Pasolini's Gospel According to St. Matthew FILM

One of my favorite Jesus films is Pier Paolo Pasolini's "The Gospel According to St. Matthew". It's a masterful surreal black and white film by atheist Italian Marxist, and I pray that he got saved before he was murdered.






Baptism scene with English subtitles.



The review of "The Gospel According to St. Matthew" in The Guardian UK sums it up quite nicely.


[QUOTE]

Films about the Christian God are not exactly my cup of tea, being either maudlin or boringly dignified, and almost always badly acted. ....

Pasolini's The Gospel According to St Matthew, made in 1964 by a Marxist who was frequently accused of blasphemy by the Catholic church and whose attitude to religion was ambivalent.

Its portrait of the Messiah - played by Enrique Irazoqui, a young Spanish economics student with a scraggy beard - is far harsher than the usual soft saint that passes for Jesus. He is, as screenwriter and director Paul Mayersberg has suggested, "a procurer for God".

The actor wears no make-up and nor does the rest of the cast. Judas is played by a truck-driver from Rome (Otello Sestili), and Pasolini's own mother is the Virgin Mary. They are all amateurs, and the close-ups of their faces make the story seem more real than usual. The bleak hillside scenery of Calabria, where the film was made, gives the film a primitive feel that is augmented by grainy cinematography.

The soundtrack - Prokofiev, Bach, Mozart and even Billie Holiday - surprises us but can be off-putting, considering the naturalism elsewhere.

What Pasolini clearly wanted was a believable gospel, armed with real people, and the glories of the music sometimes work against this, since sublimity is not what Pasolini had in mind. He did say, however, that he was not interested in deconsecrating: "That is a fashion I hate. I want to 'reconsecrate' as much as possible."

It is a stark film (someone has described it as one-dimensional), but with clear-headed interpretative qualities that avoid the usual cliches. This Christ was a political animal, angry at social injustice. The silent cry from the cross is believable and the miracles avoid any kind of underlining comment - they just happen, with not a special effect in sight.

All this puzzled the Catholic church greatly. But it was decided to approve of the film, even though Pasolini had vastly annoyed the papacy with his episode in 1962's RoGoPaG (a compilation of four satirical films by different directors) with his parody of the deposition from the cross, and had been given a suspended prison sentence for "publicly undermining the religion of the state". (He had also been expelled from the communist party, for alleged homosexuality.)

A planned life of St Paul never materialised; instead he made the less ambitious but more popular Decameron, The Canterbury Tales and The Arabian Nights, and the more intellectual, poetic and, at times, portentous Hawks and Sparrows, Theorem, Pigsty and Medea.

He never acquired the purity of The Gospel again, and Salo (1975), his last film, went in the opposite direction - a tortured scream against fascism that almost succeeded in being fascist itself. He was a loved and sometimes hated figure of Italian culture so that his murder, almost certainly by a teenage hustler, was, and still is, interpreted by many as some sort of political conspiracy.

[END QUOTE]

Here is a scene from the film. The camera work is genius, it's from the view of a spectator in the crowd, instead of the usual close-ups of Pilate and Jesus. When he shows Jesus, it's either from a distance, or an extreme close-up of His eyes. I feel that Pasolini really loved Christ.

This segment starts with Jesus healing the leper, then goes to Jesus teaching the multitudes, including during a night storm. Notice the surrealist effects with the lightning.

Something about Pasolini makes this film seem more real, although surreal, than most other Jesus films, as fine as many of them are.

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