Pasolini: Medea (1969)

Whereas Pasolini updated Oedipus Rex by bringing it into the twentieth-century, his version of Medea feels even more ancestral and remote than the play itself. In part, that’s because it’s directed at the myth, rather than the play – unlike Euripides’ version, the first half is centred on Medea’s homeland, and her life before she met Jason. In some ways, this is the most extraordinary part of the film, as Pasolini adopts a documentary, ethnographic approach, shooting on location amongst the anchorite communities of Goreme, Turkey, and devoting most of his attention to the rituals and ceremonies performed by his largely non-professional cast. Insofar as there are recognisable figures or moments from the myth, they’re more a matter of embodiment than characterisation – a mode that’s perfect for Maria Callas, who plays Medea, and simply puts on the role like an elaborate operatic costume. And it’s clear that, for Pasolini, embodying Medea means every embodying single iteration of her – the second half, which focuses on the more familiar story of Medea’s revenge, rotates through several versions of the same events, while Medea herself often feels more like a meeting-point for different mythological traditions, rather than a specific character in any one of them. Watching her is like watching a myth gradually take shape before your eyes – again, a perfect role for Callas – or like watching classical myth itself take shape, as Pasolini’s vision seems to be set at the very cusp of Greece’s separation from Asia, rather than against the urban, democratic classicism that’s more familiar to us from Euripides’ version. By the end, it feels less like an adaptation of Medea than an evocation of the earth from which all myths spring, as Pasolini’s landscapes becomes starker and starker, more and more primeval, as if to envisage how the world looked before myth conquered and transformed its surface. And that means that there’s something curiously undetermined and literal about the film’s image–objects – their pagan sensuality is suddenly available again, thousands of years later, for Pasolini to incorporate into the mythologies that would preoccupy him for the rest of his career.