Jesus the Revolutionary

The Italian filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini seemed on the surface an unlikely suspect to make a Jesus film. Marxist, atheist, and openly gay, at the time Pasolini decided to make a film based on the Book of Matthew, he was considered a controversial and even dangerous filmmaker by Italian authorities.

Enrique Irazoqui as Jesus, 1964

Yet this 1964 film, The Gospel According to St. Matthew (Il Vangelo Secondo Matteo), is often cited as one of the most beloved films about Jesus by believers and non-believers alike. Without question the 1960s Jesus film that is most faithful to scripture, nearly all of its dialogue comes straight from the New Testament. When other films dress up their dramatic moments through bombastic score or saccharine lighting, this film is understated, simple, reverent. 

Miracles happen with no fanfare at all; they simply happen, so quickly that it is startling and effective. Likely because Pasolini was limiting himself to dialogue included in scripture, there are often long stretches of onscreen silence, which play beautifully.

My favorite use of silence is in the exquisite opening scene. An anguished Joseph stares at an unhappy and mute teenaged Mary in a grotto, trying to fathom how she could betray him. He finally stumbles away from her house and, in confusion, falls asleep, his brow furrowed. The first audible dialogue of the entire film is that of the angel appearing to him.

The film has a distinct Marxian sympathy for the poor, and much screen time is devoted to the quiet faces of those everyday people who encounter Jesus in his ministry. Even the most unlikely characters -- the uneasy soldiers sent by Herod to massacre the innocent male children of Bethlehem, for example -- are shot by Pasolini with compassion and tenderness. Children and the elderly are in nearly every scene. This, Pasolini wants to emphasize, is the story of the poor, and of Jesus's dedication to them.  Most of Pasolini's actors were nonprofessionals; many were laborers themselves. His own elderly mother plays the role of Jesus's mother as an older woman.

Pasolini's Jesus (played by a Spanish graduate student, Enrique Irazoqui) is unflinchingly passionate, angry, and insistent upon justice. We see stories from scripture rarely enacted in other Jesus films. Pasolini includes the cinematically-unloved cursing of the fig tree, for example. In strident tones, Jesus also announces he comes not in peace, but to bring a sword -- a controversial line from scripture that bucks against the interpretation of Jesus as a placid peacemaker in films like King of Kings. 


Jesus also appears to turn his back on his saintly mother and family, a scene derived from scripture (Matthew 12:46-50) to which Pasolini gives particular emphasis. For American Christian audiences, a Jesus who doesn't seem to care much about his own family probably raises hackles. But it might provoke interesting questions about the way biological families are depicted in scripture. 

Margherita Caruso as Mary at sixteen

And indeed, for church discussion groups or academic classrooms, this film presents many fascinating questions. As a film with a decidedly Marxist agenda, what are we to make of its relative fidelity to scripture? Does it distort scripture? Or does it remind us of aspects of scripture American Christians often conveniently ignore? It can be fun to watch the film with the New Testament open, to see where changes in emphasis and order have arisen.

There is also the matter of the film's cryptic dedication to Pope John XXIII, which has been interpreted as tongue-in-cheek, sincerely reverent, or a nose-thumbing to Pasolini's Communist friends, many of whom argued Jesus was a sell-out subject for a supposedly revolutionary filmmaker.

The film is in Italian, although available with English subtitles, and it is in black and white, shot in a neorealist, documentary style. Of special note is its musical score, which includes Bach, the "Gloria" from a Congolese Mass, and Odetta's "Sometimes I Feel Like A Motherless Child."

All in all, this is a highly, highly recommended film -- in fact, an absolute must -- for anyone seriously interested in films or retellings of the life of Jesus.