Medea2.0001_Pasolini
Pier Paolo Pasolini, Medea (1969). Motion Picture.
Pasolini also explored classical mythological topics in Edipo re (1967) and Appunti per unÕOrestiade Africana (ÒNotes Towards an African OresteiaÓ) (1970)
P. Bondanella, A History of Italian Cinema (New York and London: Continuum, 2009), 418:
ÒInfluenced not only by PasoliniÕs attachment to preindustrial peasant cultures but also by readings in the anthropologists Mircea Eliad and James George Frazer, Pasolini transforms EuripidesÕ classical drama into a clash between two cultures with diametrically opposed views of reality, a struggle having more relevance to philosphical and religious problems than to traditional Marxist theories of class struggle. Medea represents for Pasolini the archaic, clerical, and hierarchical univers of human prehistory, a stage of civilization typical or the peasnat cultures Pasolini still finds in the Third World. Working by analogy, Pasolini sets the ancient mythical kingdom of Colchis in remote portions of Syria and Turkey. É The Piazza del Duomo, the famous courtyard of PisaÕs cathedral, serves Pasolini as his location for Corinth, and he chooses it because for him it symbolizes the triumph of reason over myth that occurred during the Italian Renaissance when middle-class merchants established their hegemony over Western culture.Ó
See also PasoliniÕs remarks on the meaning of Medea in Duflot, ed., Entretiens avec Piero Paolo Pasolini (Paris: ƒditions Pierre Belfond, 1970).
Pasolini, ÒMedeaÓ: un film di Pier Paolo Pasolini. Milan: Garzanti, 1970.
Oswald Stack, ed., Pasolini on Pasolini Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1970
Pasolini, ÒWhy That of Oedipus is a Story: Pier Paolo PasoliniÓ in Pasolini, Oedipus Rex Trans. J. Matthews. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1971.
Petraglia, Pier Paolo Pasolini