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Oedipus Rex is a fundamental text of the Western world, dating back to Ancient Greece. Freud's recent psychoanalytic reinterpretation of the text has made it one of the most significant myths of our time. Adapting it to the screen is therefore a special challenge. The film is bound to invoke the audience's previous knowledge of both the myth and the play in effecting a rewriting or, to borrow from Gérard Genette, a "palimpsest." As Naomi Greene explains: "not one but three texts infuse Edipo Re: the Oedipus tale of Greek myth and drama, Freud's reading of that tale and his elaboration of the Oedipus complex and Pasolini's references to his own childhood" (151). Indeed, all three texts deal with the definition of what it is to be human, and from that point of view, they have both a universal and an individual dimension. Since the story gives an explanation of the sexual construction of man through Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams, it was particularly interesting to Pasolini as an autobiographical text. As a palimpsest, the film functions as a complex and interesting text: it turns into a map of the soul, a translation of the works of Freud and his successors, which defines the various elements that build up the psyche. From this point of view, it is also a rewriting of Sophocles's analysis of the role of free will and fatality in shaping man's destiny, recast in the contemporary framework of psychoanalysis. Moreover, this functioning of the film as palimpsest is crucial to its meaning. It deals with escaping one's fate, with the questioning of what is said and written, or in other terms, with changing the word. It is a reflection on rewriting and translating, in several meanings of these terms. It rewrites crucial texts. The film also works as a translation of the psyche, a map of what Pasolini calls "brute images" in his essay "The Cinema of Poetry." In fact, it is a translation of his essay in visual terms, or, in other words, to quote Millicent Marcus, it is an "umbilical" film. The film thus becomes a reflection on the act of seeing and expressing.
First, I shall look at the way Pasolini uses Sophocles's text to rephrase the dilemma...