Medea · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Maria Callas walks across volcanic rock in felt, leather and beaten metal, and says nothing. She goes on saying nothing for a long time. In 1969 that was the joke played on the audience: the century's most famous voice, hired for her only film, given almost no words and nothing to sing. The publicity sold the abandoned woman playing the abandoned woman — Callas had just been left by Onassis for Jacqueline Kennedy, and the European press could not let it alone. What opened at the end of that year was a nearly wordless film about Bronze Age fertility ritual in which the star mostly watches, walks, and stands still.

The gap between the ticket sold and the film delivered is not a marketing accident. It is the method, and it goes all the way down.

Pasolini kept Euripides' story and threw out his text: the great speeches, and, more strangely, the chorus. He also inverted the play's architecture. Euripides opens in Corinth after the betrayal and leaves Colchis as backstory; Pasolini spends his first half in Colchis, on Jason's education by the Centaur, the theft of the Fleece, Medea's murder of her own brother. So by the time the betrayal comes we have seen what she is. Not a wife with a grievance. The last functioning member of a sacred civilization, standing inside a city that runs on advantage and exchange, where the Fleece is worth money rather than power.

Gilles Deleuze's two books on cinema are useful here for one reason above all: he built a vocabulary for films in which acting on the world fixes nothing. Medea is such a film even though it ends in slaughter. The old grammar of movies is a circuit — a character sees a situation and acts to change it, and the act resolves the situation. Deleuze called that circuit sensory-motor, and his name for the figure who no longer completes it, who can only look and endure, is the seer, the voyant. Pasolini keeps the outward shape of tragedy and removes the engine. No deliberation scene. No soliloquy weighing the deed. Almost no causal explanation; the film advances in juxtaposed blocks — ritual, voyage, exile, vision, act. And when Medea finally kills, nothing is restored and nothing is solved. The infanticide is performed correctly, the way a rite is performed, by the only person left who still knows how.

Which makes the missing chorus the sharpest cut Pasolini made. In Greek tragedy the chorus is the people: the body that receives the act, argues with it, converts it into public meaning. Delete it and the act drops into silence. Deleuze, borrowing a line from Paul Klee, said that modern political cinema begins from the discovery that the people are missing — not that the poor or the colonized have vanished, but that a collective who could hear a story and recognize itself in it can no longer be assumed, so a filmmaker has to invent one or film the hole where it was. Pasolini films the hole. Colchis, by his own account, is not the past at all; it is the Third World and the Italian peasant world being erased while he shot. Medea is the last speaker of a language nobody around her understands, and there is no chorus left to translate.

Then the boldest thing in the film. Glauce and Creon die twice. In the first version the poisoned robe works as magic and consumes them in fire. In the second the same events replay with no supernatural agency whatever: Glauce, overwhelmed, throws herself from the wall, and Creon follows. Neither is flagged as dream, memory, lie or vision. The film sets both down and walks away. Cinema's working contract is that what you see happened — even a flashback gets filed as true-in-the-past. Deleuze called the alternative the powers of the false, and the precise technique here is falsifying narration: mutually exclusive versions presented as equally true, with no authority left to arbitrate. That sounds like a puzzle-film trick. It's the opposite. To decide would be to lose. Rule for magic and the film becomes fantasy; rule for psychology and you have adopted Corinth's account, the rational disenchanted one that has already destroyed Medea's world. Magic and psychology are two languages describing one event, and refusing to say which language the world is written in is the argument.

The same refusal makes the film's oddest scene land. The Centaur who raised Jason is doubled too: the mythic hybrid, made with a horse-body prosthetic shot in profile at a distance, the seam plainly left visible, and a fully human man who speaks to the adult Jason. Eventually the two stand in one frame. The human one explains that the sacred one was never replaced. He is still there, alongside, unconsulted. Deleuze's term for contradictory presents that coexist without cancelling each other is peaks of present. Elsewhere it produces puzzles about perception. Here it produces a thesis about history you can look at: the archaic did not end, it was demoted.

Now watch the faces. Ennio Guarnieri shoots Callas frontally, flat to the lens, the space behind her refused rather than established, and Nino Baragli cuts without matching eyelines, so no face is anchored anywhere. The debt is exact — Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), the film Deleuze reaches for most often to explain the affection-image, the close-up holding a feeling that never discharges into action. Its finest form is the qualisign: an immobile reflecting face expressing one quality rather than a psychology. Callas offers no operatic gesture and no projection, only stillness, weight and the eyes; a presence that is monumental at the start and visibly hollowed out by the end. Against that stillness Pasolini sets the zoom, which he uses instead of cutting to travel from landscape to face, or from a face to the crowd behind it. You feel the lens choose. That felt choosing is what he had theorized in 'Il cinema di poesia' (1965): poetic cinema makes the camera's own perception felt instead of transparent, fusing the author's vision with the character's. Deleuze took the idea — free indirect discourse — from Pasolini and used it for much of his account of modern cinema. It is rare for a director's theory to become a philosopher's tool, rarer for the film to demonstrate it this nakedly. The intrusive zoom here is documentary reflex, carried over intact from the ethnographic looking he had tested on Indian ritual the year before, made visible as an author's attention.

The sound is built the same way. There is no composed score. Pasolini lays in field recordings of traditional and liturgical music from outside the Western tradition, in blocks against wind and footsteps, with no source anywhere in the frame. Italian films of the period were post-synchronized as a matter of course; he takes the constraint as a freedom and builds the entire audio track as a separate country. Deleuze's word for this is heautonomy: image and sound each a whole in its own right, communicating only across the gap between them. The music never tells you how to feel. It tells you which civilization you are standing in. When it erupts, we are in the sacred; when it withdraws into wind, we are in Corinth.

Bodies carry the duration. Staging is processional, groups moving in lines across ground. The Colchian fertility sacrifice — a young man bound, killed, dismembered, his blood and body scattered over the fields — runs at the length of the ceremony itself, with a flat literalism drawn from ethnographic accounts of vegetation ritual rather than from any dramatic tradition. Deleuze called this a cinema of the body: posture and attitude holding time where psychology used to explain it. Jason is played by an Olympic triple jumper, an athlete's physique with nothing behind the face, which is exactly the point — his civilization has no sacred, so he has no interior. And when Medea reaches Corinth, stripped of her armour of layered cloth and metal for something plainer and thinner, she cries out that the ground beneath her no longer speaks. Deleuze's any-space-whatever is a space that has stopped working as a setting for action, one whose coordinates have failed. Medea does not lose a husband. She loses the floor.

Every procedure here came from somewhere, and Pasolini names his debts by using them. Rossellini's Stromboli (1950) dropped an imported star into a real fishing ritual filmed at documentary length and let her stand there as a foreign body: the template for Callas in Colchis. Jean Rouch's Les maîtres fous (1955) filmed a possession rite in continuous duration and laid a rebuilt sound track over mute images; Pasolini imports both moves into fiction. The Gospel According to St Matthew (1964) had already established the kit — real sites cast as the ancient Levant, non-professionals chosen for their faces, pre-Renaissance frontality, borrowed non-Western music used as found sacred sound. Edipo Re (1967) was the immediate prototype, and Medea pushes its no-composer principle to the limit. Forward, the lines are just as concrete: this was Dante Ferretti's first film with Pasolini and the start of a career running through Salò to Fellini, Gilliam and Scorsese, and it left a strain of Italian cinema — Frammartino, Rohrwacher, Marcello — that approaches myth through landscape, ritual and untrained bodies instead of plot.

What did it do to the art? It showed that a fiction could be assembled entirely out of documentary procedure without becoming a documentary, and that anachronism could be a method rather than a mistake: 'Greece' built from the medieval walls of Aleppo and the Romanesque of Pisa, so the classical world arrives with none of its neoclassical furniture and becomes strange again. It failed commercially and sat undervalued for twenty years beside Teorema, which mostly tells you that a film refusing to arbitrate hands reviewers nothing to carry out of the cinema.

Watch it once for Callas's face. Watch it again for the sound, and notice how exactly the music tells you which world the frame belongs to. Then take the question the film leaves lying there: both deaths of Glauce are on screen, and only one of them can have happened. What kind of world would you have to be living in for the other one to be false?