Word: medea
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...Saint Matthew. He makes no attempt to explain why such things came about, but merely how they must have happened--and how they appear to the participants, not to a modern audience. Taking Christ's life, he worked with Romans and peasants, shepherds and carpenters. With the story of Medea, he must deal with centaurs and magic and frequent killings...
...Medea comes from Colchis and is something of a sorceress. In Corinth, she loses her powers although it is never quite clear exactly what they were. In the same way the Golden Fleece loses its meaning, as Jason ruefully admits to King Creon when he presents it to him. The earthly, naturalistic life in Colchis with its many bloody rituals is contrasted to the more civilized life of Corinth, where people live in houses and walk on tended lawns. Medea, more pagan than Jason, misses her old life, and Jason, who neglects her, is little comfort. Using what little magic...
...bowl of a sacrificed victim's blood--a documentary made by time-traveling anthropologists. Magic has its place in this society, but the common people are close to the land, to nature. The landscapes--mountains and deserts, blazing skies, sun-baked cliffs riddled with cave-dwellings--surround Medea until she returns with Jason to Corinth. Much time is spent in movement across the countryside--walking, sitting in horsecarts, pacing and filing in ritual order. The omnipresence of the land, and later, Medea's enclosure in palaces, rooms, buildings, gives much more of a feeling for the actual circumstances...
...conflicting characters of Jason and Medea provide the same interplay between real and fabulous. Medea, leaving her homeland with her new lower Jason, purposefully kills her brother and cuts him into pieces. These she carefully deposits in the path of her pursuing father, who must pause to pick up each bit and prepare it for burial. Thus she escapes with the eminently human Jason, a healthy young man who beds Medea with a cheeky grin at the camera...
With hardly a word Maria Callas conveys the extremes of Medea's superhuman passions--her obsession, turning to jealousy, for Jason; her tender love for her children; and the cold cruelty of revenge and finality with which she kills her two sons. She does not act but rather moves with naturalness, with complete assurance and belief in herself...