More than a curiosity, but less than a fully realized work, Pier Paolo Pasolini's feature-length Notes for an African Orestes is an intriguing item that's almost invariably omitted from the late director's filmography. It shouldn't be. While Orestes has a general interest for anyone curious as to how a director's mind works, it is key to an understanding of the particular Freudian-Marxist-Christian world-view that was Pasolini's.

Having recently completed versions of Oedipus and Medea Pasolini planned to film his Oresteia in the third world. Aeschylus's myth of the first human tribunal—with its climactic transformation of the archaic Furies into the civilizing Eumenides—had, Pasolini thought, a special relevance to the situation of underdeveloped societies in the throes of modernization….

Many of Pasolini's ideas are truly inspired. He uses a wounded lioness to represent the Furies and interpolates grisly newsreels of the Biafran war as Cassandra's vision. Other...