“It’s useless, it’s useless, the abyss into which you’re pushing me is in you”—the Sphinx
Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Oedipus (Edipo Re/1967) was the first in a series of films he characterized as “cruel ritualism” (followed by Teorema in 1968 and Porcile and Medea in 1969). Described as a “series of events that explodes in sounds and violence,” Pasolini relies on the familiarity of the myth to carry the viewer through dizzying atemporal and ahistorical shifts, metamorphoses and ellipses achieved through abrupt cuts: the Oedipus of Greek legend is born in 1930’s Fascist Italy; another cut, without transition, takes us from Thebes to Pasolini’s present-day Bologna; a father shakes his child awake by his feet, the child is the legend, hand and feet tied to poles, transported out to the desert to die. Oedipus stylized as samurai warrior. Mother and infant in meadow as center of Universe. Desert landscape as “protagonist.” Pasolini called it “the most autobiographical of my films.”
Starring Franco Citti, Silvana Mangano, Alida Valli, Carmelo Bene, Julian Beck, Francesco Leonetti, Ninetto Divoli, Luciano Bartoli, and P.P. Pasolini as “High Priest.”
“Everything concrete is mystical” P.P. Pasolini
“With a whirling, prowling camera that blinks at the sun and gasps and breathes almost in unison with Oedipus, Pasolini … invests his film with a wild, tormented, baroque quality” Marc Gervais
Pasolini’s Oedipus (1967) 110 min.
Tuesday, January 29, 7 pm
Peacock Visual Arts, 21 Castle St.
Presented by the Centre for Modern Thought, University of Aberdeen and Peacock Visual Arts