There are – among others, to be sure – three fascinating things in Pasolini’s Medea, which I recommend you to watch here before reading this post.
First, a necessary distinction between meaning and sense. Inevitably, one wanders about the specific meaning of certain issues: which are the phases of the human sacrifice offered in Colchis, how is the victim selected, etc.? But the sense is overall clear: the sacrifice is performed as an offering to the earth’s life, the life common to all, which stands above any particular human life. Pasolini’s reluctance to submit the narrative to the communication of meaning is a very intelligent option: the tragedy is not retold or represented – which would be the point of it, if we have Euripides to (re)read him?; instead, its key educational and philosophical lines are both explored and stressed.
Secondly, Pasolini’s exploration is deprived of linear narrative, or, better, not imprisoned in it. Thus, for example, Glauce’s (Medea’s rival) death is filmed twice without obviously happening twice, first as a curse that triggers an inner event (Medea’s bewitched robe provokes Glauce’s delirium), then as the external event that corresponds to it (Glauce suicides), so as to underline the two natures of a single event. As for Jason’s vision of his two fathers, coexisting one next to the other even if they never did (they reflect two consecutive images of Jason’s father), it extracts from the tragedy the two voices that the tragedy opposes: the voice of the earth and that of the polis. Hence the faces of the prism do not only connect to one another, they also reflect one another. If this multi-sided reflection constitutes one of Pasolini’s greatest achievements, it also contributes to highlight the philosophical structure of the tragedy, which here and there turns around the number two: two cities, in fact two incompatible worlds, the different role women have or do no longer have in them, Medea and her brother, Medea’s two children, Jason and his two fathers, Glauce’s two deaths. Whatever the tragedy wants to tell us, it is linked to this recurrent arithmetics.
Lastly, Pasolini, as usual, diminishes the distance between myth (or legend) and ordinary life, without downplaying any of the two, however: the story does not look as if it had been carefully planned in a big studio, which would make it lose freshness and truthfulness; yet the myth is there, all powerful, nurturing the tragedy. And, as usual too, he allows a good deal of spontaneity in the selection and the performance of the actors.
The result, hence, is mesmerising.
Maria Callas in Pasolini’s Medea (1969)