La transposition filmique de la tragédie chez Pasolini, (Œdipe-Roi, Médée)

Abstract

In his films (Œdipus-Rex, 1967 ; Medea, 1970), Pasolini manifests a hankering after a form of the sacred that includes the tragic dimension, tragedy representing, according to the film maker, the outbreak of the sacred into man's daily life. While Œdipe-rex signals, through the figures of the « African » Sphinx and Tiresias (as interpreted by Julian Beck, the director of the Living Theatre) the emergence of tragedy and the sacred, Medea takes us back to the confrontation of the archaic religious world of the Colchean high-priestess and magician with Jason's rational world. Through the « modern » prologue and epilogue of Œdipus-rex Pasolini, by means of contemporary autobiographical fragments, gives us a meditation on (and an exemplary transposition of) the further developments and personal implications of Sophocles' tragedy. In Medea's prologue and at the beginning of the Corinthian sequence (after the quest for the Golden Fleece), Pasolini presents the twofold aspect of Chiron the Centaur : a figure at once mythical and human, who draws the lessons of the confrontation between the « primitive » societies and the retrograde conversion of Medea the high- priestess and magician on one hand and Jason's pragmatic world on the other. With the human sacrifice in Cholcos which refers us to reconstructed archaic agrarian rites, Pasolini presents a new interpretation in contradistinction with the Euripidian schemata. The interpretation is closely akin to a « poetic cinema » and bears on Absyrte's murder and the infanticide perpetrated by Medea in Corinth, both taking place within a sacred time-space framework. Through rituals centered round such objects as Medea's garb and women's choruses, Pasolini, in this film even more than in Œdipus-rex, presents a baroque filmic opera which is a tentative eulogy of barbarity and the sacred.