Inside the debate on cinema and literature, particularly on cinematographic adaptations of literary works, the name Pier Paolo Pasolini inevitably has great relevance. Eclectic artist, critic, poet, and distinguished expert of classical languages he was, in fact, among the very few post-war artists capable of producing both arts (cinema and literature) obtaining results of great international impact. In regard to adaptations, one of his most significant intents was a simultaneous reinstating and questioning the central tropes of his culture through the meeting of the two artistic spheres, making sure to reshape a particularly literary work in order to construct (&) a new and schizoid narrative structure through which the history of modernization could be written. Oedipus Rex (967) is a primary example of how Pasolini tries to conceptualize and represent the event of modernization as if it were a myth through a text able to pierce and shape a new contemporary meaning based on the authors contemporary society. The peculiarity
of this Pasolinian reworking lies in the fact that the author measures himself with a text written during the Fifth Century b.C.: the myth of Oedipus The King narrated for the first time by Sophocles in the homonymous tragedy. In his movie, Pasolini raises the concept of film adaptation to admiration for the work chosen, proposing that any system – literature, poetry, or cinema – offers unique elements that can only be elevated and reconsidered through the influence between them, which leads to new considerations and paths through which the author can to penetrate more deeply the intrinsic meanings of the works themselves. The fame of Oedipus story is, in fact, due to the appropriation of it by the Father of modern psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, but at the same time, the influence it had on the artistic-literary activity of the centuries following the debut of the Athenian scene is witnessed by the innumerable quantity of rewrites, reconstructions, and recontextualizations to which the story has been gradually submitted.