The Gospel According to St. Matthew [1964]

 The Gospel According to St. Matthew was a great conundrum as much for the inherently contradictory context surrounding it, as it was for the fierce work that it was. The towering Italian poet, filmmaker and intellectual Pasolini was an avowed Marxist and steadfast atheist; he’d received a suspended prison sentence for his short La Ricotta from the previous year – part of the omnibus Ro.Go.Pa.G. – as it was deemed “blasphemous”; and, one would be hard placed to find something more outrageously ribald, sacrilegious and subversive than his extraordinary Trilogy of Life. It’s therefore astonishing that he made such a faithful, and almost reverential, adaptation of a religious text and unironic inquiry into Jesus’ life and myth. Furthermore, the film’s unflinching neorealism, visceral force, bleak austerity and spare minimalism – and the political readings into Jesus’ radical humanism – placed it at singular odds to the bombastic genuflection in conventional cinematic representations of the Bible, thus drawing parallels to Caravaggio’s blazing, unsettling and violent Biblical paintings. Heading its non-professional cast was Enrique Irazoqui – 19-year-old Economics student and Communist activist from Spain who’d go on to become a computer chess expert – whose searingly intense enactment of Jesus reminds one of El Greco’s paintings, while such intellectuals like Natalia Ginzburg, Enzo Siciliano, Alfonso Gatto, etc. played various supporting roles. Made with the rigorous touch of cinéma verité, shot in grainy and unsparing monochromes, filmed in gritty Southern Italian towns to mimic Palestine and Galilee, comprising of an incredibly eclectic soundtrack that ranged from Western Classical to African-American gospel blues and Congolese hymns, and evoking Renaissance-era paintings, it covered the preacher’s life – right from his birth, through meteoric rise, till death – with cutting and desolate ferocity.

Director: Pier Paolo Pasolini

Genre: Drama/Religious Drama/Historical Epic

Language: Italian

Country: Italy