Though his first two films contained serious religious
overtones, Pier Paolo Pasolini’s point of view was never going to line up
exactly with that of the Vatican. Accattone (1961) and especially Mamma Roma (1962) posited that the
underclass of ‘60s Italy was closer to God than the supposedly pious
bourgeoisie of a society that called itself Catholic. Unsurprisingly, Pasolini’s radical
combination of Christian iconography and stark neorealism, which depicted
pimps, thieves, and poor workers as modern religious icons, didn’t sit well
with the church. Even if Pasolini had
presented himself as a straightforward Catholic, it’s unlikely that the church
would want to be associated with an openly gay Marxist, though the director’s
relationship to sexuality and leftist politics was probably no less complicated
than his religious views were.
Suffice to say, Pasolini was not generally considered to be
a Christian artist at this point of his career.
In 1962, Pasolini was invited by Pope John XXIII to a dialogue between
high-ranking members of the Vatican and non-Catholic artists. Apparently something in this meeting struck a
chord with Pasolini, as he subsequently visited Assisi to attend a seminar at a
Franciscan monastery. At some point during
this trip, Pasolini came across a copy of the New Testament and read all four
gospels straight through, in the process gaining inspiration for a film called The Gospel According to St. Matthew
(1964).
In the interim between the Assissi trip and the filming of The Gospel, Pasolini was commissioned to
film one of the four segments for an omnibus film entitled RoGoPaG (the odd title being a combination of the first letters of
the four directors’ last names: Roberto
Rossellini, Jean-Luc Godard, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and the lesser-known Ugo
Gregoretti). Pasolini’s 32-minute
contribution was La ricotta (1963), a project clearly inspired by the
preparation that that the director was doing for The Gospel. In many ways,
this short film is just as much a statement of purpose as The Gospel wound up being, and it finds Pasolini further developing
his concept of the poor as the true modern spiritual figures while also
offering a blatant criticism of the bloated epics that often passed for
religious cinema in the 1960s.
La ricotta takes
place during the filming of what appears to be a glossy religious epic in the
style of King of Kings (1961). The opening credits of La ricotta roll over color footage of the film-within-a-film’s crew
doing a twist to a frivolous and simplistically repetitive pop
instrumental. After this jarring opener,
the first instance of color cinematography in Pasolini’s cinema, the film
alternates between documentary-style black and white footage of the cast and
crew of the Biblical epic joking around between takes and static color shots of
the actors in the film attempting to hold iconographic poses around a cross as
frustrated offscreen stagehands yell commands.
The in-between takes scenes alternate between the distant and seemingly
depressed director (Orson Welles) brooding from his director’s chair, and
depictions of the struggles of a poor extra named Stracci (Mario Cipriani) to
get some food for himself and his starving family. Eventually, members of the cast mock Stracci
by overfeeding him huge amounts of cheese and watermelon, shortly before a
scene where the extra has to go up on a cross.
The huge amount of food that the poor man eats, combined with the awkward
position he has to assume as he is “crucified” on film winds up killing
Stracci. Finally noticing his extra’s
death, the director laments that Stracci “had no other way to remind us that he
was alive.”
La ricotta is even
bolder than Mamma Roma in its
treatment of Italy’s underclass as modern religious icons, largely because the
film is more openly critical of the hypocrisies of the bourgeoisie than the earlier
films were. Where Accattone was concerned entirely with poor characters, and Mamma Roma featured only brief glimpses
of slightly more middle class figures, La
ricotta features an entire film cast and crew who stand in for Italy’s
upper crust. Stracci’s status as an
alternately mocked and ignored extra marks him as a clear representative of
Italy’s suffering working class. La ricotta makes its point rather
bluntly, showing the characters that represent Italy’s dominant value system
behaving cravenly while attempting to appear pious, while the character
representing the poor is crucified right under their noses. But it’s a good
kind of bluntness, making a fairly complicated point in a clear, concise, and
memorable way. It helps that much of the
film is presented as a broad comedy rather than a humorless morality play.
Pasolini also complicates the film’s potentially over-schematic
plot by apparently identifying himself with Orson Welles’ director
character. While the film that Welles’
character is making appears to be the polar opposite of what The Gospel According to St. Matthew would
become, and is obviously meant to be a critique of big-budget Biblical epics,
Pasolini nonetheless has the Welles character read one of Pasolini’s own poems
out loud at one point, suggesting an element of self-critique. Though Pasolini celebrates the working class
in this film and others, he also seems hyper-aware here of his own status as a
relatively privileged middle-class citizen.
It seems that Pasolini may have doubted whether he, as a person
occupying a similar social status to Welles’ character, had the ability to make
a sincere religious film.
Despite whatever reservations Pasolini may have felt about his
ability to depict the life and death of Christ, he ultimately went through with
his plans to depict the Passion in his third feature-length film, The
Gospel According to St. Matthew (1964).
Departing almost entirely from the expected aesthetic of Biblical films,
The Gospel is presented in a gritty
black and white, neorealistic style that suggests what it might have looked
like if cinema verite documentarians had been present during Jesus’
lifetime. While the filmmaking style is
similar to the aesthetic that Pasolini had previously adopted on Accattone and Mamma Roma, the context and setting of the new film is obviously
radically different. The effect makes The Gospel seem like one of the only truly
serious Christian films. (The Last Temptation of Christ, Martin
Scorsese’s 1988 depiction of many of the same events, is also a serious film,
but it is clearly intended as a radical interpretation of Biblical stories,
whereas The Gospel seems more like an
attempt to get an accurate version of Jesus’ life on screen). If I were a Christian, this would almost
certainly be one of my all-time favorite films, but even as a non-believer I
can appreciate The Gospel’s sincerity
and ambition. It is clearly Pasolini’s
most major and important cinematic statement to this point, and certainly one
of the best religiously themed films ever made.
Working without a script, and condensing the events of
Matthew’s Gospel only to the point needed to bring the film to an
acceptable length, Pasolini brings the story of Jesus (too often depicted as a
schlocky epic) back down to earth. The
rough edges of Pasolini’s early films – the sometimes clumsy edits separating
scenes, the occasionally stilted dialogue readings of his largely
non-professional casts – are present here as well, and once again the
almost-documentary feel makes the film feel more grounded and realistic than a
normal movie. For his Jesus, Pasolini
cast a Spanish economics student named Enrique Irazoqui, whose dark complexion
and short black hair gives him the appearance of an actual person from the
region where Christ is said to have lived rather than the conventional blond
haired and blue eyed depiction of Jesus in most Christian iconography. There is something unusually believable about
this film’s version of Christ, both as a member of the community depicted in
the film and as a half-supernatural prophet who receives visions from God. Even the miracles that Jesus performs in the
film are presented in a matter-of-fact way that makes them seem less like spectacles
than like simple facts of life. The
effect of Jesus walking on water was probably handled fairly simply, most
likely accomplished by Irazoqui walking on an unseen platform under the water,
but it is filmed in such a low-key way that it seems simultaneously miraculous
and realistic.
It would certainly be reductive to say that The Gospel According to St. Matthew is simply
an example of neorealism. Aside from the
period setting and the occasional glimpses of the supernatural, the film has a
fairly elaborate and complex use of background music that greatly expands on the
beautiful use of classical music in Pasolini’s previous features. Where Accattone
used multiple snippets of a Bach composition, and Mamma Roma utilized a handful of spiritual Vivaldi pieces, The Gospel draws music from a variety of
different genres and sources. Classical
music is prominent once again, with bits of Bach and Mozart appearing alongside
snatches from Prokofiev’s score for Sergei Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky (1938). A
version of the spiritual “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child” appears at
several different points, and there is also a snippet of a mournful Robert
Johnston blues in one of the later scenes.
The most striking and beautiful piece of music in the film is an African
chant called “Missa Luba,” an ecstatic piece of music that appears during a
number of the film’s miraculous events, such as Jesus’ birth and his later
resurrection. Luis E. Bacalov also contributed
some original music to the film, rounding out what is by far the most eclectic
selection of music in any Pasolini film to this point.
Pasolini’s growing skills as a stylist are felt not only on
the soundtrack, but in the way that he stages some of the film’s key
scenes. His depiction of the Sermon on
the Mount is particularly striking, with a closeup of Jesus’ face making each
line feel personal rather than preachy.
Each line is also clearly delivered on a different day, with the weather
changing behind Jesus’ head, even as the whole multi-day sermon is edited
together as one continuous speech, Christ’s demeanor unchanging whether it is
the middle of calm day or the beginning of a stormy night. The decision to film Christ’s pre-crucifixion
trial from a distance is uniquely tasteful; rather than overdramatize Jesus’
persecution with a bunch of expressionistic horror shots of his accuser’s grimaces,
as Mel Gibson did in his hysterical Passion
of the Christ (2004), Pasolini puts the viewer in the perspective of
someone in the crowd, emphasizing our commonality with the film’s non-Christ
characters rather than overplaying the sliminess of the men who put Jesus to
death.
A large part of what makes Pasolini’s depiction of Jesus so
convincing is that he doesn’t use Christ to stand in for any sort of
cause. He simply presents the story of
Jesus in the most realistic manner possible.
While some commentators have referred to Pasolini’s version of Jesus as
a Marxist, there isn’t much in the film to back that claim up; while Jesus
delivers the famous line about a rich man entering Heaven being less likely than
a needle passing through a camel’s eye, it isn’t as if that line is given more
emphasis than any of Jesus’ more gnomic pronouncements. The film makes no attempt to convert viewers
to a particular cause (including Christianity), and the version of Jesus
presented in the film often seems as weird and unapproachable as a guy walking
on water and claiming to be the son of God would if you actually encountered
him in real life. Pasolini’s version of
the Jesus story is the most convincing in popular culture precisely because it
isn’t trying to sell the viewer anything, or use the story to justify any
particular social agenda. It is a simple
story told directly, powerfully, and beautifully.
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