Here at The Wild Reed I commemorate Callas and her artistic legacy with a number of items relating to her brief but memorable foray into the cinematic world via Pier Pablo Pasolini’s 1969 film, Medea.
On my (archived) website Callas as Medea, I describe Pasolini’s film as “a hypnotic cinematic experience and a powerful ideological tale of the clash of two cultures.”
But before we get more into this doozy of a film, here’s a short Opera Wire article by Francisco Salazar about how Callas’ artistry continues to inspire not only those in the world of music but also film, including actress Anne Hathaway.
Anne Hathaway [left] is revealing that for her acclaimed performance in The Odyssey, she took inspiration from Maria Callas.
During the premiere of the film, the actress said, “I thought a lot about Greece and I was thinking about somebody who’s mythic to me in my own life is Maria Callas, and I was just thinking like okay if this film were an opera, Maria Callas would 100 percent play Penelope. How would she play her? And then I just let myself imagine towering emotions and the way Maria Callas could do much with intimate moments, the way she could stand there so still inside of herself and produce the most beautiful sound but then turn around and be so full of fury. So Maria Callas was a huge inspiration for me.”
Hathway portrays Penelope in the new adaptation of The Odyssey and is garnering Oscar buzz for her turn in the film.
Callas was recently portrayed by Angelina Jolie in a biopic titled Maria, for which she received Golden Globe and Oscar nominations.
The famed soprano was of Greek descent and was famously cast as Medea in the 1969 film of the same name by Pier Paolo Pasolini. It marked her only film role.
– Francisco Salazar
“Anne Hathaway Inspired by
Maria Callas for The Odyssey”
Opera Wire
July 23, 2026
“Anne Hathaway Inspired by
Maria Callas for The Odyssey”
Opera Wire
July 23, 2026
As I’ve already mentioned, years ago I created a website, Callas as Medea, dedicated to the “hypnotic cinematic experience” that is Pasolini’s Medea. My tribute contains a number of insightful writings on the film (including Myth and Marx by Peter Bondanella, Medea: Myth and Reason by Stephen Snyder, and Medea: Tropism of a Transplanted Race by Molly Haskell.
I wish I could say that Medea was the beginning of a robust and celebrated film career for Callas. Sadly, that wasn’t the case.
At the time of its release, critical response to Medea was divided, with most reactions focusing on its unconventional narrative structure, visual style, and Callas’s performance in what was to be her only film role. Vincent Canby’s 1971 New York Times’ review noted Callas’s “fascinating” presence in the title role and highlighted the film’s stylized approach to the Euripidean play, while acknowledging its highly symbolic and unconventional treatment of narrative. Retrospective criticism has generally been more favourable, with, for example, The Guardian’s Philip French describing the film as a “Freudian-Marxist-Christian take on the myth” [of Medea, Jason, and the Golden Fleece] and praising its cinematic ambition as “visually astonishing” and calling Callas a “commanding presence.” Writing for the British Film Institute, Alexandra Heller-Nicholas praised Callas’s “diva-esque regality,” and observes that “Medea’s final act of revenge feels less like the fury of a woman scorned, and more like the primal howl of a goddess facing obliteration.”
Following is a mesmerizing video montage of images and music from Medea. It’s followed by a Medea-focused excerpt from my 2016 review of Naomi Greene’s book, Pier Paolo Pasolini: Cinema as Heresy.
Pasolini lamented the vanishing of humanity’s sense of the epic, the sacred, mediated through “luminous” nature and a deep sense of human experience. It was a vanishing he attributed to the rise of capitalistic culture. Nowhere is this explored and expressed more powerfully then in his 1969 film Medea – wherein the inhabitants of ancient Colchis, including the High Priestess Medea (played by Maria Callas), are depicted as perceiving and responding to the presence of the sacred in their land. The marauding Jason and his companions, however, show no respect for either the land or others’ connection to it. Jason represents Pasolini’s view of the secularized First World – one dominated by logic and wherein acknowledgement of the sacred, of mystery, has no part.
The corruption of Medea, manifested in her willingness to assist Jason in his theft of the sacred relic of the Golden Fleece, symbolizes for Pasolini the all too common fate of indigenous cultures exposed to the conquering, consumerist mentality of the secularized nations of the West. As enticing as the First World nations may appear, Pasolini’s Medea shows that a fatal price is paid for aligning with them. The fate of Medea symbolizes and personalizes this price – “The poor soul has had a reverse conversion,” notes Jason’s mentor, “and [she] has never recovered from it” The people of Colchis have an ominous premonition of this “reverse conversion,” and they accurately connect their sense of dread with the arrival of Jason:
The sky was the boundary of our kingdom
But Jason will come and he will pierce the sky
And bring an end to our kingdom
He will laugh while we cry
For the name of blasphemy is on his lips
And where he passes, all will turn barren
He will bring an end to our kingdom
And the blood shed because of him
Will erase forever the sacred blood of God.
We know the vineyard but not the sea
We know fields of peas and garlic but not the sea
And Jason comes from the sea
He comes from the sea.
We will fall like dead upon the ground
And when we open our eyes again
We will see things forever abandoned by God.
By betraying and abandoning her land and her people, Medea is shown to lose touch with her religious beliefs and thus her connection to the land (“Speak to me Earth! I no longer hear you! Earth, where is your meaning? I touch the earth with my feet but do not recognize it!”). Living in exile as an “archaic woman” in Greece – in “a world that doesn’t believe in anything in which she always believed” – Medea is feared as a foreigner and treated as an outcast. In time – driven to desperation and rage – she commits a horrific act of vengeance.
Greene perceptively reads the character of Medea as a symbol of early religious sensibilities abruptly exposed to, and immersed in, a predominately secular and profane world. Jason represents this “new” world – enticing yet devoid of depth, of the mythic, the epic, the sacred. The film’s ultimate and tragic outcome is a clear indictment of not only the industrialized/secularized First World’s exploitation and oppressive violence of so-called Third World countries, but the responsive violence from those being exploited and oppressed.
– Michael J. Bayly
“The Impossible Desire of Pier Paolo Pasolini”
The Wild Reed
August 15, 2016
“The Impossible Desire of Pier Paolo Pasolini”
The Wild Reed
August 15, 2016
Finally, here’s newsreel footage of Callas being interviewed on the set of Medea in 1969. It’s accompanied by an excerpt from Arianna Huffington’s book, Maria Callas: The Woman Behind the Legend.
Before they started shooting, [Pasolini] made some notes and showed them to Maria: “Medea watches Jason, enchanted, lost in him. It is a true and complete love; in this moment it is Jason’s virility that prevails. Medea has lost her dazed manner, like a disoriented animal. Suddenly she finds in love which humanizes her, a substitute for her lost religious sense. In the sensual experience she finds the lost rapport, the sacred identification with reality. So the world, the future, her well-being, the meaning of things, all take shape again suddenly for her. It is with gratitude, like one who feels reborn, that she lets Jason possess her, she in turn possessing in him the regeneration of life.”
Maria recognized the parallels, and through Medea she could relive her own story: the love [she had for Aristotle Onassis] that made her tap into the woman in her and in some sense humanized her, the sensual experience of oneness, the new meaning, the new vitality like a rebirth. And in reliving her story through Medea’s, she could exorcise some of her bitterness [over Onassis’ betrayal]; she could see that it was not, after all, as it had seemed in the dark months that had passed, “nine years of meaningless sacrifice.”
At the beginning of June 1969 this mystic Marxist [Pasolini] and Maria found themselves working together on Medea in a forgotten wild corner of Asia Minor. Göreme, in Turkey, with its rocks carved into weird shapes, was exactly the place Pasolini wanted - a place where it was at times hard to distinguish between myth and reality.
During her last month in Paris [Maria] could hardly get up before midday; in Goreme she was up at dawn. She arrived on the set to be dressed and made up before anyone expected her . . . She was full of humility about her new venture, constantly seeking advice, confirmation, reassurance. “Tell me, is this gesture too grand? Too operatic?”
From Göreme, they went to Aleppo in Syria, and then to Italy, to Pisa, to the lagoons and islands of Grado, to Tor Caldara and Tor Calbona near Rome. And wherever they went, out of rocks and deserts, blanched dunes and beaches, Pasolini re-created a strange, lost world of mystery and magic, a world where ritual, violence and the the supernatural were part of everyday life.
[Maria] was almost obsessively involved with Medea. In one scene, she was being taken in long shot, and had to run frantically barefoot on a dry riverbed. She was wearing a heavy gown with huge ropes of pagan jewels, the sun was beating down and she was running, running until she fainted and collapsed on the mud. Pasolini and the entire crew ran toward her, and as she came back to consciousness her first words were, “Please forgive me! I’m so stupid. I shouldn’t have done that. It’s cost everyone so much time and money.” Maria the professional could not bear to be the one slowing things down.
For the final moments of the film, [Maria] refused the stand-in who was available: “Here,” remembers [costume designer] Piero Tosi, “Maria reached the apex of her performance. Medea must build a great fire, and holding the bodies of her dead sons, perish in the flames while defying their faithless father. It was very dangerous, because she had to stand on a high wooden platform with flames soaring before her.
It was a sacred ritual and Maria, blind as she was, had to hurl herself into the holocaust, or at least seem to do so for the camera’s eye. Three times she acted out the scene, and during the last take she nearly fell right into the inferno. For Maria, it could have been done no other way.
“Didn’t you find it exhausting to have to shoot the same scene many times?” Maria was asked at the end of July, when the shooting had moved to Italy. “No, it’s futility that exhausts me, not work . . . There will be a great void when it’s all over.”
There was a void, but something had happened during these two months of living with Medea and Pasolini that nobody could take away from her. She had reached a deeper understanding of what the last nine years [with Onassis] had meant and a quieter acceptance of the way they had ended.
She had always called herself a fatalist, and often her fatalism implied resignation, a self-destructive giving up on life. But for the moment, the fatalism was of a different kind: an accepting trust that the patterns, large and small, of every aspect of her life, had some definite, however obscure, meaning. Her relationship with Pasolini, who, through both his poetry and his films, had always sought the meaning and connections beneath the surface, encouraged this trust.
– Arianna Huffington
Excerpted from Maria Callas:
The Woman Behind the Legend
Lyons, 2002
Excerpted from Maria Callas:
The Woman Behind the Legend
Lyons, 2002
For more of Maria Callas at The Wild Reed, see:
• “Better Than Callas We Will Never See”
• Remembering Maria . . . Celebrating Callas
• Maria by Callas: “Revelatory, Unprecedented, and Authoritative”
• Callas Centenary
• A Queer Aria
• Re-Visioning Callas
• Remembering Callas
• Callas Went Away
• Maria Callas – “Ave Maria”
• Callas Remembered
• The Impossible Desire of Pier Paolo Pasolini
• Europe 2005 – Part 6: Paris
