Pasolini's Jesus, Matthew's Words

Pasolini’s The Gospel of Saint Matthew presents Pasolini’s Jesus with Matthew’s words. An antiesht, gay, Marxist making a Jesus film, especially in the 1960’s, is certainly a novelty – Pasolini’s film does not disappoint. While the text is taken and restricted to the Gospel of Matthew, the on screen presentation is what makes Pasolini’s vision unique. It is not just that Jesus takes on an activist, Marxist persona, but we find a dramatically human Jesus in a visually striking landscape.

Praise

The Biblical epics of the 1960’s tended to place Jesus in sweeping vistas with dramatic views. Pasolini’s presentation is equally striking, though for different reasons. The harsh Italian landscape with its dilapidated villas creates a sense of foreignness, antiquity, struggle, and poverty. The scenery induces a deep sense of pain and trouble inherent in the lives of the common people. Certainly this is in line with Pasolini’s Marxist ideology, but the film is no cheap ploy or propaganda piece. One is invited into the suffering and scarcity of the characters on the scene in a a particularly organic way. The cinematography invites the viewer to see Jesus in a new light. If this film and its agenda had been filmed by a director of less skill it would have become intolerable to watch. Pasolinin is able to present a controversial understanding of Jesus in a very acceptable way by using only the Biblical text as dialogue and scenery/other chapters to really push the agenda inherent in the movie.

This film also affords an intimate look at many characters. Close up shots and long silences from the lack of dialogue allows Pasolini to invite the viewr into the lives of the characters. The opening scene has a well done close up of Mary with cuts to the adolescent Joseph. The emotion and passion is unmistakable. The Biblical account does not give Joseph’s initial reaction to Mary’s pregnant state. Pasolini cannot have a dialogue in this case, so he uses good acting and cinematography to tell the story. So often mediocre film relies on dialogue and effects to drive the plot. Pasolini’s film is remarkable because it uses the understatement of black and white film and the skill of his actors and crew to move the plot. This is even more remarkable considering that none of the actors are professionals. This film is note worry simply from these technical aspects of filmmaking.

Pasolini also adeptly navigates the tension between a human and divine Jesus. Pasolini does not shy away from showing miracles, though they happen in abrupt and disjointed ways. The teachings of Jesus are also central to the film, namely the Sermon on the Mount. The divine Jesus of the virgin birth and miracles is shown alongside the mortal, moral teacher. Few other Jesus films where crafted in such a way as to preserve such a tension. Pasolini is likely able to maintain this dual identity by adhering closely to the Gospel account.

Critique

The Marxist influence and agenda of the movie, while not abrasive, is rather idiosyncratic. While the cinematography and visual action on the scene is enthralling, it is occasionally disjointed from traditional understandings of the life of Jesus. The Sermon on the Mount is traditionally viewed as a teaching on how to be a good moral agent. Pasolini's presentation makes it into a sort of 'call to arms' in which a social transformation is central. The Sermon on the Mount becomes more about social activism and societal reform than it does about how to live one's life before God. Much of the film could be collapsed into this sort of understanding. By the end of the film the viewer comes away with an idea of how to be a good citizen in the world, but not necessarily how to be a faithful person before God.

The historicity of Jesus is also uniquely challenged in this film. Pasolini is much more concerned about the impact of Jesus than about the Jesus of history. While using the Biblical text, Pasolini's visuals re-write the Jesus story in profound ways. Jesus amongst the poor masses and the influence this had is more important than the complex and confusing character seemingly portrayed in the Gospel. Pasolini's Jesus is a Jesus without ambiguity. The viewer knows who Jesus is and what Jesus is about, its only the disciples that seem to misunderstand Jesus' social message. This stands as a weakness in Pasolini's presentation because part of the power of the Jesus narrative is its ambiguity. This ambiguity and indistinctness of Jesus' activity in history could lend itself to a very deep plot. What we receive on the screen, is rather superficial in that there is little development to who Jesus is or what Jesus is about.

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.