Oedipus Rex

Directed by: Pier Paolo Pasolini. Screenplay: Pier Paolo Pasolini, based on Sophocles’ tragedies Oedipus Rex and Oedipus at Colonus. Director of Photography: Giuseppe Ruzzolini. Set Design: Luigi Scaccianoce. Costume Design: Danilo Donati. Film Editor: Nino Baragli. Cast: Franco Citti (Oedipus), Silvana Mangano (Jocasta), Alida Valli (Merope), Ninetto Davoli (Herald), Julian Beck (Teiresias), Carmelo Bene (Creon), Luciano Bartoli (Laius), Pier Paolo Pasolini (High priest), Jean-Claude Biette (Priest). Production: Alfredo Bini for Arco Film. Length: 104 min. Colour.
Oedipus Rex, filmed in the summer of 1967, is Pasolini' adaptation of the ancient myth of Oedipus, a man who unknowingly kills his father and marries his mother. Pasolini has deliberately chosen to create a non-intellectual Oedipus who does not want to explore the unknown. He is not concerned with the meaning of life. Pasolini avoids the inclusion of any scene in which Oedipus might be seen investigating, examining, questioning, inferring, clarifying, or demonstrating. When Pasolini’s Oedipus comes to a crossroad and must decide which road to take, clasps his hands to his eyes and spins around several times and then removes his hands from his eyes and walks off to the right.
In the scene where Oedipus encounters the Sphinx , Pasolini’s Oedipus not only does not save the city of Thebes by unraveling the riddle that no other man could solve but also slays the Sphinx ….
pasolini’s Oedipus rex could be reviewed from Freudian psychoanalysis view points or could be expressed as a perfect example of director’s poetic cinematography in re projecting his own obsessions into a myth, I am going to add my personal insights to the theme which is perfectly depicted by Pasolini as non- intellectuality from the stand point of statistical thermodynamics and entropy .

All great philosophical and theological systems have been built around the question of order and disorder, and they have all privileged order over disorder.

For Claude Levi-Strauss, primitive thought is just as much based on the demand for order as is scientific thought, whose most basic postulate is that nature itself is orderly. For native thought, "all sacred things must have their place." Sacred objects contribute to the maintenance of order by occupying the places allocated to them. If they were taken out of their place, even in thought, the entire order of the universe would be destroyed. (The Savage Mind, p. 10)

As we witness in Oedipus, what he has unknowingly done, is essentially generating disorder. His actions offend against order. Eliminating it is not a negative moment, but a positive effort to organize the environment and respect the Rituals of purity, so he tries to purify himself by blinding himself to suffer for the rest of his life to pay for his interference in maintenance of order through a sin.

Pasolini through the medium of film, extends the disorder caused by his primitive oedipus to our present time and strips it of history in order to remind us that "Order is a kind of compulsion to repeat which, when a regulation has been laid down once and for all, decides when, where and how a thing shall be done" (Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents, p.40)
Natural processes always move towards an increase in disorder, which is measured by entropy. The second law of thermodynamics, which states that entropy can never decrease, is thus an argument for the irreversibility .
In statistical mechanics, Ludwig Boltzmann expressed entropy as S = k (lnP) where S is entropy, k is Boltzmann's constant, and lnP is the natural log of probablilty. We set its value to 1 without affecting the generality of the arguments presented here.
Erwin Schrödinger in his book “What is Life?” considered life, which is highly improbable, to be the inverse of S, which he called negentropy. Thus an intellectual act becomes the " work" that achieves and maintains order in systems whose internal disorder would otherwise increase. For pasolini ,only intelligence in contradiction to primitiveness can reduce entropy and maintain order .

James Clerk Maxwel in his famous letter to P.G. Tait of 1867, in which he imagined "a finite being who knows the paths and velocities of all the molecules by simple inspection but can do no work except open and close a hole...by means of a slide without mass. "
Maxwell's demon ressembles the kind of divine intelligence that has a more human quality, and is especially important as a guardian of free will. He is a sort of "ghost in the machine,"in Paolini’s art works the demon has is a true divine Artist mostly palyed by himself in many of his movies as he believed in rule of a true artist who can create new cultural forms in opposition to global averages and perform work and radiates intelligence whose energetic price compensates the later useful work even after his death.
Just to recap ,only an intelligent system (intelligent human being) can process information and energy to reduce entropy. This unequivocal fact then demonstrates the existence of a regulating biological intelligence within the human body. Intelligence is the way in which life affronts entropy.

Rendez-vous
Cast and CrewDirector André TéchinéWriter Olivier Assayas , André Téchiné Actors Lambert Wilson , Juliette Binoche , Wadeck Stanczak , Jean-Louis Trintignant , ...... Music Philippe SardeRun time :82 Minutes France:1985Best Director award winner ,1985 ,Cannes International Film Festival

unhappy souls whom finaly find a common emotional ground
you should realy see Juliette Binoche as an actress on a rendezvous with destiny brilliantly portraited by Téchiné, she doesn't really have much of a personality and just sort of passively moves between people who don't treat her very well. her scense with Scrutzler, the director in the movie who is also touched by his own tragedy toward the end are what the movie is leading up to in its slow, quiet way - two people trying to come to terms with loss, but very reluctant to address it directly.