Edipo re, un film di Pier Paolo Pasolini (Oedipus Rex). FIRST EDITION. Milano: Garzanti Editore, September 1967. 8vo in original publishers hardcover, with jacket. 148 pp. With black and white photographic stills from the movie. Very good clean copy

First edition

The film’s style was intentionally ahistorical and uses various cultural motifs to create an other worldly environment. The actors are Italian and Berber, the film is shot in Morocco, and the music is largely taken from Romanian folk music but also from far flung oriental nations such as Indonesia and Japan. The costumes are also heavily stylized with medieval knight helmets and broad-brimmed straw hats and top hats fitted with wings. Many of the costumes use African, Aztec and Sumerian influences. This all serves to create a world foreign and yet completely of its own. Pasolini begins and ends the film in 1920s Italy in what he calls an act of Freudian Sublimation. Oedipus plays the traditional Japanese Gagaku theme on his pipe and follows it with a Russian folk song about resistance. The entire second part of the film is faithfully adapted from Sophocles’ play Oedipus Rex. Much of the dialogue is taken straight from Sophocles. The first half depicts the events leading up to the play and is Pasolini’s depiction of them with his own poetic style