Oedipus Rex (Blu-Ray and DVD) Blu-ray

Stunning imagery

It's the first time in twenty odd years that I've seen the film and if anything it's better than I remember. The imagery is quite stunning, although the hand-held widescreen camerawork may come as a surprise to those not familiar with Pasolini's production techniques. It looks wonderfully filmy on this excellent new HD transfer from MoC with plenty of good filmic texture in evidence. I'd love to see it on a much larger screen. So, a very worth while package form MoC. The booklet is packed with essays and interviews with the director but there's only a trailer extra on disc [which has been the case with their recent Pasolini DVD releases]. I've neither read nor seen the play performed, but we all have a sense of the general gist of the oedipus story. However, Pasolini applies his own twist to the narrative by book-ending it with modern-day sequences. The birth of the child in the 1920's being an accepted allusion by Pasolini to his own birth. I find the modern sequences both cinematically astonishing and very moving particularly when oedipus returns to the place of his birth. With the book-ending device Pasolini is able to draw together the beginning and the end, closing the circle, which has been visibly describe by the panning shots of the tree tops as observed by the baby at the beginning. The idiom of the production is very much of the 1960's and of European film making, so don't expect a Hollywood style narrative. A fascinating personal approach to the story, with extraordinary costumes and North African landscapes, makes this a classic of auteur 60's cinema.