Burning Memories to Retrieve the Past: Contaminations of Bodies and Histories in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Medea

This essay examines Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Medea, released in 1970, stressing the themes of encounter and contamination. With Medea Pasolini questions the problem of ‘purity’, addressing the European cultural heritage and the numberless contaminations that have marked its history, well epitomized by the dramatic and multifaceted character of Medea. Thanks also to the passionate and controversial interpretation of Maria Callas, Medea reconfigures the sense of belonging to any allegedly defined and monolithical tradition, as the Western one, and gives voice to a new and unpredicted paradigm of femininity, capable of violently countering both the patriarchal norms that condemn her and her children to a misrecognized existence, and the very linearity of history. The latter is questioned and uprooted, in a perpetual and problematic interaction between past and present, tradition and modernity.