Martyrs and Marxists
Part VII of the Celluloid Christ series
The last time I watched Pier Paolo Pasolini’s The Gospel According to St. Matthew was when I made it an option for the Christology final exam I discussed in the “Celluloid Christ” post that started this series. I included it in this series because I frankly did not remember much about it, or about my reaction to it.
After watching the Jesus epics of the 1960s and 70s, this film was a serious palate cleanser. Not because of its length (at 137 minutes, about a third the length of Jesus of Nazareth’s 382 minutes, but not much shorter than King of Kings 160 minute running time), but rather because of the core interpretive decision that Pasolini made about presenting the life of Jesus. While so many other Jesus films seek to incorporate material from some combination of the four canonical gospels, this film (as the title indicates) hews only to the narrative in Matthew’s Gospel. More importantly, the spoken dialogue in the film only comes from the Gospel.
Thus in contrast to King of Kings, The Greatest Story Ever Told, and Jesus of Nazareth, there are no invented scenes, no invented characters, and no invented dialogue. Pasolini does not try to fill in potential gaps in the story or to create relationships other than what the gospel includes.
This lack of invented dialogue leads to some quite effectively composed scenes, such as the infancy story that opens the film. We first see the face of a young Mary, then the face of Joseph, then a panned out shot of a very visibly pregnant Mary. Joseph walks off, down a stone path, leaving a saddened Mary behind. We hear the soundtrack, but no dialogue. After Joseph falls asleep in town, the music abruptly cuts out: he wakes, and we see and hear an angel deliver the first dialogue: “Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife.” Joseph returns along the same path back to Mary, they reconcile wordlessly, both smiling.
The sequence lacks words but is pregnant with meaning. Mary’s trepidation, Joseph’s feeling of betrayal, the strength of their renewed union: all are effectively communicated to the audience. This is all the more impressive given that the actors in the film are nearly all non-professionals. The younger Virgin Mary was played by Margherita Caruso, a fourteen year old Italian teenager, in her only film role, while the older Virgin Mary was played by Susanna Pasolini, the director’s mother, making her film debut at 73 years old.
The use of non-professional actors, a common feature of the Italian neorealist style of film that Pasolini worked in, helped to ground a second thing I kept noting in the film: there are just a lot of shots of people standing around, looking. In many of them, the camera either pans from one to the next, or it just cuts from person to person. Many of these people have no lines, or even action, but are simply there to watch and perhaps react with their eyes and faces.
This first really struck me as the holy family was preparing to go into Egypt. Joseph has the donkey prepared, Mary brings out the baby to ride, and there’s just a little group of kids watching as they set off. But this continues. It might be unintentionally funny that when Jesus says to a man he has just healed “tell no man that you have been healed,” there is a crowd of more than twenty people standing around and watching.
Pasolini’s consistent return to the gaze of these people does two things. First, it reinforces Pasolini’s own emphasis on the people, especially the poor and marginalized, of the world. Pasolini was both a socialist and an atheist, and while working on the film he said:
My reading of the Gospel could not but be a Marxist reading but, at the same time, the allure of the irrational, of the divine that dominates throughout the gospel, snaked around within me. As a Marxist, I cannot explain it, and it cannot be explained by Marxism itself. Up to a certain conscious place, actually in full conscience, it is a Marxist work: I couldn’t shoot those scenes without a moment of truth, understood as actual life.1
That Marxist sensibility is reflected both in the relative materialism of his film (many parts of the Gospel of Matthew that indicate the transcendence of Jesus and the divine are left out) but also in his attention to the “proletariat.”
Second, I think it expresses a strong sense of witness. We the audience gaze upon those who gaze upon Christ. We see them perform all the reactions people do on encountering Christ - awe, fear, hope, rejection. It is an early version of “Spielberg face,” where we see a character’s reaction to something before we see the thing itself.2
I have written before about how the apostles in particular are often the stand-in for the audience in mediating who Jesus is, but Pasolini expands this out to nearly everyone who might have chanced upon Jesus, the vast majority of whom are unnamed and unknown to us, just as the people portraying them are unnamed and unknown to us.
The idea of witness emerges in a second place, particularly in the trials of Jesus before the Sanhedrin and Pilate. There are many shots in the film that have a handheld, point-of-view style shot, but the trial scenes maintain this throughout. The audience sees the trials from the perspective first of Peter and then of John, who are standing amid the crowd. Their view is always in motion, often blocked by someone standing before them. The audio is more muted, evoking the distance they were standing at. We don’t even see the full trial in either case, but rather seem to come in while it is already in progress.
As I watched these scenes, I was reminded of the practice of composition of place in Ignatian contemplation. In the first week Spiritual Exercises, St. Ignatius of Loyola writes that
The First Prelude is a composition made by imagining the place. Here we should take notice of the following. When a contemplation or meditation is about something that can be gazed on, for example, a contemplation of Christ our Lord, who is visible, the composition consists of seeing in imagination the physical place where that which I want to contemplate is taking place. By physical place I mean, for instance, a temple or a mountain where Jesus Christ or Our Lady happens to be, in accordance with the topic I desire to contemplate.3
One places oneself in the scriptural scene that one is meditating on, imagining it through all of one’s senses. Film can really only cover two of these, but Pasolini’s trial scenes are effective visually and aurally in composing the place for his audience.
Of course, who is the Jesus that Pasolini trains our gaze upon? He’s portrayed by Enrique Irazoqui, a nineteen year old economics student and non-professional actor. Irazoqui’s performance is serious and confident, rarely smiling (mostly only in the scenes where Jesus welcomes small children), often vociferous with prophetic denunciations. There’s a magnetic charisma to his portrayal, supported by his first encounter with the disciples (who, without hesitation get up and follow him when called).
The film is not a psychological portrait of Jesus or an investigation into what tensions he did or did not experience as one person with two natures. The only scene that communicates any doubt on Jesus’ part is the Agony in the Garden, but even this scene is more acceptance and resignation than fear or temptation.
The question of two natures was not so much a question for Pasolini, actually. In a press release from 1964, he said
In very simple and poor words: I do not believe that Christ is the son of God, because I’m not a believer – at least in my conscience. But I do believe that Christ is divine: that is, I believe that, in him, humanity is so high, rigorous, ideal, that it goes beyond the common limits of humanity.4
The tension that Pasolini sees in Matthew is not between his divinity and humanity, but rather between Jesus and the world:
The figure of Christ should have, at the end, the same violence of a resistance: something that radically contradicts the life that is evolving for the modern man, its grey orgy of cynicism, irony, practical brutality, compromise, conformism, glorification of one’s own identity with the features of the masses, hate for any form of diversity, theological anger without religion.5
In her book Pasolini: The Sacred Flesh, Stefania Benini summarizes by saying that “Matthew’s Christ clearly represents for Pasolini the antithesis of the modern man (and especially of the bourgeois) in the age of late capitalism.”6
Perhaps what is most striking about the film, then, is that someone who was not himself a believer,7 and who did not set out to make a “religious” film, nonetheless made a film that is highly regarded by religious people.8 Some of this positive reception is connected to Pasolini’s portrayal of Christ’s love for the poor and the marginalized, which is done more effectively than most other Jesus films. Also, some have praised the contemplative character of the film, which was achieved both by hewing closely to the text and by rejecting more typical cinematic bombast.
I think these are essential to that reception, but I think a third point is this idea of tension. Some kind of tension is needed for dramatic storytelling. So many Jesus films, especially from the 1960s onward, find that tension within Jesus himself, whether in conflicted desires, conflicted natures, or conflicted relationships.
The story we witness in Pasolini’s film is the conflict between Jesus and “the world.” While Pasolini sees this “world” fundamentally as the bourgeois, capitalist world, I suspect non-socialists can also articulate ways in which the world is sinful and thus under Christ’s judgment. Jesus’ opposition to this world, which is represented in the film variously by the Herod, the Pharisees, Pilate, the rich young man, and other Gospel characters, is a challenge to all those unwilling to let go their nets, throw down their crutches, give up their wealth, or surrender whatever else anchors them in this fallen world.9
In this way, Pasolini’s film, perhaps unwittingly, ties together the two meanings of martyrdom. The film powerfully highlights the witnesses to Christ, and makes us witnesses as well. And the film reminds these witnesses of the call to die to our possessions, our unhealthy attachments, our very selves, and then take up the cross and follow him.
Stray thoughts about The Gospel According to St. Matthew:
The film lacks any mention of the Kingdom of Heaven, despite its frequent usage in the Gospel. This is unsurprising, given Pasolini’s rejection of the transcendent, but it does stick out.
The film also lacks a Transfiguration scene, which again is unsurprising for Pasolini. But it also made me realize that I don’t think any of the films I’ve watched so far have had a Transfiguration scene. It’s odd, as I think this could be so powerfully done via the medium. If you know of a good cinematic Transfiguration scene, let me know in the comments.
Although obviously impossible now, part of me wishes that Pasolini would have gone on to make a movie for each of the four gospels, keeping the same actors for the same roles, following the same rules about dialogue, but letting the themes and emphases of the different gospels come through.
Alternatively, maybe a project for some today would be to have four different directors each make a movie on one of the gospels, but again keep the same actors, costumes, and locations where possible. I don’t think that will happen, but a man can dream.
Next time in the Celluloid Christ series: The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), directed by Martin Scorsese. You can find links to all the posts as they come out in the series page.
Quoted in Stefania Benini, Pasolini: The Sacred Flesh (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015), 66.
The best version of this is of course the dinosaur reveal in Jurassic Park, with Dr. Grant, then Dr. Malcolm, then Dr. Sattler’s faces telling us what we are about to see.
Ignatius of Loyola, The Spiritual Exercises and Selected Works, Classics of Western Spirituality (Mahwah, NY: Paulist Press, 1991), 136.
Benini 71-72
Benini 71
Benini 71
Benini writes that “Pasolini was not so much a non-practicing and anticlerical Catholic as he was a spiritual non-believer” (Benini 63).
Most notably, L’Osservatore Romano celebrated the movie’s fiftieth anniversary by declaring it “the best film about Jesus ever made in the history of cinema.” The newspaper described it as an illustration of Pope Francis’ “poor Church for the poor” and the “merciful church.”
I’ve always quite liked David Tracy’s phrase here, that “the Christian is released…from the world, for the world” (David Tracy, The Analogical Imagination: Christian Theology and the Culture of Pluralism (New York: Crossroad, 1981), 48).
Bonus points for a Jurassic Park footnote! 🦕