Oedipus2.0002_Pasolini

Pier Paolo Pasolini, director and screenplay, Edipo Re (Oedipus the King), 1967, motion picture produced by EuroInternational Films. 110 minutes for original uncut version.

From the DVD jacket: "A dark and riveting retelling of the classic Greek tragedy 'Oedipus Rex'. Unknown to himself, Oedipus kills his father and marries his mother. When the truth is discovered, he puts out his eyes and Oedipus wanders the streets until he is found by his daughter, Antigone, a common blind beggar. / Set in Morocco, the film is a visual wonder of desert landscapes and powerful Moorish architecture. The interesting cast include avant garde film and theater director Carmelo Bene, Julian Beck from New York's living theater, and Pasolini himself as the High Priest."

This remarkable film will make you think you are really watching a "foreign" film.

Pasolini's screenplay is overtly preoccupied with the role of Fate in Oedipus' narrative. Note especially the brilliant contrivances of the bewildered Oedipus at each and every cross-roads he encounters. When he meets Laius at the most fateful crossroads, their paths cross after a series of chance changes of direction. The scene at crossroads with Laius is largely worked up beyond what Sophocles provides. This is wholly Pasolini's own telling of the myth.

Collage of film stills and a movie poster for Pier Paolo Pasolini's "Oedipus Rex," featuring desert landscapes and figures in ancient attire

From the IMDB summary: "In pre-war Italy, a young couple have a baby boy. The father, however, is jealous of his son - and the scene moves to antiquity, where the baby is taken into the desert to be killed. He is rescued, given the name Edipo (Oedipus), and brought up by the King and Queen of Corinth as their son. One day an oracle informs Edipo that he is destined to kill his father and marry his mother. Horrified, he flees Corinth and his supposed parents - only to get into a fight and kill an older man on the road..."

Pasolini also explored classical mythological topics in Medea (1969) and Appunti per un’Orestiade Africana (“Notes Towards an African Oresteia”) (1970) P. Bondanella, A History of Italian Cinema (New York and London: Continuum, 2009), 417: “The most important changes to the classical text [of Sophocles] occur precisely in the traditional section of the narrative. Oedipus (Franco Citti) blunders into his tragic destiny, murdering his father and escort in an incident that has no apparent relationship to any mysterious or predetermined fate that might explain his actions.”

Bondanella on Pasolini’s Freudian spin: “In Oedipus Rex, Pasolini takes great liberties with the Sophoclean text, re-creating the protagonist to suit his own personal sensibilities. He sees Oedipus less as a tragic figure destroyed by a mysterious fate than as an individual whose ruin derives from a consciously willed refusal to examine himself rationally. Rather than a tortured intellectual, Pasolini’s protagonist responds to intellectual problems with violence and rage. The classic Freudian interpretation of the Greek play appears in a brief autobiographical prologue taking place in Bologna around 1930, during the Fascist era. In it we see a middle-class family much like Pasolini’s: a tiny baby provokes resentment in his soldier father since the child (obviously the young Pasolini) competes for attention from the wife and mother (Silvana Mangano, who wore a dress in the scene that once belonged to the director’s own mother). When the father cruelly squeezes the young baby’s foot, the film shifts to the more traditional version of Oedipus (“swollen foot,” the meaning of his name in Greek), where Pasolini uses locations in Morocco rather than in Greece, continuing his characteristic construction by analogy that had been so successful in The Gospel [according to St Matthew (1964)].” page 417, actually above the previous quote.