Medea (1969)

Director:

Pier Paolo Pasolini

Writers:

Euripides (play)
Pier Paolo Pasolini (writer)

Release Date:

17 July 1970 (Japan)

Genre:

Drama

Plot:

To win the kingdom his uncle took from his father, Jason must steal the golden fleece from the land of barbarians...

Plot Keywords:

King | Human Sacrifice | Child Murder | Filicide | Double Child Murder

Cast

  (Cast overview, first billed only)

Maria Callas	...	Medea
Massimo Girotti	...	King Kresus / Creonte
Laurent Terzieff	...	Centaur
Giuseppe Gentile	...	Jason
Margareth Clémenti	...	Glauce (as Margareth Clementi)
Paul Jabara	...	Pelias
Gerard Weiss	...	Second centaur
Sergio Tramonti	...	Apsirto, Medea's brother
Luigi Barbini	...	Argonaut
Gian Paolo Durgar		(as Gianpaolo Duregon)
Luigi Masironi
Michelangelo Masironi
Gianni Bradizi
Franco Jacobbi
Annamaria Chio	...	Wet-nurse (as Anna Maria Chio)

Also Known As:

Medée (France)
Medea (USA)
Visioni della Medea (Italy) (working title)

Runtime:

118 min | Spain:107 min

Country:

Italy | France | West Germany

Language:

Italian

Color:

Color (Eastmancolor)

Aspect Ratio:

1.85 : 1

Sound Mix:

Mono

Certification:

Belgium:KNT | Spain:13 | Australia:M | Spain:T (DVD re-rating) | Argentina:16 | Finland:K-12 | UK:PG (video rating) (1990) | UK:AA (original rating)

Filming Locations:

Turkey

Company:

San Marco

Trivia:

According to Richard Burton's diaries, Maria Callas very much wanted him to play Jason. Callas was despondent after her long-time lover, shipping tycoon Aristotle Onassis, had dumped her for Jacqueline Kennedy, and while Burton was sympathetic, he declined the role, thinking it "thankless".

Goofs:

Anachronisms: Jason's men are shown adding potatoes to a pot, but potatoes did not arrive in Europe until AD 1536.

Movie Connections:

Referenced in John & Yoko's Year of Peace (2000) (TV)

'De-Territorializing'

"That which man, discovering agriculture, saw in grain that which he understood from seeds that loose their form in the earth to be born again, all that has become the ultimate truth: resurrection. But the ultimate truth is no longer valid. What you see in the grain, in the growth of the seed has lost all meaning for you. Like a discarded memory. In fact, there is no god."

This statement by the Centaur in the beginning already covers the entire story. The consequence, the conflict between the archaic and the rationalized, modern world view becomes concrete from this point on, held only by the action of physical powers. Medea's revenge remains completely uncommented and unweighted. What's left is the act alone which Pasolini lifts out of the row of reason and effect.

Medea, accused of its formalistic aestheticism and set in ancient Greece, is actually a pretty modern film, an experiment in ethnologic cinema. It's a colourful, 'sulfurous' work, devout in the immovable silence of a new invented Colchis in the Middle East, heart-breakingly bewitched and shot with the enthusiasm of a hand-camera; with images of purely emotional tension where words are replaced by gestures, communication replaced by the ritual. The pain and the fear for their existence of the characters have priority and that's why this film finds another level of understanding in the viewer, on a merely emotional base - in a swell of emotions which is experienced through Medea's visionary look, where love and death, regret and revenge follow each other without respite.

It is also an opportunity to meet grand Maria Callas on screen. With her natural dignity and those striking features, her penetrative eyes, her harshness, with the real human psychic trauma and angst inside of her she is the authentic, inspiring muse of the film and impersonates perfectly the complexity of Medea: The archaic world of the Greek peasants where indications of a progressing cultural and social stratification is already perceivable.

With every second that goes by and with every thought I blew after watching it, I notice how deeply impressed I am by Pasolini's perhaps most hopeless film, a film that has no illusions anymore about the future of modern society.