After his quest to retrieve the fabled Golden Fleece, Jason returns to Greece with powerful sorceress Medea. However, when the king banishes her, it's only human that Medea plots her furious revenge. Can they escape her wrath?
EN
“Pasolini used such other film tools as picture, tone, costume, text, silence, frame, and montage to express everything that exists in Euripides’ Medea, and, most importantly, to focus on the issues of power, political subversivness, and the reaction of the oppressed. For example, his eclectic use of costumes, music, and ambience corresponds to the dominant problem of the film – exclusion of the Other, and Pasolini playfully includes and mixes elements of different cultures, challenging the dominant ideas that devaluate eclecticism and thereby questioning the concepts of nation and national cultures that are always dependent upon the process of homogenization that stigmatizes the Other.”
Lada Stevanović1
“Just as Medea migrated from Colchis to Corinth, Callas migrated into Pasolini’s film from another country with different rules and customs. A country where emotions are bigger than life, where jealousy, treason and revenge are daily fare and women tend to have a much bigger space carved out for themselves, away from being mere part of the chorus. The migration I am talking about is, of course, Maria Callas washing upon the shore of Pasolini’s movie from the far away land called Opera.”
Michaël Van Remoortere2
"Maria Callas is an extraordinary tragic actress. She is the only actress who can express, even without acting and without saying a word, spiritual catastrophe. She can portray a woman deeply in love, a violent and tormented woman, the opposite of the defeated woman. You only have to look at the women in my films, to see what they are beyond all outward appearances, to know what I, Pier Paolo Pasolini, am."
Pier Paolo Pasolini3
- 1Lada Stevanović, "Between Mythical and Rational Worlds: Medea by Pier Paolo Pasolini," in Ancient Worlds in Film and Television, ed. Almut-Barbara Renger and Jon Solomon (Brill, 2013), 220.
- 2Michaël Van Remoortere, “Cast Away Diva – On the Monstrosity of Pasolini’s Medea,” photogénie, 24 november 2021.
- 3Louis Valentin, “Pier Paolo Pasolini interviewed by Louis Valentin (1970),” libcom.org, 19 November 2018. Originally published in Lui, nr. 1, June 1970.
