Oedipus Rex / Edipo Re (1967) [The Criterion Collection]

Director: Pier Paolo Pasolini
Writers: Pier Paolo Pasolini, Sophocles
Stars: Silvana Mangano, Franco Citti, Alida Valli

Pier Paolo Pasolini’s powerfully iconoclastic take on Sophocles’s tragedy blends eras and cultures to create a searing exploration of fate, free will, and the things we fear most in ourselves. Shot amid the stark, elemental landscapes of the Moroccan desert, and set in an indefinable ancient past, this bold reimagining casts the filmmaker’s frequent collaborator Franco Citti as the eponymous foundling, whose willful blindness to his own nature unleashes a cataclysmic reckoning. With a prologue and epilogue set in twentieth-century Italy, Pasolini connects the story to his own upbringing, daring to bare his soul on-screen.

Extras:
- New 4K digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack
- Notes for a Film on India, a 1968 documentary made by Pasolini during his visit to India
- The Sequence of the Paper Flower, a short made by Pasolini for the anthology film Love and Anger
- Original theatrical trailer




Pasolini 101:
One of the most original and controversial thinkers of the twentieth century, Italian polymath Pier Paolo Pasolini embodied a multitude of often seemingly contradictory ideologies and identities—and he expressed them all in his provocative, lyrical, and indelible films. Relentlessly concerned with society’s downtrodden and marginalized, he elevated pimps, hustlers, sex workers, and vagabonds to the realm of saints, while depicting actual saints with a radical earthiness. Traversing the sacred and the profane, the ancient and the modern, the mythic and the personal, the nine uncompromising, often scandal-inciting features he made in the 1960s still stand—on this, the 101st anniversary of his birth—as a monument to his daring vision of cinema as a form of resistance.