The Gospel According to St. Matthew (film)

The Gospel According to St. Matthew () is a 1964 epic biblical drama film, written and directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini. It is a cinematic rendition of the story of Jesus according to the Gospel of Matthew, from the Nativity through the Resurrection.

In the neorealist tradition, the film employed a cast of mostly amateur actors, and was filmed entirely on-location throughout Southern Italy. The dialogue is taken directly from the Gospel of Matthew, as Pasolini felt that "images could never reach the poetic heights of the text." He reportedly chose Matthew's Gospel over the others because he felt "John was too mystical, Mark too vulgar, and Luke too sentimental."

The Gospel According to St. Matthew premiered on 4 September 1964 at the 25th Venice International Film Festival, where it won the Grand Jury Prize and three Nastro d'Argento Awards, including Best Director. It was nominated for three Oscars—Best Art Direction, Best Costume Design and Best Score. In 2015, the Vatican City newspaper L'Osservatore Romano called it the best film on Christ ever made. The film is considered a classic of world cinema and the neorealist genre.

In Roman Galilee, the local Jewish community lives in poverty. Although the Romans are formally in charge, the Jewish upper class—including King Herod and the Pharisee religious elite—dominates the locals on a day-to-day basis.

The pregnant Mary has a troubled relationship with Joseph, who worries she cheated on him. Joseph reconciles with Mary after an angel tells him that God caused Mary's pregnancy. After Mary bears Jesus Christ, the magi visit the baby Jesus. The angel tells the family to flee to Egypt. Herod—who fears a prophecy that Jesus will become king of the Jews—brutally massacres the region's infants. The family return to Judea after Herod dies.

Many years later, John the Baptist preaches a brazenly anti-establishment message to the commoners of Galilee. Jesus visits John to be baptized, and God appears to them. Satan offers Jesus wealth and power, but Jesus declines.

Jesus recruits a band of disciples. He warns them that "I came not to bring peace, but a sword" and that they will suffer on his behalf. He travels around the country with his disciples, healing the blind, raising the dead, exorcising demons, and proclaiming the arrival of the Kingdom of God and the promised salvation. The film rapidly canvasses his parables and sayings, including the Sermon on the Mount, in a series of montaged monologues. Meanwhile, the new king imprisons John the Baptist before capriciously executing him to impress his stepdaughter.

Jesus is generally uncomfortable showing his divine power in public (with the exception of the miracle of the loaves and fishes). He prefers to preach radical messages to working-class crowds and children. The wealthy are alienated by Jesus's socially conscious teachings, the religious elite are threatened by his contempt for their legalism and hypocrisy, and even commoners are concerned with his asceticism. Matthew is wounded when Jesus chooses Peter over him to lead the church, but accepts Jesus's decision.

Although the public—which wants to see the supernatural—initially ignores Jesus, he attracts a large following and triumphantly enters Jerusalem to cheering crowds. The Roman army is called in for crowd control and beats several followers of Jesus.

After Jesus claims to be the Jews's prophesied Messiah, the chief priests plot to murder him. Judas Iscariot betrays Jesus after Jesus scolds him in front of the other disciples. During the Agony in the Garden, Jesus accepts his fate, which he has long known. The chief priests organize a mob to arrest Jesus. The apostles rise to defend him, but Jesus insists on surrendering peacefully. The chief priests hand Jesus over to the Romans. Fearing a similar fate, Peter denies Jesus three times. After escaping, he breaks down crying. Judas commits suicide after realizing even the priests are disgusted by his treachery.

The Roman governor, Pilate, declares Jesus innocent but executes him anyway to placate the chief priests. Mary buries her son. After three days, Jesus rises from the dead and instructs his disciples to spread the gospel throughout the world.

Cast

Enrique Irazoqui as Jesus
Margherita Caruso as Mary, mother of Jesus
Susanna Pasolini as older Mary
Marcello Morante as Joseph
Mario Socrate as John the Baptist
Settimio Di Porto as Peter
Alfonso Gatto as Andrew
Luigi Barbini as James
Giacomo Morante as John
Giorgio Agamben as Philip
Guido Cerretani as Bartholomew
Rosario Migale as Thomas
Ferruccio Nuzzo as Matthew
Marcello Galdini as James, son of Alphaeus
Elio Spaziani as Jude
Enzo Siciliano as Simon
Otello Sestili as Judas Iscariot
Rodolfo Wilcock as Caiaphas
Alessandro Tasca as Pontius Pilate
Amerigo Bevilacqua as Herod the Great
Francesco Leonetti as Herod Antipas
Franca Cupane as Herodias
Paola Tedesco as Salome
Rossana Di Rocco as Angel of the Lord
Renato Terra as Legion
Eliseo Boschi as Joseph of Arimathea
Natalia Ginzburg as Mary of Bethany
Silvio Citti as Stephaton
Ninetto Davoli as a shepherd

Production

Background

According to Barth David Schwartz's book Pasolini Requiem (1992), the impetus for the film took place in 1962. Pasolini had accepted Pope John XXIII's invitation for a new dialogue with non-Catholic artists, and subsequently visited the town of Assisi to attend a seminar at a Franciscan monastery there. The papal visit caused traffic jams in the town, leaving Pasolini confined to his hotel room; there, he came across a copy of the New Testament. Pasolini read all four Gospels straight through, and he claimed that adapting a film from one of them "threw in the shade all the other ideas for work I had in my head." He said that he decided to "remake the Gospel by analogy".

Pasolini had the idea to not reproduce exactly a historic, casual Christ, but rather projecting the present-day society of southern Italy onto that figure, a Christ after 2,000 years of narrative build-up. As he explained,

<blockquote>Along with this method of reconstruction by analogy, we find the idea of myth and epics [...] so when narrating the history of Christ, I did not reconstruct Christ such as he actually was. If I had reconstructed Christ's history as it actually was, I would not have made a religious film, since I am not a believer. I do not think Christ was God's son. I would have made a positivist or Marxist reconstruction if any, so at the best of cases, a life of one of the five or six thousands saints preaching at that moment in Palestine. However, I did not want to do that, I am not interested in profanations: that is just a fashion I loathe, it is petit bourgeois. I want to consecrate things again, because that is possible, I want to re-mythologize them. I did not want to reconstruct the life of Christ as it really was, I wanted to make the history of Christ plus two thousand years of Christian storytelling about the life of Christ, since it is the two thousands years of Christian history that have mythologized this biography, one that as such would have been virtually insignificant otherwise. My film is the life of Christ after two thousands years of stories on the life of Christ. That is what I had in mind.</blockquote>

The film was dedicated to John XXIII. The announcement at the opening credits reads that it is "dedicato alla cara, lieta, familiare memoria di Giovanni XXIII" ("dedicated to the dear, joyous, familiar memory of Pope John XXIII"). Pasolini was particularly critical with the new Pope Paul VI (1963), at a moment when he was drafting a storyboard for a follow-up to the film, this time on Paul the Apostle. The project due for 1966–1967 never took off, but it was advanced.

The film was co-produced by Arco Films and French company Lux Compagnie Cinématographique. He received a suspended prison sentence. Nonetheless, he continued making the Matthew film. Pasolini was well-known for being an atheist, a homosexual, and a Marxist. It has been speculated that the real motive for his prosecution may have been to preemptively discredit him in front of Catholic audiences, in case The Gospel proved to be iconoclastic. Due to the controversy, Pasolini strengthened the disclaimer at the start of La ricotta, saying that he believed the Passion of Christ was "the greatest [story] that ever took place."

At a press conference in 1966, Pasolini was asked why he, an unbeliever, had made a film which dealt with religious themes. He responded that "If you know that I am an unbeliever, then you know me better than I do myself. I may be an unbeliever, but I am an unbeliever who has a nostalgia for a belief." Therefore, he sets his criticism against a backdrop of sheer religious concern for the role assumed by the Church, the organization, for centuries.

Casting

In Italian neorealist style, most of the actors Pasolini hired were non-professionals. Enrique Irazoqui (Jesus) was a 19-year-old economics student from Spain and a communist activist who met Pasolini through Elsa Morante. Irazoqui initially did not want to play the role for ideological reasons, but was convinced by Morante and a local leftist writer named , who told him to play a "Gramscian" Christ. Irazoqui donated his entire acting salary to anti-Franco causes, and was targeted by the Falangist government upon his return to Spain for his participation in the film. For the elderly Mary, Pasolini cast his own mother, Susanna, who had herself lost a son (Pasolini's brother, a resistance fighter during World War II).

The rest of the cast were mainly locals from Barile, Matera, and Massafra, where the film was shot. The cast also included noted intellectuals such as writers Enzo Siciliano, Alfonso Gatto, and Natalia Ginzburg, poet Rodolfo Wilcock, and philosopher Giorgio Agamben.

Much of the dialogue was overdubbed by professional voice actors in post-production. For example, Irazoqui was dubbed by stage and screen actor Enrico Maria Salerno.

Filming

Pasolini intentionally shot the film in Italy. He visited the Holy Land but found the locations unsuitable and "commercialized." Pasolini's location scouting in the Holy Land is documented in the adjoining feature-length documentary Location Hunting in Palestine, released a year later. For Mary and Joseph's working-class home, Pasolini used the real-life cave dwellings of the Sassi di Matera. However, not every scene or inference is drawn from Matthew. For example, Matthew does not say which disciple Jesus told off during the Anointing; only John says that it was Judas (John 12). From John's detail, Pasolini draws the inference that "Jesus's manipulation of his disciples' feelings for him directly spurs Judas's betrayal." The detail that Mary was present at the Crucifixion is also drawn from John, not Matthew (John 19). Pasolini also focuses on scenes to which Matthew gives comparatively limited attention, such as the massacre of the innocents. George Aichele adds that "any careful reader will see important differences between Matthew's and Pasolini's Jesuses. ... [A]lthough the movie's Jesus is undoubtedly a prophet, he has little interest in the end of the world. Like any revolutionary, he would rather change it."

The score of the film, arranged by Luis Enríquez Bacalov, is eclectic; ranging from Johann Sebastian Bach (e.g. Mass in B Minor and St Matthew Passion) to Odetta ("Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child"), to Blind Willie Johnson ("Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground"), to the Jewish ceremonial declaration "Kol Nidre" and the "Gloria" from the Congolese Missa Luba. Pasolini stated that all of the film's music was of a sacred or religious nature from all parts of the world and multiple cultures or belief systems.

Some left-wing film critics, however, wrote unfavorable reviews. Oswald Stack criticized the film's "abject concessions to reactionary ideology." In response to criticism from the left, Pasolini admitted that, in his opinion, "there are some horrible moments I am ashamed of. ... The Miracle of the loaves and the fishes and Christ walking on water are disgusting pietism." He also stated that the film was "a reaction against the conformity of Marxism. The mystery of life and death and of suffering – and particularly of religion ... is something that Marxists do not want to consider. But these are and have always been questions of great importance for human beings." and Martin Scorsese, who instructed the cast and crew of his own Biblical film The Last Temptation of Christ to view it.

The Gospel According to Matthew was ranked number 10 (in 2010) and number 7 (in 2011) in the Arts and Faith website's Top 100 Films, also is in the Vatican's list of 45 great films and Roger Ebert's Great Movies list. Forty years later, Ebert remarked that The Gospel According to Matthew and The Passion of the Christ were the only two religious films he had ever seen "that really seem[] to deal with what actually happened" with Jesus's death.

On Rotten Tomatoes the film has an approval rating of 92%, based on 36 reviews, and an average rating of 8.6 out of 10, with the critics consensus saying "The Gospel According to St. Matthew forgoes the pageantry of biblical epics in favor of a naturalistic retelling of the Christ story, achieving a respectful if not reverent interpretation with political verve."

Awards and nominations

At the 25th Venice International Film Festival, The Gospel According to Matthew was screened in competition for the Golden Lion, and won the OCIC Award and the Silver Lion. At the film's premiere, a crowd gathered to boo Pasolini but cheered him after the film was over. The film later won the Grand Prize at the International Catholic Film Office.

The Gospel According to Matthew was released in the United States in 1966 and was nominated for three Academy Awards: Art Direction (Luigi Scaccianoce), Costume Design (Danilo Donati), and Score.

Alternate versions

The 2007 Region 1 DVD release from Legend Films features a colourised, English-dubbed version of the film, in addition to the original, black-and-white Italian-language version. (The English-dubbed version is significantly shorter than the original, with a running time of 91 minutes – roughly 40 minutes shorter than the standard version.)

Notes

References

External links

The Gospel According to St. Matthew at AllMovie