Medea (1969)

Medea is an Italian film by Pier Paolo Pasolini from 1969, with opera singer Maria Callas in the role of Medea. For Callas, this is the only film role that she has played. This film is shot on super 8 and 8 mm home movie filmed in the ancient Christian churches of Göreme Open Air Museum. The film was restored and digitized as dvd available at the label Arthaus (Besondere Filme). ==Story[ Edit] == The first half of the movie deals with the story of Jason and the Argonauts who travelling by Medea's barbarisch country looking for the Golden Fleece. Pasolini depicts Medea's people music that will accompany the film off as natives who run the old seasonal rituals and sacrifices to secure their crops and crops. Their costumes and dances are based on those of the Eastern European Mummers such as the Romanian Calusari ceremonies and their counterparts in the Balkans.

A young man is sacrificed as a gruesome human sacrifice and its organs and blood are sprinkled over the crops in a ritual called sparagmos. The victim is tied to a wooden construction and use the villagers not only his body and blood to fertilize the crops but they eat him too on. the young man was offered as a replacement for his brotherAbsyrtus, who is struck with the whip by the priests of the tribe at the same time so that his suffering is parallel to that of the chosen Royal scapegoat.

Meanwhile, Jason and his companions arrived in the village and plunder the local population. Medea awakens her brother Absyrtus to help her in stealing the Golden Fleece, which they will then to Jason. The Argonauts hastily depart from Colchis with Medea's father in the pursuit. When the colchians begin to embed them, kill Medea her brother and cuts him into pieces, in a similar way by the sparagmos ritual earlier. The colchians are forced to stop and to find the scattered pieces of Apsyrtus, making Jason and Medea to escape.

When they returned to Jason's homeland as husband and wife, Medea is stripped of her ornate barbarian garb and dressed in the costumes of the traditional Greek housewife. The film follows from this point generally the plot of the play by Euripides, although the chronology of the events be interpreted freely and one engrossed in the human motivations and intentions.

Jason has two sons obtained from Medea, but he decides to break up with her to get into a more lucrative and culturally acceptable marriage to steps with the Corinthian Princess Glauce. Furious at his betrayal Jason and Medea plots revenge against his new bride and sends Glauce a robe Bewitched with magic herbs.

Pasolini introduces here two versions of the story about the destruction of Glauce and her father. The first version is the most traditional story according to legend and is a possible vision of how Medea Glauce wants to let it die. When the latter attracts the robe, barrel heat and she is burned alive along with her father Creon who unsuccessfully tries to extinguish the flames.

The second version looks at the position from Glauce who, like Medea, to a pawn has grown in a patriarchal society. The dress that she wears is in a fact what Medea wore when she served as high Priestess. Glauce, which looks at himself in the mirror, weep-maybe because she begins to realise what Medea has lost-and out of shared grief she runs to the side of the Castle and she jumps her death, followed by her father who life without his daughter can't handle. Her suicide may also be due to the fascination of the gifts, although it is not specified.

Then Medea kills her own sons, obtained from Jason, and cross their House on fire, and refuses to give the bodies of her sons to Jason for the funeral. Instead, they burn them while they live and says to him that she and her two sons will be reincarnated and there will take revenge on him. ==Division Of Roles[ Edit] ==
 * Maria Callas - Medea
 * Massimo Girotti - Creon (King of Korinthos)
 * Laurent Terzieff - Chiron the centaur
 * Giuseppe Gentile - Jason
 * Margareth Clémenti - Glauce
 * Paul Jabara - Pelias