The Gospel According to St. Ma

One hardly knows where to begin when discussing The Gospel According to Saint Matthew. Aside from the religious aspects of the film, you have to talk about Pasolini's techniques and motivations. While I didn't like certain aspects of the film, I certainly can't deny the fact that, as a Christian, this film moved me in a very powerful way. What makes this so amazing is the fact that Pasolini is both a Marxist and an atheist (basically the anti-me). I would go so far as to speculate that The Gospel According to Saint Matthew is both Marxist and anti-Catholic in terms of Pasolini's motives. The Jesus in this film is definitely the poor man's Jesus who would seem to represent the Italian peasantry which Pasolini held in such high regard.

I can't say I'm in love with Pasolini's filmmaking technique. The opening scenes of the film play like a silent film, with words few and far between. Pasolini tells most of the early story through the faces of his characters (and I should mention that he depended heavily on regular people rather than actors in the cast - his mother, for example, plays Mary). Pasolini is absolutely in love with pans and close-ups. On occasion, the camera starts moving one way, then suddenly zigs and zooms in an entirely different direction - this, to me, is sloppy technique; either the cameraman started going the wrong way or else he decided on the spur of the moment to capture something entirely different than what was planned. Once Jesus begins his ministry, the dialogue takes hold of the story, but the cinematography is always a prominent part of the presentation. All of the panning yields blurred background images, for example. More importantly, Pasolini presents his story from the viewpoint of a follower of Jesus; oftentimes, you have the equivalent of someone walking behind the action with a camcorder. I found this rather annoying early on, but the technique works wonderfully once Jesus is put on trial and crucified, as you see events unfold from the perspective of a John the beloved or a Mary. The music, while noticeably strange at first (e.g., "Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child" with its English-language lyrics and a later song that seems to have roots in 20th century blues), becomes nothing short of mesmerizing as the movie progresses toward the end. Unconventional, thy name is Pasolini.

The film truly does tell the story of Jesus' life, death, and resurrection as recorded in the book of Matthew. You won't see several well-known scenes of Jesus' life and teaching simply because they weren't recorded in the first Gospel. Likewise, the trial of Jesus, his crucifixion, and his resurrection all feel a little rushed simply because Luke and John describe the scenes in much greater detail than does Matthew. Still, the final scenes of this film are extraordinarily powerful. One problem I had with the film, though, was the fact that Jesus came across as quite an angry young man throughout much of the film - but, of course, Matthew presents Jesus in a slightly different light than do Mark, Luke, and John.

I don't know much about Pier Paolo Pasolini, nor do I think I could figure the man out even if I did. A half-hour look at the man is included on this DVD, and it certainly shows what a complicated fellow he is. As I mentioned earlier, he is both an atheist and a Marxist with strong Communist ties. His efforts with this film seem to be an attempt to take the Jesus of Matthew's Gospel and have him speak, in a strong socialistic sense, for the Italian peasantry of Pasolini's era (the film came out in 1964). That, I believe, explains the anger I saw in Pasolini's Jesus, and Jesus' bitter denunciations of the religious hypocrites of ancient Palestine could, I would surmise, apply to the Catholic Church or any institution of authority in Pasolini's own time. All I know for sure, however, is that this film is wide open for interpretation and debate.

The Lord truly does work in mysterious ways. With The Gospel According to Saint Matthew, an avowed atheist and Marxist has given the world one of the most powerful film representations of the life, love, and sacrifice of Jesus Christ.

This is one of the most astonishing films I have seen: probing, complex, lyrical, and at times emotionally overwhelming. NOTE: Do not blame WaterBearer for the poor-quality DVD; the Pasolini Foundation, which controls the film, provided the print and also vetoed chapters to encourage viewers to watch it only in its entirety. The overly edge-enhanced image is improved by turning your TV's sharpness setting to its 'blurriest.'

Can you imagine a less likely candidate to make what, after 40 years, may still be the greatest and most moving film about Jesus Christ? Pasolini was not only a gay Marxist but a devout atheist. His fascination with Jesus may have connected with his most personal theme, that of the outsider (with his artistic, political and sexual nature, he saw himself as the consummate outsider). Although one of Italy's leading intellectuals, he also moved among the laborers, indigents, and hustlers (some of whom were his lovers, not to mention the inspiration for his early poetry and novels), whose counterparts two millennia earlier had walked with Jesus.

Jesus's story also let Pasolini explore the complexities of real-world politics even while recreating an ancient culture with astonishing immediacy. He also relished the opportunity to play with a vast, and eclectic, artistic tradition, from Jean-Luc Godard's striking documentary style in "the two trials of Christ.... to painting... Piero della Francesca (in the Pharisees' clothes), Byzantine art, Christ's face like a Rouault, etc."

We also see El Greco not only in some compositions but in the intriguing casting of Enrique Irazoqui, a Catalan economics student, as Jesus. Pasolini had also considered such young, subversive literary lions as Jack Kerouac and Yevgeny Yevtushenko. With Pasolini's encyclopedic knowledge of all the arts, you could go on indefinitely trying to unravel the cultural allusions which make up just one strand of the film's rich texture.

The result, as they say, is history. It is like no biblical picture seen before; a quantum leap beyond the artificiality of, say, King of Kings, both De Milles's silent version and Nicholas Ray's 1961 remake, and later pictures like Scorsese's Last Temptation of Christ are inconceivable without Pasolini's model.

Pasolini had the uncanny gift for using the simplest, most economical means to bring his vision to life. Some of the locations are breathtaking, from an enormous city which seems to grow out of a mountainside to the surreal wasteland where Satan tempts Jesus (filmed on Mount Etna). By imaginatively selecting these locales - and not having to build sets - Pasolini powerfully recreated the feel of the ancient Middle East at a tiny fraction of the cost of a Hollywood production.

He also took enormous pains to cast exactly the right faces. Radically, he chose real farmers and workers to enact their historical counterparts (instead of John Wayne playing a Roman centurion as in The Greatest Story Ever Told). Perhaps the film's most intriguing aspect is that all the characters seem drained of an inner emotional life (which elsewhere Pasolini explores rigorously). This is sacred material presented in the style of legend. This visual and performance approach matches Matthew's prose to perfection. But there could also be more provocative reasons for it.

Take the Sermon on the Mount montage, consisting entirely of close-ups of Jesus preaching with immense force - the background reflecting each changing verse. (The footage came from the abandoned sacred-style approach; Pasolini ingeniously integrated it by using sharp editorial rhythms.) Here as throughout the film, Pasolini's Jesus is both earthly and otherworldly, harsh and tender. And although his inner life remains completely opaque, he emerges - perhaps in part because he has been 'de-psychologized' - as a figure of power but also complexity and ambiguity. Pasolini was forever picking apart the discrepancies not only in society - including religion and politics (as seen in Accattone and Hawks and the Sparrows) - but in himself. Here we see the "tough" Jesus, who "comes not to bring peace," smites a fig tree, violently hurls moneychangers out of the Temple, and warns people that they are either "with me or against me." But we also see the Jesus of love and compassion, who heals the sick, treats children with affection, and performs miracles (most are breathtaking, reproduced with the simplest means, as when he walks on water).

The only aspect of this magnificent film which does not work for me is the self-consciously eclectic (and Oscar-nominated!) use of music, which extends from Bach to Prokofiev to folk music. Pasolini wants this polyglot score to create subtle, and shifting, tensions between the world of ancient Judea and our own, but its incongruity and repetitiveness are sometimes distracting. By contrast, the use of silence is stunning. He communicates so much in the wordless opening scene between the pregnant Mary and her baffled husband, just by their faces and postures. These are people truly, yet to them confusingly, touched by the divine. He also captures the tactile reality of their world (you can feel the stones), even as his simple but striking compositions connect his own vision with such Renaissance masters as Giotto. This is filmmaking at its most subtle, resonant, and - while acknowledging the long tradition of Christian motifs in art - original. Pasolini brings together history, art and his own probing genius to depict Jesus in all of his humanity and divinity.

Pasolini's "The Gospel According to St. Matthew" is one of the great Italian director's most accessable films. It is also one of the few films about the life of Christ that looks and feels as if it was filmed during the time that Christ lived - this is no Hollywood production - this feels like the real thing (the one star is not for this 5 star film.)

However I want to warn potential purchasers that this Water Bearer version is a high priced non-anamorphic, poor quality print (although it claims to be digitally remastered), it has burned in subtitles with no chapter stops. I had thought DVD production and quality had improved greatly in the last couple of years, this is an unfortunate (1 star) exception. If you want to see another great Pasolini film with a great anamorphic almost pristine transfer I would direct you to MGM's version of his "The Decameron".