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 the land of Greece,
takes revenge on his husband, the Jason, for his betrayal to her and his
family. Jason is successfully helped by Medea to earn Golden Fleece to overcome
the powerful and political domination on Creon's court and Athenian Empire. He must
satisfy his ambitions with establishing a new family through the marriage with
the king of Corinth's daughter. Medea, who has been 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 sons at the
end of the play.
Socio-Cultural Analysis:
Hellenistic culture in the Athenian Empire was established and founded on 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 a 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 its 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 was 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 deliberate 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 the 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 Euripides
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 the 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 to overthrow him out of his throne and launch his 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 forces her to objectify Jason
and everybody else as the target of her envious vengeful desire in 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 soundtrack
establish the balances atmosphere with the sense of ritual and traditional
ceremonies. 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' points 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 a specific period of Western History in
which the Marxist theory and sexual liberation were considered the proper
weapons to reject the dominant principles of capitalism and the bourgeois class
of society. The intellectual practices of his period expressed proletarian and
sub-proletarian culture and were capable of participating 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 the 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 images should
be seen as a different text in terms of its ideological and stylistic
reflection. Pasolini established a new visual code to visualize the verbal
signification of mythology. It is worth pointing out that his barbaric mise-en
scene and visual style at the beginning of the film were particularly
formulated for the opening sequence which only existed in adaptation and did
not include in Euripides' play. The sacrificial ceremony of the male human
body, Jason's childhood and adolescence, and Medea's slaughtering of her
brother appear to be added to the play to convey the director's worldview.
Film Analysis & Evaluation:
Medea is perhaps Pasolini's most uncommon artistic work with the complexity
of elements of cinematic language. In terms of utilizing the natural
landscapes, representing the mythological iconic images, and creating stylistic
visual codes, the film offers us the abstractive and 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, to understand the
characters' perception in Pasolini's 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, a third-person narrator speaks
from the point of view of one of the characters as evidence of 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 the 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's fascinating with Renaissance paintings, Baroque
music, Eastern-African songs, and middle age architecture bring a sense of
barbarian element to the mise-en-scene with imposing minimalism and simplicity
to the presentation of landscapes, costumes, and songs. Pasolini as a modern
storyteller was passionate to transcribe 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 detaches himself as the artist from his social class to
obtain the maximum capability of approaching reality. In Medea, he
reduces the artificiality of the scenes in the King's palace and sympathizes
with the lower class of society by visualizing the traditional
ceremonies and the claustrophobic architecture of the higher class of
society. At the end, he succeeds to responding to the abstract 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
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