Pier Paolo Pasolini: Medea, Adaptation Report

Play: Medea. Writer: Euripides. Date of Production:431 B.C. Location: Athens

Characters:

Nurse

Tutor of Medea's sons

Medea

Chorus of Corinthian Women

Creon, king of Corinth

Jason

Aegeus, king of Athens

Messenger

Medea's Two Children


Literary Synopsis & Description:

The most characteristic of all Euripides' plays, Medea, reveals the tragic story in ancient Greece in which the female character, Medea, who is the princess in the barbarian territory and has been brought to land of Greece, takes revenge from his husband, Jason, for his betrayal to her and his family. Jason is successfully helped by Medea to earn Golden Fleece in order to overcome the powerful and political domination on Creon's court and Athenian Empire. He has to comfort his ambitions with establishing the new family through the marriage with the king of Corinth's daughter. Medea, who has banished from Creon's court and territory, designs a vengeful and ruthless plan to demolish Jason's fortunes. She murders  Corinth and his daughter and slaughters her own sons at the end of the play.

Socio-Cultural Analysis:

Hellenistic culture in Athenian Empire  was established and founded on the civilized values and the rational interpretation of the universe against the menace of the barbarian invasion from outside. This culture ignored the threatening elements of violent cruelty, disorder and chaotic irrational world of instinct and emotion from within. Fifty years after beating out the Persian invaders through the land and sea of Greece, Athens still celebrated his glory as an empire at peace and its dominion over the Greek world in the spring of 431 B.C. during which the production of Medea has been over by Euripides.

In that era, unlike Sophocles who sympathizes with the element of fatalism and the metaphysical forces of destiny in his tragedies, Euripides profoundly foreshadows the inevitable process of the decline of Athenian civilization through his plays specifically Medea. He insights the whole process of tragic consequences which are formed by the deliberately mankind choices. Although Euripides' devastated landscape of mythological representations in his tragedies eventually portrays the masculine/feminine dichotomy for Athenian audiences, his text remains open to divine genealogy of myth and the moral complexity of the chaotic universe.

Credit:

Director: Pier Paolo Pasolini

Screenplay: Pier Paolo Pasolini based on the play by Europides

Producers: Marina Cicogna and Franco Rosellini

Cinematographer: Ennio Guarnieri

Editor: Nino Baragli

Art Directors: Dante Ferreti and Nicola Tamburo

Sound: Carlo Tarchi

Cast: Maria Callas (Medea), Giuseppe Gentile (Jason), Massimo Girotti (Creonte), Laurent Terzief (Centaur), Margaret Clementi (Glauce), Annamaria Chio (Wet Nurse)

Runtime:118 min

Country: France/Italy/West Germany

Language: Italian

Color: Color (Eastmancolor)

Release Date: 1969


Cinematic Synopsis & Description:

In cinematic adaptation of Medea by Pasolini, the narrative potentially centers on the sexually attractive character of the story, Jason the leader of the army of Argonaut. He has been obliged to fetch and grasp the Golden Fleece to objectify his uncle as the target for his Oedipus complex as the weapon in order to overthrow him out of his throne and launch his own kingdom. Medea whose admiration and adoration for Jason signifies and epitomizes her desperate love as the disturbing motif and complex resonance through the film  helps him significantly in his intention by sacrificing everything even her own brother to steal the Fleece and construct her life with him into unity and integration. Years later, Jason whose functionality of the plot is totally unsuccessful is driven to compose an authentic vehicle to achieve his ambition. He organizes a marriage with the young and beautiful Glauce, King's daughter. Medea's melancholic and psychopathic condition enforces her to objectify Jason and everybody else as the target for her envious vengeful desire at the end.

Pasolini's documentary style of filmmaking such as hand-held camera in exterior scenes and spatial theatricality imposed by different camera angles in interior scenes are in interconnection with the historical and mythological order of narrative and storytelling of Medea's tragedy. Costume design, set design, lighting and manipulation of the exotic oriental sounds on the sound track establish the balances atmosphere with the sense of ritual and traditional ceremonies. In order to stress the structure on which the film is based, Pasolini approaches the metaphysical construction of the scenes by utilizing the long shots and extreme long shots. He creates myth's and gods' point of views. He gives the audience the strategic position for interpreting the ideological context of his artistic work. He cancels the effect of identification process, and focuses on the Brechtian terminology of the scenes.


Socio-Cultural Analysis:

Pasolini lived and created his films in the specific period of Western History in which the Marxist theory and the sexual liberation were considered as the proper weapons to reject the dominant principles of capitalism and bourgeois class of society. The intellectual practices of his period expressed proletarian and sub-proletarian culture and were capable to participate in any ideological debates. These practices rationalize and historicize the mythological events through irrationality and chaotic situations of reality. Pasolini as an intellectual standardized his stance in Italian culture as a poet, critic, novelist and film director. Pasolini and his restless generation described and analyzed the symptomatic signs of the cold war period threatened by atomic destruction  and the problematic experimentation of the young generation with ideological representations of utopia in postwar era.

Analogy between Adaptation and literary Work:

Pasolini's approach to demonstrate his poetical existentialism concentrates essentially on his visual communication with literary work. His methodological organization of his scenarios exteriorizes the overtones of sexual and mythological discourses. For instance, the ending of the play recurs twice in the final sequence of Pasolini's films. This iterative order of image should be seen as the different text in terms of its ideological and stylistic reflection. In fact, Pasolini established the new visual code to visualize the verbal signification of mythology. It is worth pointing out that his barbaric mise-en scene and visual style of the beginning of the film were particularly formulated for the opening sequence which only existed in adaptation and did not include in Europides' play. The sacrificial ceremony of male human body, Jason's childhood and adolescence and Medea's slaughtering her brother appear to be added to the play in order to convey the director's worldview.

Film Analysis & Evaluation:

Medea is perhaps Pasolini's the most uncommon artistic work with complexity of elements of cinematic language. In terms of utilizing the natural landscapes, representing the mythological iconic images and creating the stylistic visual codes, the film offers us the abstractive and the dialectic characterization of crude and raw realism. As Antonio Costa asserts Pasolini's point of view in his article:

"Even in the most ostentatiously narrative cinema, Pasolini claims, the basic elements are always irrational, dreamlike, elementary and barbaric (meaning, in Pasolini's terms; potentially poetic, although they may have been 'held below the level of consciousness' and 'exploited as a means for unconscious manipulation and persuasion'" (Costa, 36).

Indeed, in order to understand the characters' perception in Pasolini works, it is required to use a mechanism to discern the poetic elements of cinematic language as Costa continues to observe the model:

"Such a model, according to Pasolini, consists of 'free indirect speech' which, extensively studied in relation to literature, would find its cinematic equivalent in what he calls the 'free indirect subject' mode of narration and which would have the advantage of being a linguistic as well as a stylistic fact" (Costa, 36).

In other words, Pasolini as the cinematic author uses the pre-textual use of that mechanism or model to express his own formalist and aesthetic world view. In terms of editing and expressing the cruelty of her revenge in Medea, the juxtaposition of images occurs through the same model of free indirect subject mode of narration. In that model, an apparently third-person narrator speaks from the point of view of one of the characters as evidence to his state of mind while it helps to create the metaphorical hypothesis for representing the cruel reality.

Medea's cultural alienation in Jason's territory and her psychoanalytical response to male dominated world overshadows the repressed political concept of being exploited (Medea's territory) by a militaristic source of power (Jason's army and his uncle's kingdom).

Intertextually, Pasolini fascinated with Renaissance paintings, Baroque music, Eastern-African songs and middle age architecture brings the sense of barbarian element to the mise-en scene with imposing the minimalism and simplicity to the presentation of landscapes, costumes and songs. Pasolini as modern storyteller was passionate to transcript the literary texts to the fully appropriate cinematic language. He was writer and poet in the world of literature and as a director could capture the poetic and abstractive visual elements. Finally, he detach himself as the artist from his social class to obtain the maxim capability of approaching to the reality. In Medea, he reduces the artificiality of the scenes in King's palace and sympathizes with the lower class of society by visualizing the traditional ceremonies and the claustrophobic architecture of higher class of society. At the end, he succeeds to response to the abstractive concepts of his adaptation  by using his poetic documentary style.

Costa, Antonio. The Semiological Heresy of Pier Paolo Pasolini, in Paul Willeman, ed. Pier Paolo Pasolini, London: British Film Institute, 1977.


Euripides. Medea, Translated by Diane Arnson Svarlien. Indianapolis: Hacket, 2008.


By: Morad Sadeghi