Word: medea
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...MEDEA REQUIRES of the audience not a suspension of disbelief but a suspension of twentieth-century consciousness. It conforms to none of our traditional requirements for a believable plot, lifelike characters, coherent narrative, and psychological motivation. Nor, by all accounts, does it have much to do with the Euripides play on which it is based...
...Medea is instead a powerful evocation of another era, albeit one which probably never existed. The film is prefaced with a centaur recounting to his four-year-old adopted son the true details of his ancestry as the child sits watching him. The centaur talks on, with many references to kings, captures, and so forth. "Do you understand?" he asks. Cutting back to the naked child, we see him gazing into the sky. "Oh well," the centaur continues. "It's a difficult story. It's so full of deeds, not thoughts...
...Medea too is full of event and very little overt thinking. The son, Jason, grows up--in the space of about three cuts--and goes to reclaim the usurped kingdom of Corinth from his uncle, King Creon. The uncle sends him off to Colchis, a land of magic, to win the Golden Fleece, and when Jason returns with it tells him that he doesn't feel like keeping his promise. Jason also brings back with him Medea, a daughter of the king of Colchis...
...Medea, Pasolini directs Maria Callas in her first dramatic role. Orson Welles Cinema...
...little dramatic variety and characterization. The opera focuses on Yerma with such single-mindedness that only an extraordinary singing actress-and such types are rare-could bring it off. Poulenc made the same demand in La Voix Humaine, Jánaček in The Makropulos Case, Cherubini in Medea, Richard Strauss in Salomé and Elektra. All in some degree have paid the price in lack of performances. Yerma needs a soprano who can act like Maria Callas and sing like Leontyne Price. In Santa Fe it had Mirna Lacambra, a young Spanish soprano with a red-velvet voice...