Skip to main content

Study for Oedipus

Study for Oedipus
/8
    • Study for Oedipus
    • Studiu pentru Oedip
  • 1982-1985
  • 8mm film transferred to 16mm, color, no sound
  • 12min, 15sec
In his “Study for Oedipus,” Ion Grigorescu makes use of his films “Zamora” from 1982 and “Sovata” from 1985. “Study for Oedipus” shows a boy engaged in carefree play with sheep on a hillside. The camera pans slowly across the fenced-in landscape with a herd of sheep, a little mountain stream, and a waterfall, also showing a dilapidated forest house and a scarecrow. The film’s second part focuses on an empty landscape, a forest, and a village in the snow with a short pan to the artist’s head in a winter cap. Grigorescu, foreshadowing his color film “Oedipus,” hints here at some of the elements present at the beginning of the ancient myth, in which Oedipus’s father, King Laius, sought to circumvent the prophecy that Oedipus would kill his father and marry his mother, thereby ruining his city and the family. To escape this fate, Laius left Oedipus to die on a mountainside. The baby, however, was found by shepherds and then raised by King Polybus and Queen Merope, whom Oedipus believed to be his real parents until the myth had run its course. W.S.