The Gospel According to St. Matthew (film)

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Il vangelo secondo Matteo
)

The Gospel According to Matthew
Original Italian release poster
Directed byPier Paolo Pasolini
Screenplay byPier Paolo Pasolini
Based onGospel of Matthew
Produced byAlfredo Bini
Starring
    • Enrique Irazoqui
    • Margherita Caruso
    • Susanna Pasolini
    • Marcello Morante
    • Mario Socrate
    • Settimio Di Porto
Cinematography
Titanus Distribuzione
(Italy)
Lux Compagnie Cinématographique (France)
Release dates
  • 4 September 1964 (1964-09-04) (Venice)
  • 2 October 1964 (1964-10-02) (Italy)
Running time
137 minutes[1]
CountriesItaly
France[2]
LanguageItalian

The Gospel According to St. Matthew (

Italian neorealist style, 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 utilizes a cast of non-professional actors, and is 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."[3] He reportedly chose Matthew's Gospel over the others because he had decided that "John was too mystical, Mark too vulgar, and Luke too sentimental."[4]

The film is considered a classic of world cinema and the neorealist genre. After initial release, it won the

Vatican City newspaper L'Osservatore Romano called it the best film on Christ ever made.[5]

Plot

In Galilee during the Roman Empire, Jesus of Nazareth 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 salvation of Israel. He claims to be the Son of God and so, therefore, the prophesied Messiah of Israel, which brings him into direct confrontation with the Jewish temple leaders. He is arrested, handed over to the Romans and charged with sedition against the Roman state, of which he is declared innocent by the Roman governor of Judea, but is, nevertheless, crucified at the behest of the Temple leaders. He rises from the dead after three days.

Cast

Production

Background and pre-production

In 1963, the figure of Christ appeared in

The Gospel of John). Pasolini stated that he decided to "remake the Gospel by analogy" and the film's sparse dialogue all comes directly from the Bible.[8]

Given Pasolini's well-known reputation as an

Marxist, the reverential nature of the film came as a surprise, especially after the controversy of La ricotta. At a press conference in 1966, Pasolini was asked why he, an unbeliever, had made a film which dealt with religious themes; his response was, "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."[9] Therefore, he sets his criticism against a backdrop of sheer religious concern for the role assumed by the Church, the organization, for centuries.[10]

On the idea of analogy, Pasolini emphasized his intention of not reproducing exactly a historic, casual Christ, but projecting the present-day society of southern Italy onto that figure, a Christ after 2,000 years of narrative build-up. As he explained,

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.[11]

The film was dedicated to John XXIII.[12] 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.[13]

Filming and style

Pasolini employed many of the techniques of

Expressionist artist Georges Rouault).[8]

Pasolini described his experience filming The Gospel According to Matthew as very different from his previous films. He stated that while his shooting style on his previous film

cinema verite.' ... The Point is that ... I, a non-believer, was telling the story through the eyes of a believer. The mixture at the narrative level produced the mixture stylistically."[8]

Music

The score of the film, arranged by

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.[8]
Bacalov also composed several original musical tracks.

Reception

Venice
at the premiere of the movie in 1964.

The film received mostly positive reviews from critics, including several Christian critics. Philip French called it "a noble film," and Alexander Walker said that "it grips the historical and psychological imagination like no other religious film I have seen. And for all its apparent simplicity, it is visually rich and contains strange, disturbing hints and undertones about Christ and his mission."[15]

Some Marxist film critics, however, wrote unfavorable reviews. Oswald Stack criticized the film's "abject concessions to

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."[15]

The Russian film director Andrei Tarkovsky liked the film.[16]

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,[17] also is in the Vatican's list of 45 great films and Roger Ebert's Great Movies list.[18][19]

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."[20]

Awards

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.[15]

The film was nominated for the UN Award at the 21st British Academy Film Awards.[21]

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.[22]

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.)

See also

References

  1. ^ "THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO MATTHEW (U)". British Board of Film Classification. 4 November 1964. Retrieved 30 December 2012.
  2. ^ "Lumiere".
  3. ^ "Film as Art: Danél Griffin's Guide to Cinema". Archived from the original on 22 August 2004. Retrieved 7 February 2016.
  4. ^ [1][dead link]
  5. ^ "In Francis' Church Pasolini goes to heaven". Vatican Insider – La Stampa/. Rome. 22 July 2014. Archived from the original on 24 July 2014. Retrieved 9 October 2015.
  6. ^ Wakeman. John. World Film Directors, Volume 2. The H. W. Wilson Company. 1988. pp. 746.
  7. ^ Roger Ebert (14 March 2004). "The Gospel According to St. Matthew". Rogerebert.suntimes.com. Archived from the original on 20 September 2012. Retrieved 3 January 2015.
  8. ^ a b c d Wakeman. pp. 746.
  9. ^ "Pasolini". Cinemaseekers.com. Archived from the original on 19 August 2014. Retrieved 3 January 2015.
  10. .
  11. .
  12. ^ Thomson, Ian (23 February 2013). "Pier Paolo Pasolini: No saint". The Guardian. London. Retrieved 9 October 2015.
  13. ^ On the new draft film, he went as follows: "The film is an extremely violent action against the Church and the Vatican, since I put together a double-sided Paul, i.e. schizophrenic, clearly dislocated into two: one is a saint [...] while the other is a priest, an ex-Pharisaic, one that retrieves his former cultural status and founds the Church. Hence my condemnation; as a mystic he is fine, it is a mystical experience like any other, respectable, I am not judging that, but I do condemn him firmly as the founder of the Church, with all the negative elements inherent to it: sexophobia, anti-Feminism, the organization, the collects, triumphalism, moralism. To sum up, all the things that have made the Church a bad thing." See Martellini, L. 2006, p. 119.
  14. ^ lchadbou-326-26592 (11 July 1965). "Sopralluoghi in Palestina per il vangelo secondo Matteo (1965)". IMDb. Retrieved 3 January 2015.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)
  15. ^ a b c Wakeman. pp. 747.
  16. ^ Aleksandr Lipkov; Robert Bird (1 February 1967). "The Passion According to Andrei: An Unpublished Interview with Andrei Tarkovsky". nostalghia.com. Literaturnoe obozrenie 1988, University of Chicago. pp. 74–80. Retrieved 22 March 2024. Interviewer: "What do you think about Pasolini's Gospel according to Matthew? That's also a kind of historical film." Tarkovsky: "Of course. I like the picture. I like it precisely because its director did not succumb to the temptation of interpreting the Bible. The Bible has been interpreted for two thousand years and no one can reach unanimous agreement. So Pasolini did not set himself this task, he just left the thing in the form in which it was born. Many feel that the image of a militant cruel Christ was made up by the author of the film. Not true! Read the Gospels and you will see that this was a cruel, cantankerous, irreconcilable man. Moreover with what genius was it written! On the one hand he's God and the Church has been relying on him for two thousand years, but he succumbs to doubt in the garden of Gethsemane. What could be simpler than to call for help from his father and avoid dying on the cross, but he doesn't do this. He is all back-to-front..."
  17. ^ "Arts & Faith Top 100: The Gospel According to Matthew". Arts & Faith. Archived from the original on 22 January 2015. Retrieved 3 January 2015.
  18. ^ "USCCB – (Film and Broadcasting) – Vatican Best Films List". United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. Archived from the original on 22 April 2012. Retrieved 3 January 2015.
  19. ^ Roger Ebert (14 March 2004). "The Gospel According to St. Matthew Movie Review (1964)". RogerEbert.com. Retrieved 3 January 2015.
  20. ^ The Gospel According to St. Matthew at Rotten Tomatoes
  21. ^ "BAFTA Awards: Film in 1968". British Academy of Film and Television Arts. Retrieved 26 January 2016. for the best Film embodying one or more of the principles of the United Nations Charter in 1968
  22. ^ Crowther, Bosley (18 February 1966). "Movie Review – The Gospel According to St Matthew – Screen: The Life of Jesus:Pasolini's Film Opens at the Fine Arts". The New York Timesvv. Retrieved 3 January 2015.

Further reading

External links