2024TAF: Oedipus Rex

・Pier Paolo Pasolini | Italy, France, Morocco | 1967 | DCP | Color | 104min | Protected

Predicted to “kill his father and marry his mother” in the future, the newborn Oedipus was abandoned by his father. A shepherd heard the infant crying, saved him out of sympathy, and presented Oedipus to King of Corinth for adoption. After he grew up, Oedipus heard the same prophecy at Apollo’s sanctuary. Under the strong desert sun, the horrifying words ingrained on Oedipus like an irrefutable destiny. The terrified Oedipus decided to run away from his adopted parents. Along the way, Oedipus accidentally killed an old man, who happened to be King of Thebes and his birth father. Later, he defeated Sphinx in Thebes, married his birth mother, and fulfilled the prophecy. A plague started to spread in the city, and people searched for the perpetrator that killed the old king. Eventually, Oedipus knew the truth, blinded himself, and exiled in his destiny.

Pasolini transplanted Greek tragedy Oedipus to the 20th Century (1920s to 1960s), when fascism surged in Italy. He bridged more than 2,000 years in time by interweaving autobiography and epic mythology as a modern-day reference.

Pier Paolo Pasolini 

Pier Paolo Pasolini was born in 1922 in Bologna, Italy. His father was a military officer that passionately supported fascism, while his mother was an anti-totalitarian teacher. Under this familial conflict, his creative works were extreme and authentic. Pasolini also carried multiple identities hard to define, including a poet that made films, a gay that support Marxism, and a pagan that opposed authority. Pasolini was smart from an early age. He started to write poems at seven years old, read serious literature in high school, and published a commentary magazine with friends. During WWII, he and his mother found refuge at his uncle’s home in a small town. His fame began with the first poem collection in dialects. Pasolini wrote screenplays for Le notti di Cabiria and La Dolce Vita by Federico Fellini, and started to make films.

Pasolini used mythologies and classical literature, and innovated with familiar history stories, to express how arbitrary and unattached sex was. From Tetralogy of Myth (Oedipus Rex, Teorema, Pigsty, and Medea) to Trilogy of Life (The Decameron, The Canterbury Tales and Arabian Nights), he often used realistic approaches to recreate vulgar jokes and unethical relationships. In indecency, he discovered the divine truth. In elegance, he saw the omnipresence of filth. Pasolini consistently challenged the pretentious capital class. In the first film of “Trilogy of Death”, Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom, he used unbearable images to announce to rise of capitalism as a new fascism. Pasolini exposed the conspiracy of sex and violence, and described how consumerism and ruling classes hellishly searched for ecstasy at all costs.

He included abundant penises, breasts, feces, blood, and semen to contemplate on physicality. He believed bodies contained all kinds of resistances. When bodies endured pain or delight, all kinds of sorrow and excitement emerged beyond words. Among immorality, blasphemy, ridicule, revelry, sex, violence, and poetics, Pasolini brought divinity out of secularity. Through his works, Pasolini attempted to raise eternal, real, and heretical voices for people at the bottom.