A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Wednesday, July 24, 2024

Medea (Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1969)


Cast: Maria Callas, Massimo Girotti, Lauren Terzieff, Giuseppe Gentile, Margareth Clémenti, Paul Jabara. Screenplay: Pier Paolo Pasolini, based on a play by Euripedes. Cinematography: Ennio Guarnieri. Production design: Dante Ferretti. Costume design: Piero Tosi. Film editing: Nino Baragli.

Pier Paolo Pasolini's retelling of the story of Medea is a challenge to anyone who doesn't already know the story: Pasolini is not interested in conventional movie storytelling, so the film feels shapeless, lurching through some scenes and lingering through others until it ends almost abruptly. What he's interested in is crafting a vision of antiquity, of the age from which the myths and legends came, that's primitive and tribal, not at all the graceful world of marble gods and goddesses we've come to associate with ancient Greece. This is a world in which people scrabble for survival in bleak desert settings, filmed in Turkey and Syria. In Pasolini's film, the Argo, the ship that brings Jason and the Argonauts to Colchis in search of the Golden Fleece,  is a cobbled-together raft. The fleece itself is a somewhat ratty-looking ram's head with gilded horns. It's not exactly a film in which you'd expect to find a diva like Maria Callas, and yet her out-of-placeness somehow fits the character of Medea, a woman who would rise above almost any setting only to be dragged down by it.