just another rebel
by Douglas Messerli
Pier Paolo Pasolini (screenplay and director) Il
vangelo secondo Matteo (The Gospel According to St. Matthew) / 1966
Directed as it was by a homosexual Marxist you
might imagine that Pier Paolo Pasolini’s The Gospel According to St. Matthew
(1966) would have aroused a great deal of protest, particularly coming after
the movie I just commented on. And indeed, there were a few protests planned,
but immediately abandoned upon its premier and after it won the Venice Film
Festival Grand Jury Prize.
Far
more controversial and met with intense protests was Martin Scorsese’s version
of Nikos Kazantzakis’ retelling of the life of Christ in human rather than
divine terms, The Last Temptation of Christ. In that film, again not at
all LBGTQ related, the primary controversies centered around
the Satan-induced hallucinations while on the
cross, and the final passages of the film Christ marries and raises a family
with Mary Magdalene
As
the story goes, after the controversy with La ricotta Pasolini was
invited by Pope John XXIII to be part of a dialogue with non-Catholic artists in
the town of Assisi, and to attend a seminar there at the Franciscan monastery.
The visit of the Pope created such a traffic jam that the director was
consigned to his hotel room, where, after coming across a copy of the New
Testament, he read all four Gospels through, which immediately led him imagine
adapting one of them into a movie. Supposedly, he found “John was too mystical,
Mark too vulgar, and Luke too sentimental." But the work he finally made
remained quite true to Matthew’s version, mostly quoting from it, creating a
work, as he described it, by analogy instead of the usual process of an amalgam
of the several different versions.
Since his film is not primarily an LGBTQ work, in any obvious manner, I shall not
discuss the movie in full here, but will only briefly mention it in relation to
the scenes which end The Gospel According to St. Matthew having to do
with the Crucifixion.
I
will just mention that the brilliance of Pasolini’s film lays in its utter
simplicity. In stark black-and-white—please note if you have watched or are
about to watch a colorized, English-language dubbed version that is also
shorter than the original, you are not truly seeing Pasolini’s film and you
should abandon the memory or your intent immediately—he attempted to re-mythologize
the story by treating it more as a simple and straight-forward history, not
just of events but of the thousands of years of Church belief since then rather
than as reconstruction of Christ’s life as Mel Gibson and others have
attempted. Using non-actors (Christ is played by an economics student at the
time, Enrique Irazoqui), the director stays within the lines of Matthew’s
telling but portrays it so straight-forwardly and simply that any aspect of
belief or faith seems almost beside the point. In his argumentative statements
and sometimes even slightly humorous behavior this Christ is truly one of us
firmly planted in the real. As Roger Ebert describes him:
His personal style is sometimes gentle, as during the Sermon on the
Mount, but more often he speaks with a righteous anger, like a union
organizer or a war protester. His debating style, true to Matthew,
is to answer a question with a question, a parable, or dismissive scorn.
His words are clearly a radical rebuke of his society, its materialism,
and the way it values the rich and powerful over the weak and poor.
Like most of Jewish men of his time, he wears his hair short —none of
the flowing locks of holy cards. He wears a dark, hooded robe so that
his face is often in shadow. He is unshaven but not bearded.
Most of the traditional religious critics were impressed, surprised by
its reverence. And Pasolini’s major critics of the film came, as one might have
expected, came from Marxist leftists. Indeed, the director himself admitted, in
response to leftist criticism, that "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." But he also argued that the film, in part,
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."
Christ in Pasolini’s work meets his end much as any human might, with
fear and trepidation, too weak to even to carry his cross the entire way, it is
carried mostly by Simon with Jesus walking behind. There is no great violence
depicted here except when the nails are pounded into hands, first the man
hanging near Christ, and later Jesus himself crying out in horrible pain.
As
Matthew reports, Christ cries out with the feeling that god has forsaken him.
And when one of the guards suggest the other stop sponging off his lips with
water to see if Elias will save him, Jesus howls in pain, while
somewhere in the distance we do see a half-ruined building crumbling as if an
earthquake has just stuck it, fire observed in its windows. But this
occurrence, like the man who soon will die, may simply be just incidental.
Although his mother and the gathering of friends who stand nearby clearly
suffer, Jesus is not truly different from the other men nailed to a cross that
day in Golgotha.
Christ dies, a ladder is put up against cross, and the body taken down,
the crown of thorns tossed away, the body wrapped in a white winding sheet by
Mary and Mary Magdalene. He is carried without pomp to a grave and a large
stone door pulled into place before the entrance once they have laid him
within.
Pasolini’s Jesus—unlike those who might prefer to perceive the “glory”
of the event such as fundamental Christians, or those who seek the uniqueness
and strangeness of the Crucifixion and Resurrection like Flannery O’Connor who
described herself as a Third Century Christian interested in its mystery and
magic—has been nearly drained of all mythology rather that re-mythologized.
As a nonbeliever myself, I don’t necessarily see this as a problem, but I am
puzzled why those with a deep sense of faith might not be outraged by the
director’s concerned young man killed, like so many others in his time, just
for being an innocent, who believed he could change the society in which he
lived.
And one wonders, with all the horrors self-defined Christians have
perpetuated ever since whether his teachings were ever properly understood or
truly learned.
It
is interesting that in most of the works following this, Pasolini turned away
from neorealism in the direction of fable and historical narratives that
pointed to worlds truly out of the ordinary.
Los Angeles, July 29, 2021
Reprinted from World Cinema Review (July
2021).
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