Pier Paolo Pasolini is the most controversial and revered polymath in modern Italian history. He was a poet, critic, linguist, journalist, painter, novelist, playwright, scriptwriter, essayist, art historian, and internationally renowned film director, whose work embodies the length and breadth of earthly experience from God, love, and grace to violence, depravity, and power. Pasolini’s artistic singularity, humanity, and poetry has influenced the likes of Abel Ferrara and Martin Scorsese, who declared, “Pasolini is never irrelevant.” I’d like to frame Pasolini’s biography through his complex relationship to Catholicism and his film The Gospel According To Matthew, which was included in the Pontifical Council for Social Communications film list of 1995.
Pier Paolo Pasolini was born in Bologna, Italy, on March 5, 1922. He was the son of elementary school teacher Susana Colussi and Royal Italian Army Lieutenant Carlo Alberto Pasolini. Pier Paolo spoke later of his early desire to write poetry:
What it was that made me write poetry at the age of seven I have never understood. Perhaps it was the urge to express oneself and the urge to bear witness of the world and to partake in or to create an action in which we are involved, to engage oneself in that act. . . . In my writing there are deliberate elements of a naturalistic type of realism and therefore the love for real things . . . a fusion of traditional academic elements and of contemporary literary movements.
The young Pasolini was baptized and raised in a Catholic environment, inexorably influencing his life and artistic work. In 1939, he entered the University of Bologna and began to identify as an atheist. He was drafted into the Italian Army during the last years of World War II; after Italy surrendered, he fled to Casarsa and remained there for several years. He published poetry in Friulian (a minority language in the region) and eventually moved to Rome with his mother in 1950. Pasolini wrote and published several books, essays, and plays, including Ragazzi di vita (The Ragazzi, 1955), L’usignolo della Chiesa Cattolica (The Nightingale of The Catholic Church, 1958), Una vita violenta (A Violent Life, 1959), Porcile (1968), Calderón (1973), amongst many others. It was the constant struggle between belief and unbelief, Catholicism and Marxism, religious conversion and political revolution, that characterized much of his work:
I discovered first of all that there is an old latent religious streak in my poetry. I remember lines of poetry I wrote when I was 18 or 19 years old, and they were of a religious nature. I realized, too, that much of my Marxism has a foundation that is irrational and mystical and religious. But the sum total of my psychological constitution tends to make me see things not from the lyrical-documentary point of view but rather from an epic point of view. There is something epic in my view of the world.
Pasolini began his work in film writing scripts for Fellini’s Nights Of Cabiria (1957) and La Dolce Vita (1960). He then went on to debut as an actor in Carlo Lizzani’s The Hunchback Of Rome (1960). He made his directorial debut in Accattone (1961), which tells the story of a pimp living on the outskirts of Rome in post-war Italy. The Austin Chronicle’s Nick Barbaro called it “the grimmest movie he had ever seen.” Accattone and its follow-up Mamma Rossa (1962) cemented Pasolini’s reputation as an uncompromising cinema auteur in the mold of Italian neorealists Roberto Rossellini, Vittorio De Sica, and French New Wave pioneer Jean-Luc Godard. Pasolini made a clear distinction between what he deemed to be cinematic prose and cinematic poetry:
The difference is this: the film of Godard is written according to the typical characteristics of poetic language; whereas the common cinema is written according to the typical characteristics of prose language. For example, the lack of story is simply the prevalence of poetic language over prose language. It isn’t true that there isn’t a story; there is a story, but instead of being narrated in its integrality, it is narrated elliptically, with spurts of imagination, fantasy, allusion. It is narrated in a distorted way—however, there is a story. . . . In my view the cinema is substantially and naturally poetic, for the reasons I have stated: because it is dreamlike, because it is close to dreams, because a cinematic sequence and a sequence of memory or of a dream—and not only that but things in themselves, in reality—are profoundly poetic: a tree photographed is poetic. . . . But who talks through a tree? God, or reality itself. Therefore the tree as a sign puts us in communication with a mysterious speaker.
It was during this time Pasolini began to identify as a “Catholic Marxist.” Pasolini was a man of profound contradictions whose work deeply engaged with paradox and the unity between seeming opposites. He was a Marxist who was kicked out of the Italian Communist Party, he was a gay man whom Maria Callas “hoped to convert to heterosexuality and to marriage,” and he was an atheist who said, “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.” To illustrate the point further, during the Battle of Valle Giulia, Pasolini sympathized with the police, whom he deemed to be “the children of the poor,” and criticized the student protesters, whom he called “left-wing fascists.” Ultimately, Pasolini’s relationship to Marxism must be understood in the context of his vehement repudiation of Italian fascism and Benito Mussolini. His infamous film Salò (1975) explicitly depicts his feelings about fascism and its extreme degradation of the human person through unbridled power, greed, sin, and corruption.
It was the constant struggle between belief and unbelief, Catholicism and Marxism, religious conversion and political revolution, that characterized much of his work.
The Catholic Church was going through seismic changes during the late 1950s and 60s. The Italian-born Pope John XXIII had called the historic Second Vatican Council (1962–1965), famously declaring the Church needed “aggiornamento” (updating). A part of the Church’s re-engagement with modernity was an invitation to dialogue with non-Catholic artists. Inspired by the pope’s bold declaration, Pasolini picked up the New Testament and read the Gospels through in one sitting. As he reflected,
I opened the Bible by chance and began to read the first pages, the first lines of St. Matthew’s Gospel, and the idea of making a film of it came to me. It’s evident that this is a feeling, an impulse that is not clearly definable. Mulling over this feeling, this impulse, this irrational movement or experience, all my story began to become clear to me as well as my entire literary career. . . . I did not want to reconstruct the life of Christ as it really was. I wanted to make the history of Christ plus 2,000 years of Christian storytelling about the life of Christ, since it is the 2,000 years of Christian history that have mythologized this biography.
Pasolini reportedly chose the Gospel of Matthew because “John was too mystical, Mark too vulgar and Luke too sentimental.” He wanted to create a “documentary on the life of Christ” and use only the written dialogue from the Gospel itself. Pasolini scoured Palestine for suitable locations (brilliantly depicted in the short 1965 documentary Location Hunting in Palestine) and ended up deciding on the southern Italian region of Basilicata. As was customary in his filmmaking, he chose non-professional actors for the roles in the film:
I never chose an actor as an interpreter. I always chose an actor for what he is. That is, I never asked anyone to transform himself into anything other than what he is. . . . When I shot The Gospel I went round and chose all the extras myself one by one from among the peasants and the people in the villages round where we were shooting. . . . Naturally, things were a little more difficult with regard to the main actors. For example, the fellow who played Christ was a student from Barcelona. Except for telling him that he was playing the part of Christ, that’s all I said. I never gave him any kind of preliminary speech. I never told him to transform himself into something else, to interpret, to feel that he was Christ. I always told him to be just what he was.
The location, non-professional actors, and modern nature of Pasolini’s telling is reminiscent of Caravaggio’s paintings, where the figures and scenes are taken directly from contemporary sixteenth-century Italian life. There is a feeling of something ancient and timeless, yet framed within the cinematic context, that intersects the historical and contemporary in a way rarely seen throughout film history. The fact that Pasolini’s Gospel According to Matthew achieves this exceptional feat is in of itself a supreme artistic accomplishment. Another example of this intersection is the soundtrack. Pasolini shifts between Bach to African American spirituals from Odetta and Blind Willie Johnson, not only juxtaposing baroque with contemporary gospel but high culture with low, subtly implying the central paradox of the Incarnation.
The film opens with a tribute to Pope John XXIII: “Dedicato alla cara, lieta, familiare memoria di Giovanni XXIII” (“Dedicated to the dear, joyous, familiar memory of Pope John XXIII”) and cuts to an intimate close-up of the young Mother Mary (Margherita Caruso). Her face illuminates the screen with tender beauty as it cuts to the weathered Joseph and pans out to a pregnant Mary framed by a decrepit stone arch. We are instantly introduced to the naturalism and honesty of Pasolini’s stylistic approach. When the adult Jesus (Enrique Irazoqui) arrives to be baptized by John the Baptist (Mario Socrate), the viewer is struck by Jesus’s stern yet gentle face, as we descend with him toward John and the river. Pasolini’s Christ embodies the Incarnation through humility—the grandiosity of his beauty exudes from his profound simplicity. He is one of the people, he shares their face and their poverty in a way not seen in cinematic depictions of Christ then or since. Pasolini was conscious not to fall into the clichés of costume drama and not to imprint his own ideological bias on the film, opting instead to make the film indirectly and through the eyes of a believer:
With The Gospel, the thing was so delicate that it would have been easy to fall into the ridiculous and the banal and the typical costume film genre. The dangers were so many that it wasn’t possible to foresee them all. . . . It was as if I had done a documentary on the life of Christ. . . . I could not tell the story of Christ—making him the son of God—with myself as the author of this story, because I’m not a believer. So I didn’t work as an author. And so this forced me to tell the story of Christ indirectly, as seen through the eyes of one who does believe. And as always when one tells something indirectly, the style changes.
In the Sermon on the Mount scene, Christ is framed by the sky and sea as he speaks the beatitudes. You have the feeling that he truly is the voice of heaven and earth. When Christ walks on the water, the audience is left as stunned as the disciples by the mystical realism of seeing Christ as a bridge between nature and God. The Last Supper is shown as an unadorned moment as Christ solemnly speaks the Eucharistic prayer and passes unleavened bread around the table. Curiously, the majority of the trial and Passion of Christ is seen through the eyes of the disciples and spectators, a fascinating perspective shift from the rest of the film. One of my favorite moments is when Christ is ascending Golgotha and the camera pans out to the grass blowing toward the Crucifixion site—it’s as if the world is bending toward that moment in its smallest and simplest gestures. The Crucifixion itself is an astonishing cinematic moment. Christ isn’t severely beaten and bloody but rather the horror and pain is depicted on the face of Mother Mary, played by Pasolini’s own mother, Susana, as mournful yet triumphant music plays. We see the screen blacken as Christ utters the words:
You will ever be hearing
But never understanding
You will ever be seeing
But never perceiving
The heart of this people
Has become dull.
Their ears are slow to listen
And they have closed their eyes.
So they may never see with those eyes
And never hear with those ears.
Jesus is laid in the tomb, and the door springs open to reveal a body removed and the angel declaring the jubilant words of his Resurrection. Pasolini remarked, “The Resurrection is the most sublime moment of the entire evangelical story, the moment in which Christ leaves us alone to search for Him.”
There may be no other depiction of the Christ story that so perfectly marries mystical realism with documentarian naturalism. Pasolini’s combination of non-professional actors in archaic environments, contemporary gospel and classical music, the language of the Gospel with aesthetic intellectuality, and the insistent emphasis on the unadorned beauty of raw simplicity and humility, makes this film into the ageless cinematic interpretation of Christ.
There is a feeling of something ancient and timeless, yet framed within the cinematic context, that intersects the historical and contemporary in a way rarely seen throughout film history.
Pasolini was a man who plumbed the depths of paradox and contradiction throughout his life and work. I think perhaps his ability to view Christ as an unbeliever gave him a unique objectivity hitherto unseen in the artistic heights to which he aspired. But it may have been the love, respect, and invitation extended by Pope John XIII that ultimately inspired Pasolini to create what L’Osservatore Romano called “the best film on Christ ever made.” Pasolini was in Assisi reading the Gospel on the day Pope John XXIII was visiting; Pasolini wrote a letter to Fr. Giovanni Rossi:
I am struck, dear Fr Giovanni, in a manner that only Grace can undo. My will, and that of others, is powerless. . . . Perhaps because I have always fallen from a horse: I have never fearlessly mounted the saddle (like so many powerful or wretched sinners): I have always fallen, with one foot caught in the stirrup, so that my race is not a ride, but a being dragged away, with my head banging on dust and stones. I can neither remount the horse nor fall forever upon the earth of God.
Pier Paolo Pasolini was murdered on November 2, 1975, at a beach in Ostia. The brutality of the murder was so savage that his body was left almost unrecognizable. The murder remains unsolved, with speculation suggesting a Mafia-style revenge killing or a hate crime. It is a great tragedy that Pasolini’s death will forever remain a mystery.
The Gospel According to Matthew is undoubtedly a cinematic masterpiece as defined by Pope John Paul II: “We have seen that masterpieces of the art of film making can be moving challenges to the human spirit, capable of dealing in depth with subjects of great meaning and importance from an ethical and spiritual point of view.” It was included in the Vatican’s best films list alongside Andrei Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev, Carl Dreyer’s Passion Of Joan of Arc, and Roberto Rossellini’s Flowers of St Francis. Martin Scorsese has mentioned the film many times over the years as a seminal influence on his own work:
I loved that film. Pasolini’s Gospel According to Matthew is absolute poetry—the idea of an engaging Christ who provokes and is tough. . . . It’s a very strong piece and completely surprising, and has an immediacy you feel. . . . He understood it—faith versus spiritual change that you have to undergo in yourself, whether there is a God or not.
Pasolini has influenced artists from a variety of disciplines, including Bernardo Bertolucci, John Waters, Jenny Holzer, William Kentridge, Tom Burr, and Marlene Dumas, and inspired songs from Coil and Scott Walker. Pasolini’s final days were dramatized by Abel Ferrara in his film Pasolini (2014), starring Willem Dafoe in the titular role. Ferrara’s film won awards at the Berlin International Film Festival, Cannes Film Festival, and the International Catholic Film Office. The Gospel According to Matthew was nominated for the United Nations Award of the British Academy of Film and Television Arts in 1968.
For all the paradoxes of the film’s maker, The Gospel According to Matthew has always resonated for me more deeply than any other cinematic interpretation of the life of Christ. There is a rare poetry, beauty, and humility contained in its use of non-actors, black and white 35mm, and portrayal of the Gospel with stark, simple, and profound language and raw aesthetic sensibilities not found in other works throughout film history.