Figure e controfigure dell’altro nel padre sel vaggio di pier paolo pasolini

Abstract

Il Padre selvaggio, a screenplay written by Pier Paolo Pasolini in 1962 and published in a literary form only in 1975, the year of Pasolini’s untimely death, is one of the first and most compelling texts dedicated by the director and writer to Africa. Still influenced by the myth of the naïveté experienced in the borgate (shanty towns) of Rome, the writer is looking for an innovative key for the contrast between tribal tradition and the reality of the postcolonial era. The protagonist of the plot is a student living in Congo at the time of the struggle between Lumumba’s army and Katanga secessionist movement. In Pasolini’s screenplay all the hopes and disappointments of Italian intellectuals of the sixties are at play.