{[['
']]}
']]}
I envy anyone their first viewing of Pier Paolo Pasolini's Il Vangelo Secondo Matteo (The Gospel According to Matthew, 1964). Hopefully, that first viewing will be in-cinema with a 35mm print so that the film's defamiliarizing visuals can achieve their full and intended impact. My first viewing was at home on DVD screener, yet—even as such—I was tremendously impacted by this film, thrown off by it you might say, and it has lingered with me weeks afterwards. I eagerly anticipate a second viewing tomorrow when a restored 35mm print of Matthew screens at Berkeley's Pacific Film Archive (PFA), as part of the Bay Area's multi-venue tribute to Pasolini.
As Judy Bloch has written in her PFA program note: "What was seen in 1964 as a daringly direct, almost reportorial account of the Gospel of St. Matthew, set against the everyday life of the times, today looks like a radically stylized classic. Pasolini employed a cast of nonprofessional actors, and settings of rugged Southern Italian landscapes and hill towns, shot with a mixture of cinema-verité techniques, expressive close-ups, and ingenious set pieces. His Christ (Catalonian economics student Enrique Irazoqui) is an anguished and determined revolutionary, setting children against their parents as he has turned against his, a peripatetic preacher against the afflictions of social injustice. (He has an artist's ego: 'Only in his own country, a prophet goes unhonored.') His miracles are as matter-of-fact as Pasolini's pageantry is gritty. The faces Pasolini has chosen are those of the rural proletariat, but they evoke parallels with Italian religious art; similarly, the music is a mixture of black spirituals, the Missa Luba, and Bach."
Matthew premiered in competition at the 1964 Venice Film Festival, where—according to John Wakemen, editor of World Film Directors Volume 2: 1945-1985—crowds had gathered prepared to boo Pasolini. He had scandalized Catholic sensibilities a year earlier with his short film La Ricotta—deemed contemptuous of the state religion—earning him a conviction and a four-month jail sentence. Instead, the film was awarded the OCIC Award and the Special Jury Prize, audiences cheered, and his conviction was voided by an appeals court. Matthew went on to have a robust festival run, opening theatrically in the United States in 1966, receiving three Oscar® nominations for Art Direction (Luigi Scaccianoce), Costume Design (Danilo Donati), and Score (Luis Enriquez Bacalov).
Matthew also won the grand prize of the International Catholic Film Office, which screened the film inside Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, and it was one of 45 films recommended by the Vatican in 1996 in honor of the centenary of cinema; honors that—Kenneth Turan reports—were "huffily condemned" by fellow director Franco Zeffirelli whose religious films Brother Sun, Sister Moon (1972) and Jesus of Nazareth (1973) did not make the list. Zeffirelli complained Pasolini was "not only mediocre but also an atheist.''
As Matthew approached the U.S., anticipatory reviews were more consistently enthusiastic. Writing for the Autumn 1965 issue of Film Comment, Maryvonne Butcher asserted: "In my opinion, The Gospel According to Matthew is incomparably the most effective picture ever made on a scriptural theme." Veteran British critic Alexander Walker likewise proclaimed that Matthew "grips the historical and psychological imagination like no other religious film I have ever seen." Nearly 40 years later, Roger Ebert concurred: "Pasolini's is one of the most effective films on a religious theme I have ever seen, perhaps because it was made by a nonbeliever who did not preach, glorify, underline, sentimentalize or romanticize his famous story, but tried his best to simply record it." Reporting from the New York premiere for The New York Times, Bosley Crowther praised the film's "flinty" language, naturalistic sense of place, Pasolini's "remarkable avoidance of clichés", and the surprisingly memorable performances of his unskilled actors. As summed up by The Virginia Pilot, Pasolini's film suffered "no starched laundry."
A critical overview of The Gospel According to Matthew requires attention to the sequential waves of criticism reacting to the film: the first wave in the mid-'60s, as stated above, when the film premiered at festivals and during its early theatrical life. The second, nearly 40 years later, occurred in the wake of the controversy elicited by Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ (2004), which inspired reviewers to make comparisons with the existing canon of films depicting the life of Christ, including Pasolini's. One might argue that this seeming necessity emerged as a very good moment indeed for Pasolini's Matthew to be rediscoverd, revisited and re-appreciated, not only comparatively, but on its own terms (which—let's face it—shouldn't have required Gibson's folly).
Ebert provides, perhaps, the most trenchant comparison: "To see the film a few weeks after seeing Gibson's is to understand that there is no single version of his story. It acts as a template into which we fit our ideas, and we see it as our lives have prepared us for it. Gibson sees Christ's suffering as the overwhelming fact of his life, and his film contains very little of Christ's teachings. Pasolini thought the teachings were the central story. If a hypothetical viewer came to The Passion with no previous knowledge of Jesus and wondered what all the furor was about, Pasolini's film would argue: Jesus was a radical whose teachings, if taken seriously, would contradict the values of most human societies ever since."
Of course, as Pasolini's films began to be shown in institutional retrospectives, regional critics responded. By way of example, when Matthew screened as part of the Harvard Film Archives' September 2010 retrospective, Peter Keough wrote of Pasolini's "perverse poetry" at The Phoenix: "Although Pasolini remains faithful to the original text, his Christ … stirs crowds like a revolutionary, and the Marxist subtext couples with a meditative stillness that builds to an epiphany. Everything, including miracles, occurs with blunt literalness but also shimmers with immanence. And so the blunt Crucifixion and the threadbare Resurrection pierce ideology and open into something deeper."
In 2012, Masters of Cinema released Matthew on DVD/Blu-Ray, initiating a fresh suite of critiques, several which were profiled by David Hudson at his Daily (then at MUBI), including Philip French's Guardian review and David Jenkins at Little White Lies, let alone a sizeable earlier quote from Martin Scorsese regarding Pasolini's influence on his own The Last Temptation of Christ (1988).
Perhaps most importantly is when Covey questions Masters of Cinema's "misplaced emphasis" on changing the English title from its previous cinematic releases by removing the "Saint" honorific, thereby restoring the film to its original Italian title. Apparently the addition of "Saint" during the film's U.S. distribution caused Pasolini "considerable anguish." Pasolini's personal wishes aside, Covey suggests it's all much ado about nothing considering most "scholars, Christian and not, have recognized since the 1600s that Matthew wasn't the author at all. The fact that it is an anonymous text did not keep it from being associated, from a very early date in Christian tradition, with one of the first apostles, but the fact is, calling the author 'Matthew' is really just a convention, in textual history terms." Notwithstanding, I follow Master of Cinema's impetus to honor Pasolini's wishes.
At The Guardian, Peter Bradshaw categorizes Matthew as a "brilliant and entirely unforgiving neorealist Passion play" that "looks as if it has been hacked from some stark rockface." He adds: "This really is raw film-making, in a political vernacular which speaks of Pasolini's high, theocratic Marxist belief in the sovereignty of the people, like the publicans and the harlots that Christ said understood him. The texture and feel of what's on the screen is abrasive and uncompromising…. A fierce magnesium flame of a movie."
Also in response to the BFI retrospective, Mamoun Hassan introduced a screening of Pasolini's Matthew to a full house at the National Film Theatre in London on March 8, 2013, and this has been captured on video and offered for viewing at Vimeo.
The trailer for the film is available at YouTube, where the film can likewise be found in its entirety. At the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive CineFiles database, several rare documents on Matthew can be studied.
Post a Comment