing voices.