MEDEA
ItalyFranceRFT West Germany, 1969
Director: Pier Paolo Pasolini. Story and screenplay: Pier Paolo Pasolini, from ‘Medea’ by Euripide. Art Director: Dante Ferretti. Cinematographer: Ennio Guarnieri. Set designer: Nicola Tamburro. Costume designer: Piero Tosi. Editor: Nino Baragli. Music coordinator: Pier Paolo Pasolini with Elsa Morante. Sound manager: Carlo Tarchi. Director assistant: Sergio Citti. Cast and characters: Maria Callas (Medea), Giuseppe Gentile (Jason), Laurent Terzieff (the Centaur), Massimo Girotti (Creon), Margareth Clementi (Glauce), Fabio Mauri (Pelia). Production: San Marco SpA (Roma) Les Films Number One (Parigi) Janus Films und Fernsehen (Francoforte). Length: 110’.
Format: DCP. Source: Unzerofilms under licence from Unzerofilms.
Original version. Subtitles: English.
In Pasolini’s vision, Euripides’ Medea becomes an emblem of the Third World deceived and exploited by the pragmatic rationality of the West (Jason). The sequences of human sacrifice, shot in Turkey, are among the highest and cruelest in Pasolini’s cinema. Maria Callas in her only film role, is a lunar goddess of revenge.
“In reality, myth and mythology don’t interest me. When I say “myth” I am not referring to a special myth, of Sophocles or Euripides, I mean “myth” in the general sense of the word. Medea is based on the history of religions, on Frazer, Lévi-Strauss, Lévi-Bruhl. When I read these books, I got the idea of conceiving the world of Medea as a symbolic, dream-visionary fragment of the Third World. (..) The clash between the Third World and the contemporary world is a typical theme of all my work, both literary and cinematographic, both because it constitutes a crucial point of my personal history, of my ideology. ” (Pier Paolo Pasolini)
Saturday 21 May 2022, h. 6:00 pm