Medea2.0005_Pasolini

Pier Paolo Pasolini, Medea (1969). Feature length motion picture.

Pasolini also explored classical mythological topics in Edipo re (1967) and Appunti per un’Orestiade Africana (“Notes Towards an African Oresteia”) (1970)

“Influenced not only by Pasolini’s attachment to preindustrial peasant cultures but also by readings in the anthropologists Mircea Eliad and James George Frazer, Pasolini transforms Euripides’ 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 universe 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. … The Piazza del Duomo, the famous courtyard of Pisa’s 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.”