Papers by Cecilia Cerrini
Oedipus is, par excellence, the man who embodies the conflict between irrational human impulses a... more Oedipus is, par excellence, the man who embodies the conflict between irrational human impulses and man’s necessity to understand his inner nature while Jocasta incorporates the feminine Eros, the pure sensuality which rejects the rational human drive to know (cf. Oed. Tyr. v. 1068, “ὦ δύσποτμ᾽, εἴθε μήποτε γνοίης ὃς εἶ.”). The Medea represents the collision of two incompatible cultures: Medea belongs to a primitive world, regulated by natural rhythms, whose inhabitants celebrate the holiness in everything (to quote Pasolini’s Centaur) by practicing magical rites. Jason is instead characterised by the pragmatism typical of the modern man, who has lost the perception of sacredness. Pasolini in his Medea skilfully depicts the antithesis which will bring the tragedy to its final conclusion. On the other hand, the figures of the Eumenides in the Appunti symbolically bring together the values of an archaic society with the new, rational principles which lay the foundations for a democratic polis. This fusion wants to maintain, alongside the new elements instituted by the goddess of reason, the ancestral ones represented by the Furies; but the one who wins the trial is Orestes, whose defender is Apollo, the symbol of that Apollonian influence identified by Nietzsche in his masterpiece The Birth of Tragedy (1872) as the counterbalance of the Dionysiac force. We can argue that Pasolini summarises in the Appunti all the polarities he had tried to represent in the Edipo and in the Medea, finally realising that their coexistence is not possible in the real world.
The aim of this paper is to analyse the Pasolinian representations of these splendid Greek plays: in particular, we will emphasise the originality of Pasolini’s angle of interpretation, comparing his versions with Sophocles’, Euripides’ and Aeschylus’ models.
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Papers by Cecilia Cerrini
The aim of this paper is to analyse the Pasolinian representations of these splendid Greek plays: in particular, we will emphasise the originality of Pasolini’s angle of interpretation, comparing his versions with Sophocles’, Euripides’ and Aeschylus’ models.
The aim of this paper is to analyse the Pasolinian representations of these splendid Greek plays: in particular, we will emphasise the originality of Pasolini’s angle of interpretation, comparing his versions with Sophocles’, Euripides’ and Aeschylus’ models.