Medea

The centaur's sermon, with its mythological semantics ("Everything is holy, but holiness is a malediction") and 7th Voyage of Sinbad illusionism, states the style. How does one film Euripides? Turkey and Syria stand for Greece, with telling contributions from Pisa and Cinecittà—mountains like mammoth anthills, caves like Byzantine cathedrals, intense natural lighting bathing it all in resplendent orange. A loinclothed youth is led smiling to the sacrificial rack, the villagers eagerly scoop up his blood in bowls and fertilize the earth. It might be a pagan idyll, or a spaghetti Western. "All apparitions." Jason (Giuseppe Gentile) is a beefcake athlete and Medea (Maria Callas) a bejeweled sorceress out of Piero della Francesca, they meet during the journey for the Golden Fleece, a tattered rag hurled at the usurper's feet. The primitive and the intellectual like gladiators in Pier Paolo Pasolini's sun-blasted arena, reveling in the contrast between the absolute realism of the landscape and the heightened tremors of the visiting-alien leading lady. Dubbing strips Callas of her voice, but her physical grandeur still towers: Mane sweeping and eyes flashing from under a tangled mass of medallions, earrings and necklaces, she gives the camera visual aria after visual aria. Elsewhere in Corinth, Glauce (Margareth Clémenti) and King Creon (Massimo Girotti) are patently a novice caught in the headlights and a graying matinee idol, catnip to a banished witch. "My revenge shall be splendid." Pasolini's tableaux are stark, abstruse, elemental, characters die, are revived and die again as the tale breaks down into jagged, malleable narrative blocks. The diva saves the incendiary culmination for herself, the cry of despair ("Niente è possibile ormai!") is answered by The Trilogy of Life. With Laurent Terzieff, Gerard Weiss, Paul Jabara, Luigi Barbini, and Sergio Tramonti.