La Medea romántica de Lars von Trier: homenaje a Carl Theodor Dreyer

Lars von Trier's adaptation of Carl Theodor Dreyer's screenplay of Euripides' Medea translates every word printed in the literary text into images, replacing each connoted meaning with its "corresponding," yet unambiguous, image. In the script, the word is thinned until it is minimized; Euripides' text fades away to be transformed, multiplied, into images that complete it, giving it a "body" and returning the gaze to its deepest essence. This film representation has the visual quality of the relief of a pictorial work of German Romanticism, a reference that we also find in later works by the director, where nature transmutes as a transcendent element, uniting with the sacred. Trier adopts this perspective on Euripides' tragedy, and the result is a film that follows the linear development of the plot set out in the work, but where the large quantity and complexity of procedures of the film adaptation give it, if not a structural change with respect to the literary text, then a great breadth of signifiers due to the richness of its images. The purpose of this proposal is to connect the specular with the spectacular: to establish a dialogue between literature and cinema, so that, starting from literary texts, we can accurately evaluate the adaptation procedures used by Lars von Trier to bring Euripides' tragedy Medea to the screen. The iconic visual artistic elements used in the film will be analyzed to communicate the original pre-literary meaning of the Medea myth linked to the ineffable.