Medea: Tropism of a Transplanted Race
by
Molly Haskell


Maria Callas in Pasolini's Medea - "not an individual woman . . .
but the quintessence of a primeval civilization
. . . emblazoned across the film like a medallion."

Medea is Pasolini's interesting if not entirely successful attempt to get into the freer and more animalistic skin of prehistoric man. Roughly half of Pasolini's version, written by himself, takes place before Euripides' tragedy begins, elaborating on such formative influences as the young Jason's tutelage at the hands (or rather hoofs) of a centaur, and the bloody and barbaric civilization of Colchis in which the sorceress Medea was raised. Unlike Euripides, Pasolini is not concerned with the evolution of Medea's passion, or with seeing Athenian society through her eyes, but in a bold and characteristically Marxist interpretation, with Jason and Medea as products of their conflicting environments, engaged in the struggle between a rapacious, man-oriented civilization and a primitive, pantheistic one. Ironically, whereas Euripides was "modern" and psychological, Pasolini is atavistic in his insistence on the physical.

In reconstructing the world of Colchis, with its cave dwellings in tiers of stone, its ritual of human sacrifice, dismemberment, and "re-cycling of limbs and organs," its magic and incantations, Pasolini attempts to recapture a sense of the strangeness and wholeness of nature before it was called "natural." The world of Colchis is not so much prehistoric as preconceptual, its houses and vegetation and animals and human beings forming an unbroken chain of life and death.

A link in this chain and its crowning glory is Medea. To the role Maria Callas brings the magnificence not of an actress seeking modulation and motivation, but of an image, emblazoned across the film like a medallion. For Pasolini, Medea is not an individual woman with inner conflicts and complexes, but the quintessence of a primeval civilization which, even as she betrays and abandons it, hacking her own brother to pieces to delay the pursuers, she most clearly embodies, and which clings to her tragically in her new home.

Pasolini uses striking architectural and musical contrasts to set off the alienation of Medea, a story - to borrow a phrase of the centaur - "full of deeds and not of thoughts." Even her imaginings become concrete images, as, in the film's most exciting sequence, she plans the murder of her rival with the poisoned cloak and crown.

In her initial attraction to Jason, Medea is beguiled not, as Euripides suggested, by words, but by his flesh. In their final confrontation over the flames, he himself accuses her, in so many words, of treating him as a love object. I use the term advisedly because, although Pasolini means to make us feel something more than merely the desire of a woman for a man - something vaster and deeper, like the tropism of a transplanted race - when Maria Callas gazes at the Olympic limbs of Giuseppi Gentile, we see him, inevitably, as a love object. This arises partly because the image of sensuality on the screen obliterates subtler meanings. But it is a problem inherent in the kind f interpretation Pasolini attempts - i.e., the intellectual trying to inhabit the primitive sensibility. As he himself realizes, the very faculty that enables us to appreciate and long for early, undifferentiated experience is the distance that divides us from it, the river of no return.

There is a haunting moment when Medea arrives in Greece and searches desperately for a holy tree like some in Colchis. She must suddenly recognize, like a child discovering his separateness from people and objects, that the trees are not an extension of herself but have a place and time of their own. Just as with the loss of innocence we really discover it, with the loss of her tree Medea comes to know its beauty.

From Film 71/72: An Anthology by the National Society of Film Critics, edited by David Denby (New York: Simon and Schuster).