Medea
Pier Paolo Pasolini · 1969
Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1969 Medea stars Maria Callas in her sole film role, adapting Euripides’ play as an anthropological re-enactment rather than a psychological drama. Shot across Turkey, Syria, and Italy, it uses distinct colour schemes, non-Western music, and ritual pacing to embody three civilisations — Colchis, Iolcus, and Corinth — as competing cosmologies. Callas’s Medea is a force of nature, her infanticide a final assertion of sovereignty over meaning in a world that has abandoned her epistemology.