Pasolini on Callas

Callas and Pasolini on the Medea set.

ilsussidiario.net reports on a 1969 letter from Pasolini to Callas that is part of the Pasolini exhibit at Casa Testori. The letter, written during the Medea shoot, was apparently meant to reassure her, unaccustomed as she was to cinema’s stop-and-go process and close-range focus.

You are like a precious stone that is violently shattered into a thousand fragments so that it can be reconstructed in something more enduring than the material of life—that is, the material of poetry. One must shatter a reality that is “whole” in order to remake it in the image of its synthetic and absolute truth, which makes it still more “whole.”