While he had been thinking of filming the Greek myth of Medea for some time, it was only when producer Franco Rossellini convinced his friend Maria Callas to star in it that the script became a reality. From its inception, the film was conceived as a showcase for her, a part written to order - as Bellini and Donizetta write operas to measure for the sopranos assigned them. It was intended for the most compelling actress among opera divas in living memory.

Not only was Pasolini the director least likely to put Callas finally on film, but he was far from the first candidate for the challenge and the honor. Between 1960 and her death in September 1977 (at fifty-three, Pasolini's age at his murder), she sang only three operas - Norma, Medea, and Tosca - any one of which would have served for a film version. Onassis had urged her for years to try her hand at acting. In 1961 a producer, a guest on Onassis' yacht, tried unsuccessfully to convince her to play opposite Gregory Peck in The Guns of Navarone. Five years later she turned down a part in the gigantic Italian-American co-production of The Bible. She declined other offers or near-offers as well: to appear in an adaptation of a Poe story or in Tennessee Williams' Boom, both projects of Joseph Losey, whom she respected. (The part in the disastrous Boom and a staggering million-dollar fee went to Elizabeth Taylor.) Callas might also have made a Medea with Pasolini's hero Carl Dreyer, whom she called "an exceptional man," but he could not line up a producer to back him.

But by 1968 she was in crisis: On October 20, Onassis married Jacqueline Kennedy in the chapel of Panayitsa (Little Virgin) on his private island of Skorpios. Rather than appear in a projected life of Puccini, which Visconti wanted to film, or sing in Menotti's The Consul, Callas finally agreed to play a song-less Medea in a Italian-French-German co-production, written and directed by Pasolini. She told an interviewer the exact date of the proposal: October 19, 1968. Putting the best face on a difficult decision, she said at the time, "When Franco Rossellini, Medea's producer, proposed this one, I had no doubt. I knew immediately this was the occasion I'd been waiting for and I determined not to let it slip by."

What Pasolini saw in Callas (and he explained so to the press and addressed it in poetry) was not the voice and not the star but the woman. He wanted her "for herself," in precisely the same way he had wanted Franco Citti and Anna Magnani, Ninetto [Davoli] and Silvana Mangano.

Pasolini's plan was to present Medea through images, a film not directed to the obvious audience of Callas' opera fans. Besides, he did not like opera anyway. At eighteen he went to the Teatro Duse in Bologna and saw his first performance, an "ugly" rendition of Il trovatore: "I suffered such a shock that I never went to the opera again"; but after going with Ninetto to hear Giuseppe di Stefano in Rigoletto, in the open air at the Baths of Caracalla during the mid-sixties, "From then on, I began to have a feeling and a love for opera. Nevertheless, he thought swooning over Callas singing "Vissi d'arte" was so much ceccheria (approximately: queenery); Callas as the darling of homosexuals all over the world interested him not at all. He said, "Here is a woman, in one sense the most modern of womwn, but there lives in her an ancient woman - savage, mysterious, magical, with terrible inner conflicts."

Pasolini merged the real Callas, the Medea inside her but palpable to him, with the Medea of ancient myth, a personality quite as "real" as the living opera legend before him. He noted: "The barbarian deep inside [Callas], who emerged through her eyes, her shape, does not manifest itself directly, on the contrary, the surface is almost smooth. Overall, the ten years [Medea] passes at Corinth are a bit like the life of Callas. She came out of a peasant world, Greek, antique, and then had a bourgeois formation. Thus in a certain sense, I tried to concentrate in her character that which she is, in her total complexity."

If such a perspective helped Pasolini to work, so be it. Rossellini knew an international box-office draw when he saw one.

Pasolini also stated the mechanism of his strategy more baldly: "I'm aware of her professional abilities," he said, "but they are really of very little interest to me." He demanded that she start over and, for the first time in the public eye, be herself. She wrote that her involvement with Onassis left her with "nine years of meaningless sacrifice." Maybe acting the drama of a woman mad with love, and then betrayed by it, offered a way to ease her pain.

She decided Pier Paolo was not like other intellectuals "with their nose always in a book who do not see life." He soon said, "I feel I've always known her. It's as if we'd been to school together." He told one reporter, "For me, Callas is like Franco Citti. The two extremes meet: The so-called 'sacred monsters' have something so authentic and personal about tem, just as if they had been taken off the street."

Pasolini treated her with kid gloves from their first meeting in March 1969, one that followed on exchanges of letters and telephone calls. He spoke softly and they struck it off immediately. She had been known to snap unpleasantly about "homosexuals and Marxists" (her friendships with both notwithstanding): Nothing unpleasant occurred. The production proceeded from the first day that summer with the calm of two professionals animated by mutual esteem, locked in their common task.

Consistent with his style from the time of Accattone, Pasolini wanted to shoot Callas' face in long, slow close-up. She was used to the opera audience at a distance and begged him not to. He won. She might have been convinced to sing at some length. He asked only that she sing a short lullaby, in Greek, to Medea's baby son. She agreed but asked that it be omitted when she saw the rushes with sound track.

The press followed them everywhere: to isolated Goreme in Turkey, where Pasolini liked the weirdly shaped rocks, suggestive of a world "outside of time," imbued with Medea-the-sorceress' magic and communion with the supernatural. To Grado, to Aleppo in Syria, to Tor Caldara and Tor Calbona outside Rome. . . . One reporter tried to enter Callas' hotel room in Turkey by climbing along an outside railing, only to be discovered hanging in mid-air. . . . NBC, the RAI, Life, and Look sent reporters to cover the great Callas' film debut. The BBC shot an interview on the set, three minutes aired June 28, 1969, on Omnibus. No one wanted to miss making copy of the unusual Callas-Pasolini relationship.

Callas outworked everyone. She was always early, attentive, and willing. She never complained. Moments not filming were spent studying the day's work just completed. To keep her shielded from the hear, Callas was transported by a special sedan-chair the production carpenters built for her.

Director and star understood each other perfectly as to what Medea was supposed to be. On the Turkish set, she told the press her role was that of ". . . a semi-goddess who puts all her beliefs in a man. At the same time, she is a woman with all the experiences of a woman, only bigger - bigger sacrifices, bigger hurts. . . . You can't put these things into words. . . ."

In April 1970 Garzanti published Medea as a book: ninety-seven "scenes," always very short, some even a single line of dialogue. Pasolini had written it as though to be one sequence, then shuffled the pieces into another order for shooting. During that process he sat for long sessions of one-on-one talk with Rossellini, explaining his ideas. . . . The dialogues were the only guidance given to Callas. Used to working with score and libretto, she found film difficult. Sometimes she complained that the dialogue was not Shakespearean enough; another time she claimed she could not memorize lines without music.

The producer, within limits, gave Pasolini free reign. A deepening fascination with cultural anthropology, rite and ritual, reading of Levi-Strauss and Jung permeate Pasolini's vision of the film. He had discovered the great scholars of comparative mythology, including Mircea Eliade and Sir James Frazer.

Through improvisation, discussion, compromise, Medea was made. Some of what was planned was never shot. Other parts were shot but cut in editing . . . As usual, a scene was as much made in the editing as the filming: Pasolini shot several times what he needed and, back in Rome, boiled it all down to 118 minutes.

He believed that he had "a sacred relationship with objects"; they were the signs and symbols he could make speak through the language of the eye. He was, through things - places and bodies - communicating the unseen; his work, he believed, was to bridge from the material to the equally real that was invisible.

The month before Medea's shooting started, he told a reporter from Turin's La stampa, "I am an atheist. But my relationship with things is full of the mysterious and sacred. For me, nothing is natural, not even nature." Talking with a student group about Teorema, he repeated the idea, "To me, everything seems invested with an important light, special, which is best defined as sacred. And this determines my style, my technique."

So the shots of sky, shifting sands, the red earth - and the characters his actors and non-actors played - were so much stuff to be shaped into a syntax, a grammer of sacred meaning. The first incarnation of the Centaur makes him train the yung Jason to see the world as Pasolini still saw it: "All is holy, all is holy, all is holy. There is nothing natural in nature my boy, keep that in mind. When nature seems natural to you, all is over - and something else will begin. No more sky! No more sea!"

Callas came to Rome to see the rushes in December 1969. She was dismayed at how many shots of her she thought lovely had ended up on the cutting room floor. Too often, she thought, a camera angle emphasized her nose. The close-ups were not always kind to her forty-six years. But she said nothing, so in awe was she of Pasolini's art, so much did she trust him. More than a decade before, she had also been mesmerized by Visconti; when they disagreed, she sometimes held her tongue, and the result was perhaps her very best work.

The film was not - at least at first - a commercial success. From the start, it was labeled as something for film clubs and art cinemas. Many critics found the backdrops that quoted early Renaissance paintings, the costumes full of self-conscious pastiche somehow too decorative, "too esthetic." The mass magazine Gente called Pasolini "ambitious and cerebral"; Panorama wrote that Callas' violence recalled "that of Malcolm X"; Rinascita's reviewer was reminded of "the bloody feudal epics of Kurosawa."

Medea opened in Milan in December 1969; a month later, on January 28, 1970, a gala premiere was held at the Paris Opera. A selection of the international beau monde was in attendance: The Aga Khan, Maurice Chevaliaer, Mrs. Sargent Shriver (wife of the US ambassador), various Rothchilds and ambassadors from eleven countries. Photographers recorded Pasolini in black tie, sitting with Callas and their hostess, Madame Georges Pompidou, wife of the president of France.

Arriving at Palais Garnier, January 29, 1970 to present Medea,
(L to R) Pier Paolo Pasolini, Maria Callas, and Franco Rossellini.

Between Callas and Pasolini was no more or less than a playful and tender mutuality of feeling. It began platonically and stayed that way during the filming and for several years afterward when they saw one another. For a time, long phone calls passed between Paris and Rome.

In April 1970 Garzanti published the shooting script of Medea along with Pasolini's treatment for the film, an interview with Callas, and "poems written during the shooting. . . ."

Some were to, or about Callas. On the set, Pasolini had given her a ring: an antique bronze coin set in silver. "On one side, there were the worn profiles of a man and a woman, and on the other a victorious warrior. His poetry to her almost teasingly suggests heterosexual love. He rote that she came into his life:

bringing with you that odor from beyond the tomb,
you sing arias composed by Verdi that have turned blood-red
and the experience of it (without a word being uttered)
teaches sweetness, pure sweetness.

His was an attention she needed then. Not long before Onassis dismissed her talent as "a bird that had died" in her throat, Pasolini wrote that she was a "Little bird with the powerful voice of an eagle. A trembling eagle."

Their friendship survived and overcame ideology. She stopped lecturing him about his Communism. When the film was done, she stayed on in Rome; they went for long lunches together, sometimes at the Escargot on the via Appia Antica, one of her favorite restaurants. He told a reporter from Le monde that she had read some of his poems about her in Nuovi argomenti: "She was a bit upset by them, she doesn't know if she should be happy or unhappy about what I wrote about her. This has provoked a conflict in her we don't talk about much."

In the summer of 1970 he joined Callas on Tragonisi, an Aegean island in the Petalii group owned by Perry Embiricos - a great music lover, heir to one of the great Greek shipping fortunes. The part on vacation included Callas, [her confidante-assistant] Nadia Stancioff, one of Onassis' partners from his early whaling business and is wife: an odd ensemble. As he and Callas talked on the beach, Pasolini sketched her, continuing the series of portraits he had started during the filming of Medea the year before. He folded a paper into squares and drew her profile on each, using transparent glue and flowers for color. Stanciff says that he exclaimed, "This is art in the making. Now it must dry in the sun for twenty-four hours. I shall make only three, and one will be for you."

One undated sheet, believed to be from the drawings series of 1969-1970, repeats the abstracted image of a profile or a mountain - just lines running from lower-left to upper-right in sixteen squares of a folded page. It is an image repetitive, automatic. At the bottom of this sheet, he penned, "The world does not want me anymore and does not know it" (Il mondo non mi vuole pił e non lo sa).

Between 1969 and 1971 Pasolini made fourteen drawings of Callas in all: a first group in Cervignano del Friuli and five more in Greece. In Italy he worked at the dinner table, combining the red and white wine at hand, a bit of candle-wax, crushed flower petals. On the beach he took the materials he found there and worked his alchemy with them.

He gave one to Signor Citossi, who did some work on the Centaur's house on Safon. Two went to Callas, on the occasion of Medea's Paris Opera premiere. Other versions were found among his papers at his death. In the first group Callas is seen full-face and lively; by 1970 she is only a profile, something distant.

From Pasolini Requiem by Barth David Schwartz (Pantheon Books, New York, 1992).