'De-Territorializing'

zolaaar

"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 But the ultimate truth is no longer valid.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.

score 10/10

zolaaar 2 June 2008

Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw1885061/