Medea (1988)

Director: Lars Von Trier

1988 / 75min / Digital

Based on an unfilmed screenplay by Carl Theodor Dreyer and, of course, Euripides’s tragedy of the same title, von Trier’s made-for-television film—save for two epiphanic eruptions—is uncharacteristically austere, the enfant terrible of Danish cinema making himself a medium for the Old Master’s vision, setting the source material in a pre-Christian Denmark. “An experimental film in the true sense of the word… Taking the greatest limitation of video—the medium’s lack of depth of field—Mr. von Trier turns it into a strength, flattening perspectives in a way that collapses his foreground characters into the tumultuous backgrounds (waves, wind-swept fields) that surround and dominate them.” —Dave Kehr, The New York Times

Distributor: DRTV

Part of Classical Cinema