Il vangelo secondo Matteo (1964)

Director:

Pier Paolo Pasolini

Writer:

Pier Paolo Pasolini (writer)

Release Date:

2 October 1964 (Italy)

Genre:

Biography | Drama | History

Plot:

The life of Jesus Christ according to the Gospel of Matthew. Pasolini shows Christ as a marxist avant-la-lettre and therefore uses half of the text of Matthew.

Plot Keywords:

Jesus Christ | Walking On Water | Child Murder | Healing Power | Baptism

Awards:

Nominated for 3 Oscars. Another 6 wins & 2 nominations

Cast

Enrique Irazoqui	...	Christ
Margherita Caruso	...	Mary (younger)
Susanna Pasolini	...	Mary (older)
Marcello Morante	...	Joseph
Mario Socrate	...	John the Baptist
Settimio Di Porto	...	Peter
Alfonso Gatto	...	Andrew
Luigi Barbini	...	James
Giacomo Morante	...	John
Giorgio Agamben	...	Philip
Guido Cerretani	...	Bartholomew
Rosario Migale	...	Thomas
Ferruccio Nuzzo	...	Matthew
Marcello Galdini	...	James son of Alphus
Elio Spaziani	...	Thaddeus

Also Known As:

L'évangile selon saint Matthieu (France)
The Gospel According to St. Matthew (USA)

Runtime:

137 min | USA:136 min | USA:91 min (edited version)

Country:

Italy | France

Language:

Italian

Color:

Black and White

Aspect Ratio:

1.66 : 1

Sound Mix:

Mono

Certification:

Finland:K-11 (cinema release) (1967) | Spain:13 | Spain:18 (DVD) | Singapore:PG | South Korea:All | Italy:T | Argentina:16 | Sweden:15 | Norway:11 | UK:U

Filming Locations:

Apulia, Italy

Company:

Arco Film

Trivia:

In keeping with his idea of Jesus Christ as the greatest revolutionary of all time, Pier Paolo Pasolini considered casting Jack Kerouac or Allen Ginsberg in the role. He changed his mind when he met Enrique Irazoqui, a Spanish student of literature, who has written a thesis about Pasolini's novel "Ragazzi di vita" and was very curious to meet him.

Movie Connections:

Edited into Ten Minutes Older: The Cello (2002)

Best Screenwriter Makes for Best Jesus Movie

We have reached a point at which the main point of a movie about Jesus has to be that he was "human". As if his "humanity", in itself, was any more remarkable than that of Barabbas or Philip the Tetrarch or the Man Born Blind. A recent TV miniseries drew roughly 10 % of scenes and dialogue from the Gospels. Most of it was devoted to making the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity look like a slacker goofball, a likable but pitiful example of air-headed arrested development. The approach of moviemakers to the Figure of Jesus has always been crooked. Now it's just gotten out of hand.

In the 60s, they wanted to have it both ways. To make Jesus THE Man, the Son of Man, as it were, in clouds of glory, provoking supernal modes of a Phrygian nature, but in a secularized, not a "dogmatic" way. Things were bound to get worse for the Incarnate Word in cinema. The trick to the post-SUPERSTAR travesties is to diminish Jesus by making Him out to be infantile, weak, unstable, uncertain, neurotic, stupid... and answering all orthodox objections with an appeal to the idea of His True Humanity. "Oh, I suppose YOU think the Man was made of stained glass, that He didn't sweat and weep and laugh and sing and at least WANT to have sex with Mary Magdalene and maybe even the 12 year old daughter of Jairus..."

THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO ST MATTHEW, with roughly 99% of its dialogue and 90% of its very images coming from the eponymous text,puts to shame all other Jesus Pictures on the level of basic conception. It alone has given itself over to the Material, to the Story. It is the only movie on Jesus made in good faith with Him as He is in the Gospel. That's why it's the only one which really works on a dramatic level. With great and terrible justice of at least a poetic kind, the others fail dramatically for having tried to serve two masters: the Gospel Christ and Modernistic, Liberal Christian reductionism in His regard. MATTHEW is the only one whose 33 year old itinerant Preacher matches up perfectly with its hours-old Angel-attending, Magi-sought Celestial Babe. (THE GREATEST STORY EVER TOLD fails most miserably in this regard. It robs Jesus of all glory, all Personal interest. No WAY this kindly but annoyingly sententious unmarried uncle or history prof, called forth Glorias In Excelsis once upon a time...)

It is far from perfect. The scenes of Jesus just standing there preaching get wearisome. Too much of the direction seems deliberately bizarre. Those are obviously dolls being tossed about like footballs in the Massacre of the Innocents scene.

But what brilliant gold on the other side of the scale!

The Face of Jesus, dominated by amazingly piecing eyes...

The strong yet suave voice provided by Enrico Salerno.

Jesus' air of otherworldly authority focused with terrible intensity on His Father's business in this world...

The intelligence and the compassion and the Rabboni-worthy anti-authoritarianism demonstrated in Pasolini's own marginal glosses to Matthew's narrative... The sadness and fear of a peasant girl both pregnant and unmarried... The mute qualms of young men, soldiers, before they are forced to render unto Caesar (Herod the Great, that is) something which SS Peter and Paul themselves might not so readily have declared not to be Ceasar's... (No Christian artist before Pasolini seems to have considered that the "cruel soldiers" of unreflective homiletics and iconography were ORDERED to be cruel by the lawful Powers That Be... Maybe for Pasolini this touch was a Marxist thing. But it should be a Christian thing...)

Magnificent sequences. The young fishermen brothers James and John racing unknowingly down a beach, nets unfurled, towards their Rendevous with Immortal Glory... The way in which the very spaces between Jesus and his hearers in one wind-blown preaching scene are made to convey the idea of His words being carried off on the wind...

And you want the human touch? After this Apocalyptically stern Master of All warns some hapless farmers he happens upon to repent, leaving them to look after him in shock and awe, HE SHOOTS A GLANCE BACK AT THEM! This beautifully natural and "human" moment puts to shame all the others' tendentious "souping-up" of the Sacred Humanity.