Cinematographic Aesthetics as Subversion of Moral Reason in Pasolini’s Medea

As the film theorist Janet L. Borgerson claims, there is something awry in our historical memory of Medea. This is precisely the point of departure for Pasolini’s film: he does not create an opposition between the world of patriarchal reason, embodied by Jason, and the matriarchal, irrational, archaic, and magical world personified by Medea. On the contrary, he shows that this opposition is itself the product of a historical conception. The ICI Berlin Repository is a multi-disciplinary open access archive for the dissemination of scientific research documents related to the ICI Berlin, whether they are originally published by ICI Berlin or elsewhere. Unless noted otherwise, the documents are made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.o International License, which means that you are free to share and adapt the material, provided you give appropriate credit, indicate any changes, and distribute under the same license. See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/ for further details. In particular, you should indicate all the information contained in the cite-as section above. 255 A E S T H E T I C S A S S U B V E R S I O N CINEMATOGRAPHIC AESTHETICS AS SUBVERSION OF MORAL REASON

As the film theorist Janet L. Borgerson claims, there is something awry in our historical memory of Medea. 4 This is precisely the point of departure for Pasolini's film: he does not create an opposition between the world of patriarchal reason, embodied by Jason, and the matriarchal, irrational, archaic, and magical world personified by Medea. On the contrary, he shows that this opposition, like the desire for a passionate, irrational, and primitively vital Medea, is itself the product of a historical conception which, from the Age of Reason onward, has associated the emergence from self-incurred tutelage with the rationalization of sensuality and sexuality. Over the course of the nineteenth century, the female body was hystericized and medicalized. As Foucault has vividly shown, female hysterics became objects of study of psychiatry and of the emerging scientia sexualis. Along with the sexually perverse, who were declared a separate species, they become part of an entire 'sub-race race'. 5

A N U N F O U N D E D F E A R
Pasolini's Medea betrays her native village and her origins; she dismembers her brother, kills Jason's new bride, stabs both of her children, sets her house on fire, and deprives Jason of their children's corpses. The disturbing nature of the film, however, does not derive from these actions. Rather, it is related to the fact that one does not easily cast moral judgement on Medea on the basis of these actions, and that the audience is left in a state of indifference or suspense. It therefore becomes difficult to project Medea back into the realm of prehistory or into the circle of hysterical, irrational, and mad women and perverts.
Pasolini and Callas create a Medea whom we not only comprehend but who leads us to believe that her children are better off as dead corpses fleeing with their mother in her chariot than remaining with their father in Corinth. Indeed, the children are consecrated to death well before Medea's final act. The children's murder is preceded by a scene in which Creon, king of Corinth and father of Glauce, Jason's young bride, seeks out Medea in order to ban her from the town along with her sons. Creon denies Medea and her sons the right of residence even though, as he claims, he has nothing to hold against her. The reason is fear. As Creon also concedes, he fears for his daughter, and he fears the power of Medea's pain. He fears that his daughter might become infected and commit suicide. It is this -unfounded -fear that leads Creon to confer magical powers on Medea and that causes him to become partly responsible for the death of his daughter and of Medea and Jason's sons.
In Medea's moment of greatest vulnerability and weakness, when she realizes that Jason has definitely left her in order to marry Creon's daughter Glauce, she is addressed by one of her maids: ANCELLA Signora, perché hai deciso di rassegnarti così? MEDEA Che cosa dovrei fare. ANCELLA Dicono … MEDEA Che cosa dicono? ANCELLA Che tu, nel tuo paese, se volevi … potevi compiere prodigi … dominare l'aria, il fuoco. Almeno così dice la gente qui a Corinto, e ha paura di te. MEDEA Ha paura? ANCELLA Sì, come di una maga … The maid claims to have said all this only to help her mistress and to encourage her to do works of magic again, in order to take her fate into her own hands. At first Medea declines, claiming that she is no longer the same person after ten years spent in exile, but then she recollects herself: '[…] Forse hai ragione. Sono restata quella che ero. Un vaso pieno di un sapere non mio' (1:06:10-1:07:30). 6

E R O S T H A N A T O S
With his film and its cinematographic aesthetics Pasolini subverts not only Medea's projection into the prehistorical world, i.e., the world of madmen and perverts, but also the belief in the validity of a moral rationality, as exemplarily elaborated and argued for by Immanuel Kant in his Critique of Practical Reason. Pasolini reproaches the belief in a world of reasons for its incomprehension of that which is without reason -the unfounded, the irrational as well as the a-rational. Pasolini thereby conceptually builds upon Nietzsche's artistic-philosophical transfiguration of Dionysus. As he writes in an open letter to Silvana Mangano in 1968: Egli [Dioniso] è venuto in forma umana a Tebe per portare amore (ma mica quello sentimentale e benedetto dalle convenzioni!) e invece porta il dissesto e la carneficina. Egli è l'irrazionalità che cangia, insensibilmente e nella più suprema indifferenza, dalla dolcezza all'orrore. Attraverso essa non c'è soluzione di continuità tra Dio e il Diavolo, tra il bene e il male (Dioniso si trasforma, appunto, insensibilmente e nella più suprema indifferenza, dal giovane pieno di grazia che era al suo primo apparire in un giovane amorale e criminale). Sia come apparizione 'benigna' che come apparizione 'maledetta', la società, fondata sulla ragione e sul buon senso -che sono il contrario di Dioniso, cioè dell'irrazionalità -non lo comprende. Ma è la sua stessa incomprensione di questa irrazionalità che lo porta irrazionalmente alla rovina (alla più orrenda carneficina mai descritta in un'opera d'arte). 7 Pasolini could also have referred to Walter Benjamin, who developed his critique of Kant's rationally founded morality by highlighting Kant's odd interpretation of marriage and treatment of sexuality. In his widely discussed fragment entitled 'On the Programme of the Coming Philosophy' in 1917- 18 Benjamin reproached Kant with failing to find a valid answer to the question of the dignity of an experience that is ephemeral. 8 In his essay on Goethe's Elective Affinities (1924-25), Benjamin draws on his earlier critique of the Kantian notion of experience and links ephemeral experience with the experience of the fateful collapse of love between Ottilie and Eduard, which ends in death. As Benjamin elucidates with the 'dark conclusion of love' vividly described in Goethe's novel, the idea of self-legislation reaches its limits with ephemeral experience. When love is measured according to Kant's definition of marriage as 'the union of two persons of different sexes for the purpose of lifelong mutual possession of their sexual organs', 9 it must appear as 'naked foundering' rather than as 'true ransoming of the deepest imperfection which belongs to the nature of man himself', 10 as Benjamin motivates his critique of the belief in moral reason. Benjamin concedes that Kant has correctly grasped the subject matter of marriage. However, the moral possibility or indeed the necessity of marriage cannot be deduced from it. From the 'objective nature of marriage', as Benjamin objects to this interpretation of moral reason, one can 'obviously only deduce its depravity'. 11 Benjamin considers the 'dark conclusion' of Ottilie and Eduard's love as a 'ransoming of the deepest imperfection which belongs to the nature of man himself', whereby 'imperfection' is measured against a perfection which only accords with the nature of purely rational beings -angels. Alluding to Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle, which first appeared in 1920, Benjamin ascribes this imperfection to the workings of 'Eros Thanatos'. 12 Even if Benjamin could not at that time have known Freud's 1932 edition of the New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, he would have agreed with Freud's thesis that phenomena of life proceed from the 'concurrent and opposing action of [Eros and Thanatos]' -of the erotic drives that 'always seek to combine more and more living substance into ever greater unities' and of the death drives 'which oppose this effort and lead what is living back into an inorganic state'. 13 And he would have claimed -no less than Pasolini -that the acknowledgment and comprehension of precariousness and of imperfection, of the irrational which, to quote Benjamin once again, 'belongs to the nature of man himself', is the precondition for avoiding violence and destruction.

T H E L A S T T H I N G S
Janet Borgerson has convincingly shown how meticulously Pasolini composed his film, and the precision with which he works with repetitions in this composition. 14 This begins with the very decision to reconstruct ancient Colchis, Medea's home village, in Central Anatoliamore specifically in Cappadocia. As Borgerson argues, this particular geographical detail establishes the cultural specificity to which Pasolini refers. 15 This, in turn, allows us to explain and interpret the rituals staged by Pasolini in the first part of the film.
The film starts with a monologue by Chiron, the centaur to whom Jason was given after his birth. Over the course of the monologue, Jason first appears as a young child, then as a thirteen-year old boy, and finally as a young man. When Jason reaches adolescence, Chiron is transformed from half man and half horse into an attractive, handsome man who now appears as a divine messenger, mediator, and poet. Chiron begins his speech with the confession that he is a liar and that he enjoys telling lies. Then he explains to Jason his true descent and the story of his origins. It is a complicated story, permeated by jealousy and power struggles. As Chiron impresses upon Jason, it is important that nothing in nature is natural, but that everything is holy. As he specifies to the thirteen-year old boy, everything in nature is an appearance and the gods not only love but also hate. And, as he finally reveals to the grown-up Jason, he is not only a liar but perhaps expresses himself too poetically for Jason. He explains this with the fact that for the ancient man all myths and rituals are real experiences and they are grasped in their physical presence. For him, reality is a unity so perfect that the emotion he experiences in the stillness of a summer sky corresponds to the most personal and emotional experience of modern man. Pasolini apparently alludes here to the melancholy mood which, in the passage mentioned at the beginning of this essay, he had so vividly described during the shooting of the film as the experience of nature's indifference, amounting in the end to the world's meaninglessness: È un giorno di festa e di riposo. Ed ecco che dopo tanto sole, le stesse ragioni che rendevano questo giorno ilare, lo rendono angoscioso. Ragioni senza ragione. Forse il primo segmento della curva declinante che il sole fatalmente percorre particolarmente impartecipe in terre straniere. Si comincia allora ad affrontare in modo diretto le cose, come il bambino che in quelle ore piangeva per nevrosi. Intorno c'era l'Appennino, ma, per la verità, il sole aveva questa stessa indifferenza per chi l'implorava. Seguiva la sua strada, ecco tutto. 16 Pasolini here describes the appearance of a world which has stopped speaking to man, a world without myth but also without poetry, a world without meaning in which the last remaining resort is neurosis.
After the short excursus in which Pasolini uses the figure of Chiron to inform the audience of the poetology framing the film -or also to inform the audience that the question of a Poetry of Cinema constitutes a central question of the film -Chiron tells Jason that he has a right to the throne of Pelias in Iolkos, but that he will be given the task of recovering the Golden Fleece. Jason will go to a remote land, where he will find a world which is far from our imaginings. This land is very real, very realistic and therefore very mythical. Through Chiron's speech, Pasolini once more prepares us for what comes next: the rituals which have been created with the development of agriculture, and the discovery that seeds lose their form beneath the earth to be born again. As Chiron explains to Jason, they represent the last things, the resurrection. However, this knowledge is no longer of any use to Jason, because what he sees in the seeds and in their resurrection no longer bears any meaning. This knowledge is, as Chiron says, no more than a distant memory. For, as Chiron concludes, 'in fact there is no god' (8:27).

I N T H E W O R L D O F M E M O R Y A N D D R E A M S
The scene is followed by a jump cut and we are in Cappadocia, Medea's mythical world. We first see two goats, then the image opens up and the camera shows several people from behind and follows them -a man in a bright woollen gown, some women in capes. A rocky landscape. Sacral stones. All is still, no one speaks until the foreign-sounding and deeply penetrating music, which Pasolini had chosen together with Elsa Morante, commences: sacral Japanese music and Iranian love songs. Once again, people walk across the image, followed a short distance by the camera. There is a quick succession of medium long shots, long shots and extremely long shots. We see a scene of animals and men, moving or standing still; they seem to be waiting for something. It all seems like an ethnographical film. The only missing element is the insistent voice-over so characteristic of Jean Rouch's films, which might have served as Pasolini's inspiration here. And perhaps it is also for this reason that everything is dream-like or, to cite Pasolini himself, as if in a 'world of memory and dreams'. 17 From the point of view of cinematographic aesthetics, the scene seems familiar and unknown at the same time, near and temporally distant, surreal because of the music and the absence of speech.
In his 1965 essay 'The Cinema of Poetry', Pasolini introduces the term 'im-sign' (imsegno) in order to distinguish signifying images from the linguistic carriers of meaning, the 'lin-signs' (linsegni). He claims that 'every attempt at memorization is a series of "im-signs", that is, primarily a cinema sequence'. 18 All dreams, he argues, 'are a series of im-signs which have all the characteristics of the filmic sequence: closeups, long shots, etc.' In other words, there is an affinity between dream, cinema and memory which is based on cinematic technique. These are mechanisms which move at the limit of humanity, which for Pasolini means that they are 'pre-grammatical' or 'premorphological' mechanisms. And from this he concludes that 'the linguistic instrument on which cinema is founded', or the series of im-signs is 'of an irrational type', which in turn explains the 'profoundly oniric nature of cinema' as well as 'its absolutely and inevitably […] objective status'. 19 As we can infer from the last sentence, there is not only an affinity between dreams and cinema, but also between cinema and what Pasolini describes as the nature of myth in Medea. On this basis it becomes clear that Pasolini joins Mircea Eliade's description of religious-historical rituals and ico-nographies to the cinema of poetry, operating against a background of philosophy and the aesthetics of film. 20 The linkage between cinematic technique and dream mechanisms -between memory and myth -creates a cinematic and aesthetic basis on which to violate 'the code' (to cite Pasolini himself). 21 In the case of Medea, to violate the code means to displace Medea's historical and cultural memory and thereby to upset the belief in the validity of moral reason.
Medea provides a nearly exemplary illustration of what Deleuze asserts concerning modern film when he writes: 'It is as if, speech having withdrawn from the image to become founding act, the image, for its part, raised the foundations of space, the "strata", those silent powers of before or after speech, before or after man.' 22 As Deleuze shows for modern cinema, and as is exemplified by Medea, the visual image becomes 'archaeological, stratigraphic, tectonic'. Hence it becomes even more important to consider the following claim that Deleuze makes: 'Not that we are taken back to prehistory (there is an archaeology of the present), but to the deserted layers of our time which bury our own phantoms; to the lacunary layers which we juxtaposed according to variable orientations and connections.' 23 Moreover, what Deleuze writes about Pasolini's cinema in rediscovering the lacunary layers in the images of the desert is even more relevant for Medea than for Teorema, Deleuze's primary reference. 'There are the deserts of Pasolini, which make prehistory the abstract poetic element, the "essence" copresent with our history, the archaean base which reveals an interminable history beneath our own.' 24

F E T I S H E S E V E R Y W H E R E
No one looks into the camera, not even the royal couple, who watch the preparations in their artful costumes, or Medea's brother who stands next to them in a blue gown. A procession is formed; a sun wheel woven from grain is worn on top of their heads: fetishes everywhere. The camera then follows the gaze of Medea's brother upon the procession. He lowers his eyes and walks away. The camera stays with him. He goes into the field and sits down, the camera pans over the rocks and after a cut it stops at the body of a young man who is suspended by the arms and clad only in a loincloth. One more step and we see the Callas/Medea portrait for the first time, and the camera follows her glance with a countershot on the victim, who is now shown in a medium shot. People outside are waiting; they are prepared for the ritual, lined up and well equipped. They carry sacral objects, there is a figure reminiscent of the Madonna, and next to it there is grain and a dead rat suspended by its tail. The victim is led out of the caves. He exchanges glances with Medea and with the members of the royal family. The procession starts moving and, despite the fact that these fetishes don't originate in Christianity, it is reminiscent of a Christian procession.
Cappadocia, indeed, was not only home to the Phrygian Cult of Cybele, but was also the place where Saint Paul took refuge and founded one of the first Christian settlements. The first Christians carved more than one thousand churches into the rocks surrounding Goreme, Ihlara and Soganli, places well known for their frescoes and where Pasolini in turn projected Medea's story. Jason appears to Callas/ Medea in one of these churches with well-preserved and easily visible Christian frescoes. In the film, the church represents the sanctuary where the Golden Fleece is kept. Pasolini had already intensely studied the place and its history while conducting research for a film he had planned to shoot about Saint Paul in the mid-1960s. 25 There is a significant shift of focus -a close-up and countershot with distinctly erotic allusions between Medea's brother and the victim. The killing of the victim on a wooden cross, ritually painted all over the body, constitutes one of the film's climaxes. Once again there is a superimposition of Christian imagery and antique sacrificial rituals, recalling the fact that 'the last things' (eschatology) and the resurrection are at the centre of both. The dead body is chopped up: the blood and the individual pieces of flesh are taken to the land and fields where the blood is distributed among the trees, plants and crops, while the flesh itself is buried. The bodily remains are burnt in a fire, whose smoke is also dispersed across the fields. It is only now that Medea utters her first sentence: 'Give life to the seed and be reborn with the seed' ('Da' la vita al seme e rinasci col seme') (21:40). The scene is followed by a lively masked celebration, which is once more strongly influenced by ethnological cinema.

L O V E W I T H O U T T H E B L E S S I N G O F C O N V E N T I O N
The cult of Cybele, which originated in the time of the Phrygians in the 9th century BCE, was still celebrated in the Roman Empire when Paul was evangelizing in Cappadocia. It was a cult of mourning for an obsessive love which neither enjoyed the blessing of convention, to cite Pasolini, nor corresponded to the pragmatism of Kant's definition of marriage. Nor did it conform to the romantic ideal of love opposed to this form of pragmatism. It dealt with a form of love which is focused on bodily desire. More specifically, it is about the female desire for the masculine body, which is realized in the cinematographic visual arrangements of Pasolini's staging of Medea's love for Jason, and which is also thematized in some of the dialogues -for instance when, towards the end of their love, Jason accuses Medea of having based everything she has done for him on her love for his body. In this accusation it becomes clear not only how contorted and outrageous this love is from the perspective of a heteronormative regime, but also how distant Jason is from the uncompromising love which dictates Medea's thought and actions, and which is mourned in the cult of Cybele.
Cybele was first worshipped in Phrygenia and later in Greece and Rome as the Goddess of Earth. Similar to the myth of Demeter with the figure of Baubo, the myth of Cybele also includes the motif of hermaphroditism. Unlike Demeter's companion Baubo, however, Agdistis is not a creature in his own right, but part of the very story of Cybele: he is she in a different temporal stratum. The androgynous Agdistis was seen as frightening and therefore castrated by Dionysus following a ruling of the gods. The emasculated Agdistis was transformed into Cybele, and from Agdistis' severed genitals grew Attis. Cybele and Attis became lovers and everything went well until Attis decided to marry someone else. Cybele avenged herself by striking the entire wedding party, as well as Attis, with madness, whereupon he castrated himself under a pine tree. When Cybele learnt of Attis' death she fell into a profound state of mourning and founded an orgiastic and ecstatic cult of mourning and lamentation which met in March every year.
Pasolini's Medea bears the memory of the myth of Cybele. Her love for Jason is unconditional and this unconditionality is shared by her brother. He not only helps to steal the Fleece but also desires Jason. When returning to Jason and the Argonauts with Medea and the Golden Fleece, he beholds Jason with the same desire as Medea. And of course it is the gaze of Pasolini's camera that merges with the audience's own gaze (59:30).
The cult of Cybele is originally the cult of mourning for an irreversible loss. In Pasolini's Medea, this loss and mourning are omnipresent. They are intensified in the representation of Glauce who, as Pasolini illustrates in an oniric repetition of the scene in which Medea's children hand over their mother's wedding dress to Jason's new bride, glances into a mirror and kills herself in a bout of melancholy. It is not Medea's magical powers which kill Glauce, but, rather, the pain over the loss of an uncompromising love, which in the end is the love of life.
This ancient pain is masterfully represented by Maria Callas in the role of Medea. Her gesture and acting originate in nineteenth-century opera. Hers is a body fallen silent in the midst of song. Her affiliation with such a different medium makes Callas/Medea appear even more extraneous, sublime and distant. Medea is a disturbing film that blurs the boundaries between hysterics, those who are made objects of psychiatry, the sexually perverse, and 'ourselves'. This is why it is an important film and a profound work of art.