MEDEA

Original British 30 inch x 40 inch Quad Poster for the 1969 Pier Paolo Pasolini Greek Tragedy MEDEA, based on the play by Euripides and starring Maria Callas, Massimo Girotti, Laurent Terzieff, Giuseppe Gentile, Margareth Clementi, Annamaria Chio and Paul Jabara.

Callas (dubbed) stars in a non-singing role as Euripede’s high priestess who returns to Corinth with Jason (Gentile) and avenges herself on him when he tires of her. Pasolini emphasises the operatic nature of this tale, presumably the point of casting Callas, who had made Cherubini’s opera her own throughout the 1950s, and he uses her great, tragic face to huge effect.

The poster art is by Peter Strausfeld. Strausfeld was interned in the Isle of Man at the Onchan Internment Camp during the War where he met the Austrian producer George Hoellering. In 1947 Hoellering opened the Academy Cinema on Oxford Street and invited Strausfeld to produce some posters for the cinema which he did in wood and lino-cuts till his death in 1980.

The Academy Cinema, built in 1913, was saved from conversion to a shopping arcade in 1928 by Elsie Cohen of the original Film Society, who proceeded to run it as an arthouse which is how it was ran till it’s closure in 1986.

The posters became a London landmark, in fact very few were used outside of London, resulting in very small print runs of 3-500.

Printed by Ward & Foxlow Ltd.

The poster is in very good folded condition.