Medea

Very interesting & uncompromising take on the myth that thoroughly engages the intellect. At its best, it feels like a poetic reflection on history & myth, the sacred & the natural. It's not a simplistic argument (as I would make it sound) & I love how Pasolini isn't afraid of his emotional baggage, enabling him to express it with full integrity while also taking a step back & being analytical. Dramatically it can seem a bit like a lecture contrived by both theory & sentiment. But Maria Callas!

Pasolini offers a genealogic reading of history there: Iason borns and centaur reminds that "there is nothing natural in nature" which is a very Marxist statement, underlining the antagonisms in nature, just like between Medea's culture and the Corinthian culture. Even the centaur which becomes desacralized contains the reminiscences of the sacred one, which means the history evolves in a dialectical way, a fact overlooked by Iason and Corinthians which prepared their indispensable bitter end.

A hyper-real reconstruction of something that never happened, an ethnographic study of a group of people who never existed. It has potential to be Pasolini's most poetic work, but it runs out of steam.

Alternately fascinating and pretentious film seems to be more about evoking a mood than being anything resembling a straight forward telling of its story, but scenes of great beauty combined with uneasy, sickening scenes of brutality actually works quite well, with a lot of credit going to Callas in a quite mesmerising portrayal of the central character. Overlong, and narratively frustrating, but ultimately worth the journey.

I wasn't so familiar with the classical story of Medea ... and I'm still not. Like PPP's Oedipus Rex, this one has bizarre hats and costumes, including Burrito Monks and Quilted Knights. You definitely have to read between the lines to understand much of this; that isn't helped when scenes are randomly repeated a few times. Unfortunately, it feels like it's just starting to hit its stride when it ends rather suddenly. Very artsy.

Very beautiful, in the booklet I got with the movie it mentions 'seeing first, knowing later' and that really nails it. Lots of visual storytelling which leave you having to figure it out. It is very beautiful yo watch, and all scenes feel very purposeful. Side note, I got this after it was mentioned in Saint Omer, and seeing this after that really helped make sense of both stories. Overall enjoyable although a bit difficult!

The first half hour works hard to show the strangeness as/and violence of Greece (globalised to man as a whole via the locations and music), but the decision to render the infanticide in an intimate way that downplays the act's brutality may have been a mistake, dramatically speaking, although the concluding words of the murderess remain affecting. The audacity of the attempt to reinvent Greek tragedy as cinema is very impressive, but there's a sense that the critique of modernity is incomplete.

revisto em 16 de outubro de 2023

ancient story of medea in pasolini's view.