Medea Research

I’m looking for Medea. I investigate what we know about her, what we don’t say, and what she teaches us about ourselves. A text emerges: Medea-Material, by Heiner Müller. We lend our voices to this character – perhaps this time we’ll be able to hear her.

Mathilde Girard gives her friends Medea As Material, a short text by Heiner Müller and his take on the myth of Medea. In their tiny kitchens, at dinner or doing their ironing, they read it, recite it, talk about it, searching for Medea who, it seems, is nowhere yet everywhere to be found. The aim is not to perform the myth again but rather to experience the repercussions. Medea Research becomes a space of excavation. Driven by the text, which imposes yet refuses itself, the film advances from one reading to another, from analysis to discussions, and helps them to express who they are. Questions fill the minds of each – pressing questions on love, parenthood, responsibility, solitude. How can they talk about themselves? Find out what they desire? Reveal what usually remains unspoken? The search thus becomes an attempt to listen differently, to read the underside of imposed interpretations and discover what they have to say. They reading texts written from the heart for the occasion from the narrow stairways of a friend’s block of flats, searching for the “other” to better recount where they themselves are. They dig deeper until the film is pierced by a strange necessity: there is no tragic explosion, no return to the myth, no blood, no fury or barbarity, simply a contained intensity. It may be the effect of this revealed intimacy, of ordinary tragedies or of this world “that we experience with great emotion”. The film finds a place in the void left between gentleness and the irreparable, allowing us to sense that what has been unravelled here can be woven together again differently.

Clémence Arrivé Guezengar