EDIPO REDUX
Commissioned by the BETA Timișoara Architecture Biennale, 2025Curator: Oana Stănescu
WRITER + DIRECTOR: C. NICOLAE
DP: DRAGOȘ HANCIU
In 1967, Pier Paolo Pasolini ventured into Romania, seeking a primordial, archaic setting for his adaptation of Oedipus Rex. A country undergoing rapid industrialization, Romania nonetheless offered glimpses of the raw, untamed world Pasolini yearned for. The filmmaker left with a collection of music curated by the Institute for Ethnomusicology in Bucharest and released by Electrecord in 1962, which was used, almost in its entirety, as the soundtrack for the film that was eventually shot in Morocco.
There is ample ambiguity in the rhythm and language of Romanian traditional folk music, marked by indefinable traces of Arab, Slavic and Ancient Greek tonalities. In his words, “They are a little out of history. I wanted to have ahistorical, timeless music.” Edipo Re:dux is a speculative location scouting that invites viewers to contemplate a “what if ” of cinematic history.
It interrogates the relationship between landscape and narrative, the role of place in shaping expression and the cultural memory. A series of vignettes interspersed with film footage form an invitation to a spectral journey, a cinematic rite of transition between a nebulous, mythical past and a hyperreal present. Engaging with the frugality of its scenery, Edipo Re:dux pays homage to Pasolini’s transcendent poetics.