Medea

Medea (1969) is Pier Paolo Pasolini's Italian-French-German mythological drama — stream it online on iFILM. Maria Callas, the opera legend, made her only film appearance here, and Pasolini built the entire picture around the weight of her presence rather than her voice.

This is not the dignified stage version of Euripides. Pasolini's Argonauts are closer to raiders than heroes — men who stole the Golden Fleece and brought back a foreign sorceress no Greek world would ever accept. When Jason (Giuseppe Gentile) abandons Medea for a politically advantageous marriage, her revenge is not grief run amok. It is deliberate, ritualistic, and devastating. Callas speaks almost no lines; the camera stays on her face and finds everything it needs.

Pasolini completed the film six years before his death, and it has stayed in European film school syllabuses ever since as a model of how to treat myth as lived experience rather than costume drama. Watch Medea (1969) online on iFILM.