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Medea
“There’s the heat of the sun high, in a May sky, there’s the haze, of humidity or my sleepless eyes, see now as if submerged, underwater, I understand, nothing, not the time of day, not the names of towns.”
Pasolini; poet, communist, when distinguishing oneself at the time he did, would now parallel asserting terrorism, and ultimately a conjectured martyr; no wonder he appropriated the tale of Medea.
In Corinth, Jason abandoned Medea for King Creon’s daughter, Glauce. Medea took her revenge by sending Glauce a dress and golden coronet, drenched in poison. The result was the death of both Glauce and The King, when he went to save Medea. According to the tragic poet Euripides, Medea continued her revenge, murdering her two children by Jason. So the story goes …
Ennio Guarnieri’s cinematography is a deluge of visuals solely celluloid deliverable with style making this Pasolini’s most retinatically emotive. Guarnieri assisted behind the lens in “La Dolce Vita” and later graduated to De Sica’s 1971 Oscar recipient “The Garden of the Finzi-Continis”. Nino Baragli cut and spliced through over 200 pictures and held the reins for all of Pasolini’s silver screen epics. Baragli worked the “Man with No Name” trilogy etching a visual literacy which certainly affected the painfully missed Sally Menke. The two aforementioned Roman paeans created an imagery symphony with literacy ancient as Greek mythology, disjointed in juxtaposition and precisely littered with musical stabs and swells. As Medea subscribed to no boundaries of passion and lust, Pasolini flavours the picture with the same disregard for rules that I believe must be learned; to know how to break them properly. Through time and space, Medea’s insanity travels within her thoughts which are read in her austerely pained eyes, with Baragli and Guarnieri propelling us around an enchanted haunted castle of devastation and voracious revenge.
Pier collaborated with Elsa Morante for the audio haunt of a score, Pasolini’s own poetry about sound is as reads: “Your music, oleander and mosquito, muted in May. I would lose the latter part of that duet. Ah, but what is it if, it cannot pierce, if it cannot get under your skin? I hear him whispering, ‘Such music’s emasculated.”
My sister and I viewed the picture and as she endured the harrowing soundscape I only temporarily stop believing in Pier’s musical brushstrokes, a force parallel to the painted skies of the Sonora desert sunsets. I breathed faith and trust into this master, refusing to choose suffering as a result of the pain he created with noise. He took my hand as we Manhattan Shuffled through the streets of love of the soul of art, unconditionally. He hurt me at a point, but as the picture ceased with a slam I forgave his temper and faced everything and rejoiced. I did not forget my dying king! He affected my soul and I faded into his love of the real world, not the illusion most choose to call life. The credits rolled and I moved 871 miles away back to this reality, stepped away from the bliss of our time together and prayed to a God I do not believe in someday we will meet again.

~> written under extreme duress by david JOSEPH DEL GRANDE