MEDEA

1988, Denmark, 75 mins. Video source: Facets Video.
Written and directed by Lars von Trier. Produced by Danmarks Radio. Photographed by Sejr Brockmann. Edited by Finnur Sveinsson. Costume Design by Annelise Bailey. Original Music by Joachim Holbek. Principal cast: Udo Kier (Jason), Kirsten Olsen (Medea), Henning Jensen (Kreon), Solbjerg Højfeldt (nurse), Baard Owe (Aigeus), Preben Lerdorff Rye (teacher), Ludmilla Glinska (Glauce).


From Lars von Trier by Jack Stevenson (British Film Institute: London, 2002):

After Epidemic, von Trier's next plunge into filmmaking was a TV project called Medea (1988).

Back in 1985 DR-TV had planned a production of Euripides's play Medea, which was based on the Greek myth of Medea, the princess with powers of sorcery who had helped Jason (of Jason and the Argonauts) get the golden fleece. Jason and Medea married and had children, but then he left her and she ended up killing the children in revenge.

After the original director, Søren Iversen, quit, von Trier was offered the project and a great deal of creative freedom. Instead of faithfully adapting Euripides' tragedy to the screen, he chose to use Carl Dreyer's script of the same name which the director had written in 1965-66 but had never found sound financing for. Dreyer's script was not a straightforward adaptation of Euripides' play, but rather an attempt to recreate the original story which might have inspired Euripides. Von Trier's film, in turn, as he states in the prologue, was not an attempt to make Dreyer's film, but rather was his personal interpretation of the manuscript. In any case, Medea was not purely based on von Trier's own material, and this was exceptional.

Using two of Dreyer's old actors, Baard Owe and Preben Lerdorff Rye, he transplanted the story to a marsh in Jutland.

He shot the film on 3/4-inch videotape, readjusted color and light, transferred it to 35mm film and then copied it back to 1-inch videotape. The result of this laborious experimental process was a train of images that seemed on the verge of dissolving in murk and graininess. The classic dialogue, sounding a bit inappropriate in Danish, was then laid on post-sync.

Medea was broadcast over Easter of 1988 and critical response was overwhelmingly negative. 'An affected melodrama,' wrote Randi K. Petersen for B.T., 'very far removed from Dreyer.' 'The striking visuals do not manage to hide the fact that von Trier has no sense for the deeper layers in the text,' wrote Dan Nissen of Information. 'Comic rather than gripping,' according to Bettina Heltberg of Politiken. This initial wave of condemnation was hotly disputed by two other critics, Christiaan Braad Thomsen and Jan Kornum Larsen, who maintained it was a masterful and innovative work. Yet again von Trier had managed to polarize, to put critics at each other's throats.

From a review by Michael Atkinson for The Village Voice, April 16, 2003:

Once upon a time, in a decidedly pre-Dogmatic age, Lars von Trier was an electrifying image-smith, and so it is that the 1987 version of Medea he made for Danish TV, which has been floating around on cable and in retrospectives for years, is also his best film. It is certainly his most vivid and least indulgently snarky; students of his influential faux-doc video-realism should receive this banshee cry from the depths of classicism as a revelation. Not that von Trier mutes his confrontational pomo proclivities-shot either on video with a post-production mutation to celluloid or vice versa, Medea is grandly expressionist, judiciously employing solarized shadow, shifting video backgrounds, and visual degradation. But perhaps because von Trier was working merely with a few simple locations (barren Danish plains, beaches, and catacombs sub for Greece), a TV-movie budget, and a bloodletting tale as elemental as subsoil, the film achieves an abrading, intimate, primal force his later films only hint at. It's difficult to imagine the Euripides original ever being more eloquently adapted.

Which is to say, it's a film that stings your corneas. A substantial slice of the credit goes to the specter of Danish cinema demigod Carl Dreyer, who co-wrote the original screenplay; as the opening titles claim, von Trier is trafficking heavily in homage. Although the script remains faithful only to the sparsity of Dreyer's dialogue, von Trier's stark tableaux evoke frames from The Passion of Joan of Arc, Vampyr, and Day of Wrath. He makes it look easy-images of wind-buffeted grass and figures stalking over waste-scapes, all of them layered with a gauzy haze, have the grim chill of an atavistic delirium. Medea (Kirsten Olesen) walks through sun-shower rainbows, talks in a whisper with soldiers across a vast lake, and collects charms in a foggy bog evoked with Maddinesque economy.

Following Dreyer's lead, von Trier artichoke-peels Euripides until virtually all that is left is the clenched core of feminist fury-namely, Medea's deranging spite over the abandonment by Jason (a remarkably robust Udo Kier) as he marries a royal nymphet despite the two sons Medea has borne him. For options, the woman is left with exile, death, or revenge.

Once Medea speedballs toward its famous and horrifying climax, which von Trier shoots in panting close-ups with only wind and bird chirps on the soundtrack, the movie seems likely to be the nearest he'll ever come to a masterwork. (Pasolini's 1970 version, comparatively, ends in a meek and tasteful elision.) It's a rare thing indeed-a movie that reveals itself in lucid and unsettling ways we haven't seen before.