ABSTRACT
Pier Paolo Pasolini's Medea places the Euripidean narrative within its broader, epic context. The quest of Pasolini's Giasone is hardly a realization of a hero's 'destiny' or a politically innocent adventure of discovery of exotic lands — even assuming that such a thing is possible. Pasolini's film, ironically, draws upon the powerful and influential discourses of Victorian cultural evolutionism: the Colchians are represented as a society characterized by practices that are recognizably 'primitive' and 'archaic'. Pasolini's Medea is an alienated subject because she can not negotiate the shift into the Greek world, a world the film represents as absolutely, and irreconcilably, different to the world of Colchis. The significance of Pasolini's representation of the infanticide as a type of religious ritual lies in its implicit commentary on the ways in which power becomes organized in society. Pasolini's film underscores the violence that social institutions and discourses can enact by virtue of 'naturalness' with which they constitute the order of things.
