Oedipus Rex
Oedipus Rex
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1h 45m
Directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini • 1967 • Italy, Morocco Starring Franco Citti, Silvana Mangano, Laura Betti
Pier Paolo Pasolini’s powerfully iconoclastic take on Sophocles’s tragedy blends eras and cultures to create a searing exploration of fate, free will, and the things we fear most in ourselves. Shot amid the stark, elemental landscapes of the Moroccan desert, and set in an indefinable ancient past, this bold reimagining casts the filmmaker’s frequent collaborator Franco Citti as the eponymous foundling, whose willful blindness to his own nature unleashes a cataclysmic reckoning. With a prologue and epilogue set in twentieth-century Italy, Pasolini connects the story to his own upbringing, daring to bare his soul on-screen.
Up Next in Oedipus Rex
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Notes for a Film on India
This documentary was shot on the occasion of Pasolini's trip to postindependent India to do research on a proposed film. It features his reflections on the country's economic and class-based hardships, as well as on its modernization and Westernization.
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The Sequence of the Paper Flower
Pasolini directed this sketch featuring actor Ninetto Davoli as part of the 1969 anthology film Love and Anger, a compendium of modern-day cinematic reflections on the Gospels that also feaures the work of contemporaries such as Jean-Luc Godard, Bernardo Bertolucci, and Marco Bellocchio.
