Data Visualization: How Does Pasolini Abridge Matthew's Gospel?

Click here for larger/better resolution version of the image.

Earlier in the year I was writing a chapter on Pier Paolo Pasolini's Il Vangelo secondo Matteo (The Gospel According to Matthew, 1964) for a book due out next year hopefully about some of the films from the Arts and Faith Top 100. 

The words spoken in the film are almost entirely directly taken from Matthew's Gospel, but not all of the Gospel is included. Many sections are omitted or abbreviated. Moreover, Pasolini rearranges the text so some incidents/ speeches occur in a different place in the film. 

I made a list of which parts of the Gospels appear in various film many years ago (free download) and Jeffrey Staley and Richard Walsh produced similar but more detailed versions of this information for their 2007 book "Jesus, the Gospels, and Cinematic Imagination" (my review) a completely reworked version of which was published last year. 

However, I wanted to get a better feel for how Pasolini edits, abridges and rearranges the material and while those resources are useful I wanted to get something more immediate. Given my day job is creating data visualisations, I decided to have a quick go with the data about Pasolini's movie. Jeffrey and Richard were kind enough to allow me to use their research and to provide it in an electronic format. 

Preparation

My intention was to plot where the cited/dramatised incidents from the text occur in the film. In order to do this I began by tidying and making a number of amendments to their data. There was the odd error and there was one passage where the wording is used twice in the text and I felt the other verse seemed to be where Pasolini would more naturally be drawing from. I also gave a more detailed breakdown of the Sermon on The Mount and where there was only a time stamp for a section of teaching, I added in specific times. This was a challenge as Staley and Walsh had used a different release of the film than any of mine own.

Visual elements

One of the things I wanted to examine was how Pasolini handled the five main teaching blocks we find in the text. Scholars have noted how Matthew concentrates Jesus' teaching into five main blocks and for over a century it has been suggested that this is to associate Jesus and the gospel with Moses and the five books of the Torah. So I shaded these areas in grey. I probably should've mentioned that on the diagram itself, but I couldn't quite work out where to do that and, at least at the time, I was hoping to do an improved version.

From a data visualisation point of view there is one thing that is particularly unusual about this chart which is that "time" is on the y-axis, whereas nearly always time goes on the x-axis. I decided to do it this way for two reasons. Firstly, because in a sense both axes are a variation on time. The y-axis is time through the film, but really the x-axis represents time to. Perhaps we could call it time spent reading through the gospel. It's not linear or regular time, but it's not totally out of keeping with the convention.

The second reason, however, was that having plotted it both ways this felt like the more natural choice. While the time through the movie might be more regular, the text is more original. It represents a reality that exists before the film comes and rearranges it. The sense of progress is progress through the text. Similarly, I think the various attempts to plot the time sequence in Pulp Fiction (1994) fail because the people producing them don't want to break the rule that time in minutes/should be on the y-axis. But this is a case of "it depends" albeit in a situation where the convention is dominant.

Notes on style

Many of the most popular data visualisations use quite lively colours and style. When that works, it really works and it's no surprise that the ones that are able to leverage colour effectively go on to become the most popular. 

The downside of this, however, is that people think effective / good data visualization has to have lots of colour. That's not true. Indeed many dataviz experts like Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic advise us to "resist the urge to use color for the sake of being colorful" ("Storytelling with Data", p.117). 

Here, it felt like colour didn't really have a key role to play. I could perhaps emphasise one particular section, or assign different colours to the type of material, and perhaps that's a job for a future iteration of the visual, perhaps one that is being presented. 

Instead, I decided to lean in to the lack of colour. The film is of course magnificently and proudly black and white (if you have the colourised abomination you should destroy it before it burns out your eyes and shrivels your soul). Moreover regardless of the excesses appearing on screen, Pasolini kept his titles sparse and plain. 

So I stuck with black and white, or rather black and light grey. The off-white background is the same hue featured in Pasolini's opening credits, and I used the Galatia SIL font as this seemed like the closest approximation to Pasolini's original font that I could find for free. I'm weighing up doing a couple of other version of these and I'm thinking of doing those using colour and a more modern font. But here, I've essentially tried to reproduce the film's simple aesthetic. It's part of what makes the film so powerful.

Limitations

As I've mentioned above I'm still wondering about doing a more advanced version of the above. Ideally I would have liked it to be possible to hover over the dots and see the name and reference to each incident. In terms of tools I tend to use Power BI, but here I used Excel, partly because I didn't think anyone would look at it unless they already had a Power BI account and also because Power Bi doesn't let you use custom fonts. There are a couple of ways round the latter, but the former is a real deal breaker. 

Annoyingly, though, while the Excel file version of this document does allow you to see some info as a tool-tip, you can't customise it, the way you can in PowerBi. So maybe I'll return to this data if I ever get around to picking up Tableau or Deneb or R or something where I can make the interactivity show online.

The other limitation is that the quality is not as high as I'd hope. The higher quality version of this image is just over 800 by 900 pixels, but even then the dots look a little pixely in places. I also need to find somewhere to put that note about the darker grey strips being the author's five teaching blocks.

Did it work?

The main point I make about all this in the essay is that whereas Jesus has five chunks of teaching, Pasolini essentially reduces this down to two, the Sermon on the Mount (Matt 5-7) and the Olivet discourse (Matt 23-25). However this visualisation doesn't really bear this out. While both sections feel like they take a long time, in reality they only take 5½ and 6½ minutes respectively, only 10% of the film combined. Plus while Pasolini's second discourse includes almost every word from chapter 23, he omits most of 24-25.

This move from five to two seems really clear from viewing the film, so it's arguably a bit of a failure of the graph that it doesn't really bring that out. In a future version I'd want to itemise the seven woes a bit more. That would create more presence on the chart, but I don't think it will solve the problem. I need to think a bit more about that  – it's why this visualisation won't be appearing in my chapter on it. 

That said, though, the point of the visual wasn't to reinforce a point I already felt comes through strongly in the film, it was to give me much more of a feel of how Pasolini jumps about in and abridges his source. And in that sense I think it really helps. For example, even with the briefest glance it's clear that Pasolini does not adopt a linear-but-abridged approach to the text. He moves material around. Much easier to see here than by sifting through a list of chapters and verses. I'm considering doing another one of these for The Jesus Film (1979) which takes a similar approach to Luke's gospel. I have no idea whether it jumps around or not.

There are other benefits. One point I found particularly interesting, is to see what happened to Matthew's second discourse. Pasolini essentially merges it into part of his calling of the disciples sequence. It's a clever move because he manages to not only preserve the "revolutionary" way Matthew has Jesus make a single clear proposition, but also maintain a plausible dramatic narrative in terms of Jesus' growing support. He calls his men, and teaches them, before turning up after just his baptism to a huge crowd on the top of a mountain.

It also demonstrates that Pasolini jumps back four times in the film, but for decreasing amount of time and material on each subsequent occasion. Also noticeable that the birth and Passion narratives take place in completely straight-forward fashion. It's only the ministry where some things change. But it's also arguable that what Pasolini is doing is jumping forward, rather than backwards. I might need to think a bit more about that.

Over to you

Having not only gone to the effort of producing this, I've now spent quite a while creating this blog post about it as well. So needless to say I'd love it not to be all in vain. So feel free to like and share and use if you're using it in classes. Please just keep the attribution to Staley and Walsh as well as mentioning me as its originator.

More importantly do you have any observations that come from the chart? If so, I'd love to hear them. Please put something in the comments below.

My Film Commentary for Pasolini's Gospel According to Matthew

For most of this year I've been writing a chapter on Pier Paolo Pasolini's Il Vangelo secondo Matteo (The Gospel According to St. Matthew, 1964). The chapter is due to go in a book celebrating the Arts and Faith Top 100 “Spiritually Significant” films lists due out sometime 2024-25. I'll post details on that in due course but keep an eye out for it. It's current title is "The Soul of Cinema: Essays on Arts & Faith’s Top 100 Spiritually Significant Films".

In honesty, that project may have finished me as a writer. There has been just so much written about Pasolini, and the concepts he wrestles with and introduces as an artist are not easy to get one's head around that it was hugely challenging marshalling all the sources and doing them justice, and then trying to cram it down to a semi-reasonable word count (I think mine might be the longest chapter in the book. I'm grateful to the book's editor and brains behind the project, Ken Morefield, for his flexibility & support on that. 

Having done all that I thought it might be fun to put that knowledge to good use in other contexts. So I was interviewed about the film by John Bleasdale for his "Cinema Italia" podcast which you can get from Acast | Apple | Spotify. 

So I've also recorded this feature length commentary track. Here you get to watch the whole film while I discuss various aspects about it's production, meaning, performers, music, etc. It's like a director's commentary, only I'm obviously not the director. The beauty of doing this is that I've added subtitles so you can still follow what's happening. And it's 720px so the visual quality should be pretty decent. Watch the video here.

It's difficult to know how this will land. I'm an avid consumer of YouTube, but have had quite mixed results even with my own limited content. My most watched video is 3 seconds of John Inman going "I'm free", followed by Harry Dean Stanton singing "Ain't No Grave" in Cool Hand Luke. But in terms of Bible Films material I don't really know why my most successful video comprising of clips from 6 Classic Era Jesus Films has currently got 26,000 views, while one showing clips from 5 Silent Jesus Films has only 345. Similarly I would never have predicted that around 7,000 people would watch my clip from obscure Sardinian Jesus film Su re (2012), but only 64 would watch the pivotal clip from the far better known Jesus of Montreal (1989).

I suspect this is the least appealing of all of them – after all not many people will have the time to sit and watch/listen to me for over two hours. But I do hope those that do find it an enriching and rewarding experience. I should add that I don't make a penny of these videos, so hopefully there won't be too many ads for household gadgets at crucial moments.

 

La ricotta (1963), revisited

Sixteen years ago now I reviewed Pier Paolo Pasolini's 30-minute short La ricotta (1963), which was released as part of the anthology/portmateau film RoGoPaG. I've changed a lot since then, not least becuase now I've seen all of Pasolini's films – some of them multiple times – and read a lot and spoken about his movies as well. So I thought it was time to revisit this one, as I sat down to watch it in its entirety for the first time in a while.

Multiple crucifixions
The first thing that struck me was the multiple crucifixions we find here, all stacked up against one another. Most obviously we have the gaudy technicolor reconstruction of the film within a film – a close reproduction of Rosso Fiorentino's Mannerist "Deposizione dalla croce" [aka "Deposition of Volterra"] (1521) – but this is not the only depiction of the crucifixion in the film with the film, because the scene in which Stracci features stars a Jesus who looks significantly different (there's no long red hair for one thing). In another sense though, Stracci's death is also a crucifixion of sorts. He dies on the cross, perhaps even, one could argue, for the sins of the world, and the final line of dialogue from Welles's director, recalls the centurion at the foot of the cross. Stracci's own final lines are significant too.

But there is another scene that functions as a crucifixion scene, that is not so widely talked about. as the crew set up one of the shoots for the crucifixion scene we witness Stracci and the actor playing Jesus. While they are lying, nailed to their crosses, on the ground, the camera looks "up" at them as if the shot is taken at from the foot of the cross. Like the rest of the cast and crew the Jesus-actor talks down to Stracci, and their dialogue could be easily construed as just that. However, on closer inspection there's more to it:

Stracci:
I'm hungry. I'm hungry.
Now I'm going to blaspheme.

"Jesus":
Just try it and see what i give you.

Straci:
A fine Christ you are. You think
I've got no right to grumble?

Jesus:
Suit yourself, but I won't take you
into the Kingdom of Heaven.

Stracci:
I could be okay in the
Kingdom of the Earth.

(The argument moves on to politics)

This dialogue works as an ironic take on the text from Luke's Gospel. Instead of the thief humbling himself to beg a receptive and willing Jesus for entry into the Kingdom of Heaven, we have an already humbled Stracci talking up his suitability for the kingdom. Meanwhile the Jesus actor is anything but the figure we find in Luke 23. Rather than be gracious and receptive he acts like a petty and mean-spirited gatekeeper.

Sweary Mary
Sixteen years I didn't know any Italian, but I started learning around 2013-4 and have been making slow progress since. Enough, at least, to spot the odd thing that you don't get from the subtitles. Here, for example, there's a scene where the actors are trying to capture the deposition from the cross, reproducing the exact poses of another Mannerist, Jacopo da Pontormo's "Deposizione" (1528). Pasolini has studied the history of art, and knew his Mannerism, so he would have know that "its adherents generally favored compositional tension and instability rather than the balance and clarity of earlier Renaissance painting".(1) So Pasolini makes a visual art-joke, demonstrating the "instability" of the composition by having the actors – who have been ordered to hold their poses still, rather than move and act – collapse after a while. This is rather unsurprising given the general messing around that has been occurring on set and taken to be typical of the attitudes that Pasolini seeks to highlight. Most of the actors laugh and see the funny side.

One person, however, is not impressed. The film's major star, "Sonia, la 'Diva'" played by Laura Betti, is playing Mary, Jesus' mother. While her co-stars laugh-off the whole incident, she is incandescent with rage. Her voice though is not added to cacophony of sounds emanating from the cast at this point, which almost seems to add to her frustration. However, it's clear that one of the words she shouts several times is "basta", the Italian for "Enough!" only here it's probably a bit stronger in Italian than that literal translation. I can't lip read the rest, but I'd love to hear from anyone who can. I do wonder if this was the moment that was the tipping point for those who decided to press for Pasolini's prosecution (that said, Geoffrey Nowell-Smith says, in this piece, "that the real target of the prosecution was not La ricotta at all but the much talked about Gospel". In other words that this prosecution was a shot across Pasolini's bows.

Accattone and Stracci
This time around I was struck by the similarities between the title character (I won't say "hero") of Pasolini's debut feature Accattone (1961) and Stracci, the lead character here. Both characters have meaningful names. Accattone means "Beggar" or more colloquially ‘deadbeat’ or ‘grifter’. Stracci means "rags". The meanings of both resonate through their roles. While both are the lead characters, neither of them is a hero – not in any conventional sense at least – or even, really, an anti-hero.

More importantly for Pasolini was that they were both representatives of the bottom layer of Italian society that he treasured so greatly. For Pasolini it was this strata of society that most opposed neo-capitalism and refused to play by its rules, and was also where the last remaining vestiges of the sacred could be found.

Pasolini was hugely critical of bourgeois society, and the more I look into his work the more I am convinced he would have hated me and the majority of those who so value his films today. And this is perhaps why I find both Accattone and Stracci so difficult to sympathise with, certainly to understand their actions. Stracci is the more sympathetic. Selling a dog to buy food when you're starving is more understandable than grooming and then pimping out a young girl, but the way Stracci eats to such excess proudly refuses to make him a conventional tragic-hero and imbues the whole film with the sort of comic approach that Pasolini was going for.

The actor playing Stracci, Mario Cipriani had appeared, uncredited in Accattone and Mamma Roma (1962) and would do so twice more, firstly in "La terra vista dalla luna" his contribution to another composite film Le streghe (The Witches, 1967), then in "Che cosa sono le nuvole?" in another joint film Caprice Italian Style (1968). Franco Citti, who played Accattone, would go on to become one of Pasolini's biggest collaborators, fronting a number of his movies throughout Pasolini's 14-year career.

The cruelty
Not unrelated to the above is the cast and crew's treatment of Stracci. This time around I was struck by how unrelentingly cruel it is and how it seems to be generated largely by class hatred. Stracci is never shown as being part of the group or having any form of social acceptance. Sonia's dog is welcome on site, and even catered for, but Stracci's family have to remain at a distance. Even when his costars appear, they smile wave and pass by like the opening characters from the Parable of the Good Samaritan. The scene where Stracci overeats to bursting point is particularly noticeable – everyone goads and bullies him into eating more and more, pitting the desperation of his hunger against his human dignity – but this behaviour occurs elsewhere. Once when Stracci is fixed to the cross, and mentions his hunger, a co-star offers him bites from his sandwich to taunt him before another man pours drink down his throat and he is mocked in every scene.

I suspect this behaviour is not so much a call to the middle classes to improve their behaviour to other classes as it is to say to the sub-altern/proletarians that "this is how they will treat you if unrestrained"

 

While it tends to be Il vangelo secondo Matteo, Teorema (Theorem, 1968) or Salò o le centoventi giornate di Sodoma (Salò or the 120 days of Sodom, 1975) that are Pasolini's most celebrated films, there's a very strong case for La ricotta being his best short film, and his greatest comedy. And while there were often strong objections to his work, and threats of prosecution, I believe it was the only time Pasolini was convicted for one of his films.

Given its release came at a similar time to the start of the Vatican II Council I can't help but wonder if the timing was deliberately provocative, even for such a mild film by today's standards. Pasolini considered himself an atheist, but one who nevertheless realised the important and varying role the church played in Italian society in general. So while Il vangelo remains the more insightful film about the Gospels, La ricotta speaks with more insight and passion about the role of the Roman Catholic church at just the same time that the institution itself was undergoing major self-examination; and about Italian society in general and its often hypocritical attitudes to religion.

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1- Finocchio, Ross (2003) "Mannerism: Bronzino (1503–1572) and his Contemporaries", Department of European Paintings The Metropolitan Museum of Art website. Available online -  https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/zino/hd_zino.htm

Sopralluoghi in Palestina per Il vangelo secondo Matteo (1965)(Scouting for Locations in Palestine for The Gospel of Matthew)

Those who follow this blog regularly will know I've focused quite a bit on Pasolini's Il vangelo second Matteo (1964) this year, but one thing I'd never watched until today is the documentary he made around the time of the film's release concerning his trip to Palestine scouting for locations. I've heard various people discuss Sopralluoghi in Palestina per Il vangelo secondo Matteo (Scouting for Locations in Palestine for The Gospel of Matthew, 1965) but never actually seen it for myself.

The documentary is one of a number of Pasolini's minor works that he produced around his five major early sixties films (Accattone, Mamma Roma, La ricotta, Il vangelo secondo Matteo and Hawks and Sparrows) including La Rabbia (1963) and Comizi d'amore (1965) but it's also one of a series of films he made as part of the creative process for films set outside of Italy. In this case it's Palestine for his Jesus film, but around the same time he was exploring India (resulting in Appunti per un film sull'India [Notes for a film on India] eventually released in 1968) and later Appunti per un'Orestiade africana (Notes toward an African Orestes, 1970). Whilst neither of these latter films were actually made Pasolini did release these "making of" style films.

The jist of the documentary, summarised a hundred times by those discussing Il vangelo is that Pasolini headed out to the Holy Land and found it disappointingly unsuitable for his purposes. Usually it's the modernisation which is cited, but, as it turns out this is far from the only factor. In addition to a film crew, Pasolini is typically accompanied by Don Andrea Carraro, "a Biblical scholar of the Catholic left group Pro Civitate Christiana" (Gordon 2012, 39) and Pasolini is struck by the differences between the two of them. He praises Don Andrea's "absolute, extreme mental order" notes their varying usage of the word 'spiritual'. "When you say 'spiritual' you mean, above all, religious, intimate and religious. For me 'spiritual' corresponds to aesthetics." Perhaps most significantly is Pasolini's observation that he "tended to see the world in Christ's times a little like what was before my eyes here. A rather wretched world, pastoral, archaic, shattered. While Don Andrea always tended to see even in the settings that surrounded Christ a certain dignity."

The pair start out in the countryside near the Jordan river having found an exceptional panorama in the midst of a long drive through "modern, industrialised" countryside. They take in Mount Tabor ("similar to Soratte") and Lake Tiberias before arriving at Nazareth, "a landscape contaminated by the present." The concept of "contamination" is a regular one in Pasolini, something that had fewer negative connotations to his contemporaries, or indeed to himself later in his life.

Interestingly when the pair visit the region near Capernaum, Pasolini is struck by "extreme smallness, the poverty, the humility of this place". Given how his final film ended up, it seems that this moment had a significant impact on his thinking. "As far as I am concerned", he concludes a little later, "I think I have completely transformed my imagination of the holy places. More than adapting the places to my mind's eye, I'll have to adapt my mind's eye to the places." Further on he is struck again "What most intrigues me is this panorama, that Christ should have chosen such an arid place so bare, so lacking in every amenity".

But by now the negative factors of shooting in the region are starting to add up. The modernisation  / transformation of the landscape is important; but Pasolini also cites the lack of scenography and backdrops; and even the fact that it will be difficult to find extras since the people all have such stable employment. Later he complains that "either there is too much poverty...or too much colour...or else, it is excessively modern"

The next stop - in a village of the Druse Arabs - provides both "a lovely moment", but Pasolini decides the faces of the residents are unsuitable because they "have not been touched by the preaching of Christ". It's here some of the worst of Pasolini comes through as he describes them as "pre-Christian faces, pagan, indifferent, happy, savage." These kind of racist attitudes to non-European people is all too common in these location scouting films, even though Pasolini is seemingly well-meaning he can be patronising or irrationally unobjective.

This highlights one of the problems running throughout the entire enterprise, namely that neither Pasolini not Don Andrea really known what the Holy Land and its inhabitants looked like 2000 years earlier. The trees that now weep into the Jordan would not even have existed. Various forms of erosion, farming, war, climate change, conquests and land reclamation have all left the ancient landscape largely unknowable, and whilst more recent studies have determined more about the faces of our ancestors, it is not to the level that could be distinguishable in film based on their hearing, or otherwise, of a particular preacher. It's easier to imagine how today's landscape may differ from that of the 1800s, but beyond that is largely conjecture.

The problem of modernisation is brought into sharper focus with Pasolini's visit to a Kibbutz at Baram, one of many which have "reshape(d) the landscape with absolute modernity". There he talks more to members of the collective, but Pasolini keeps his communist politics to himself. This passage feels a little out of step with the rest of the film so perhaps this is his way of drawing attention to it, but it's hard to tell whether his approval for communal values are outweighing his objections to the modernisation (which is inherent in these Kibbutzim).

Beersheba follows and then Jerusalem, which Pasolini prefers to Nazarerth, calling it "grandiose" and finding something so "historically sublime in her appearance" that it "cannot but instil the film with a different stylistic identity". Most interestingly at this point (Jesus' arrival in Jerusalem) "Christ's
preaching, till now solely religious... due to objectively historical events becomes a public and political fact as well as a religious one."

From there they head to Bethlehem where Pasolini seems to finally admit defeat that he is not going to find "a village which has maintained its integrity through the millennia". "The biblical world appears" he sighs "but it resurfaces like wreckage".

The film ends in the supposedly nearby location of the Ascension, and with the surprising closing words that the Ascension marks "the most sublime moment of the entire evangelical story: the moment in which Christ leaves us alone to search for him."

Pasolini is often praised for being a pioneer and visionary, and this and his African and Indian films do seem to have paved the way for the making of documentaries which briefly appeared as extra features on DVD and Blu-ray discs, like them this was released after, rather than before, the main film. It seems likely that streaming may make films like these a thing of the past - at least in this format. Today researchers will typically bring this footage, perhaps just find it on YouTube first. Meanwhile any such visits of key cast or crew are more likely to form pre-publicity than appear afterwards. By today's standards the overall feel of Paolini's film feels like something shot on a phone, but then every so often there is a sublime moment, where the director sees a landscape that inspires him and his artistry shines through. His success with Il vangelo means that, for us too, the lands of the Bible are ever likely to strike us as we expect them to.

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Gordon, Robert S. C. (2012) "Pasolini as Jew" in Luca Di Blasi, Manuele Gragnolati, Christoph F. E. Holzhey (eds.) The Scandal of Self-contradiction: Pasolini's Multistable Subjectivities, Geographies, Traditions, Vienna/Berlin: Verlag Turia + Kant. pp.37-54.

Delving Deeper into Il vangelo secondo Matteo - Part 6

Peter Bondanella's "Italian Cinema" is the standard set text for the subject in the English language, as evidenced not only by the multiple copies in the university library, but also by the fact that it is now into its fifth version. The book was originally published in 1983 as "Italian Cinema: From Neorealism to the Present", with revised editions occurring at regular intervals until 2009 when it was significantly expanded and retitled simply "A History of Italian Cinema". The edition numbering went back to one and chapters covering the silent and fascist periods were added to the start of the book, as were several others throughout, including one on the "Sword and Sandal Epic". A 'second' (i.e. fifth) edition of the work was published in 2017. My budget doesn't stretch that far however, so I only own the third edition, which was subtitled "From Neorealism to the Present". However, since the relevant passage from the latest edition is available via Amazon's "look inside" feature, I'll be quoting from both. They are broadly the same (though the relevant passage starts much later at p.289), but there are a couple of choice variations which allows me to pick which I prefer.

One such variation occurs in the opening sections. The older version more or less begins with "Pasolini's works reflect a unique and idiosyncratic combination of Gramscian Marxism and linguistic theory" (2013: 178) whereas the current version notes how Pasolini's five films from the early to mid sixties "all build upon neorealist tradition but embody a very different style of filmmaking, one indebted far more to Marxist ideology and Pasolini's own eccentric theories abut the lower classes in Italy than to the ideas contained in the neorealist classics" (2017: 178-9). That two fantastic summations for the price (!) of one, both of which fit Il vangelo secondo Matteo like a glove.

Bondanella then goes on to give a broader introduction to Gramsci which I think readers will find useful.

"Modifying the traditional Marxist view that economic conditions directly determine ideas, Gramsci offered his concept of cultural 'hegemony': social classes exercise hegemony over other classes first through the private institutions of civil society(schools, churches, journals, films, books) rather than through those of political society, and they more often obtain this hegemony through reason and common consent than through force. In order for the Communist Party to become a ruling class, the working class it represented would first have to establish its legitimacy as a dominant group by winning cultural hegemony within Italian culture." (2003: 178)

As discussed in part 4 which looked at Marcia Landy's work, "Gramsci was especially interested in the southern peasants of Italy" (2003: 179). Pasolini uses the term 'sub-proletariat' to "underline their agrarian and preindustrial origins" in contrast to industrial workers in the North (2003: 179). Il vangelo "reflects Pasolini's fascination with this almost unknown stratum of Italian society" in many ways their appearance is much more notable and striking than in most Jesus films (2003: 179).

Bondanella then goes on to examine Pasolini's own writings on cinema theory which he considers "one of the most original contributions to film theory in Italy" (2017: 290). Again, I'll quote at length.

"His basic contention was that the cinema expressed reality with reality itself - an idea certainly born of neorealist cinema - and not with separate semiotic codes, symbols, allegories, or metaphors. Furthermore, Pasolini claimed that film's reproduction of physical reality was essentially a poetic and metonymic operation. The poetry of the cinema conserves not only reality's poetry but also its mysterious, sacred nature, and in its most expressive moments, film is both realistic and antinaturalistic. (2017: 290)

At the risk of committing academic suicide, I'm not sure I fully grasp everything that Bondanella is saying here, but with Il vangelo we can appreciate how in the way it both does and does not represent the reality of the events of the Gospels it somehow offers something more transcendent.

Whilst it is clear that, inevitably, Pasolini had been greatly influenced by neorealism, as was noted in part 5 of this series, he was also aware of its limitations. In particular he "rejected the tendency towards naturalism present in some neorealist styles" (2017: 291). This is particularly interesting with respect to due to Il vangelo since Bondanella considers that this rejection of certain aspect of neorealism is due to "his preference for the religious and sacred approach to reality" (2017: 291). For Bondanella, Il vangelo and Pasolini's other early sixties films "pay homage to neorealist style yet also assimilate it, rejecting some aspects of it in order to create a highly personal style with a very different vision of the world" (2017: 291).

Pasolini described himself as a "pasticheur" mixing "the most disparate stylistic material" (Stack, 28), and Bondanella describes how he does this "in unusual combinations", for example juxtaposing "the most sublime examples of official 'high' culture with the humblest elements from 'low,' or popular culture" (2017: 291). For example, in Il vangelo Bondanella notes how the "faces of subproletarian characters evoke scenes from early Renaissance masters" (2017: 291). This tendency for pastiche becomes most pronounced in the last film of the 'series', 1966's Uccellacci e uccellini (Hawks and Sparrows), though it is also very apparent in La Ricotta where the mix of kitsch colour footage (evoking historical artworks) clashes with Pasolini's own, preferred (at this stage) black and white footage, as well as with trick photography such as the sections of the film featuring sped up footage. Bondanella's comments on Uccellacci e uccellini later on note the part of the film where the crow - who Bondanella considers "functions as Pasolini's alter-ego) - exclaims "The age of Brecht and Rossellini is finished" (2003, 184).

Pasolini himself often used the terms "contamination and mixture" to describe his use of pastiche (Stack, 28) which implies both a similarity and a difference between them. Whereas the terms pastiche and mixture suggest no single elements is dominant, "contamination" suggest an overall material with other, somewhat opposite materials introduced to radically alter its character. With Il vangelo Bondanella notes how Pasolini is "'contaminating' the traditional biography of Christ with the epical-religious qualities he believes the Italian subproletariat retains" (2003: 182). This perhaps goes someway to explaining Pasolini's switch during the initial phases of filming from the "reverential" style he used in Accatone to the more "varied" style he uses here (Stack, 84). Pasolini contaminates Matthew's Gospel with the various analogies to 'modern' day Southern Italy. This explains his choices in terms of locations, faces, music and costumes. Bondanella sums this up nicely:

"Herod's soldiers dress as if they were fascist thugs; Roman soldiers wear costumes that resemble those worn by the Italian police; the flight of Joseph and Mary into Egypt recalls photographs of civilians fleeing over the Pyrenees after Franco's victory in the Spanish Civil War."

Bondanella makes some nice comments on the film's use of the camera as well. "Nothing about The Gospel is more striking than its editing and sense of rhythm, for it is with a continuous process of rapid cutting and the juxtaposition of often jarring images that Pasolini forces us to experience the life of Christ through a novel perspective." (2003, 182) Calling Pasolini's Christ "an almost demonic and relentlessly dynamic figure" he notes how Satan is "dressed in the manner of a priest" (2003, 183). "A number of different camera styles are employed, ranging from rapidly edited scenes using extremely brief shots to very long takes and to those photographed with a hand-held camera from a subjective perspective. (2003, 183-4).

I had not originally planned to cover Bondanella's book. Given the breadth of it's scope I didn't expect it really to give me the depth I was after. Furthermore, the number of similar works that have sprung up in its slipstream (not least the BFI's "The Italian Cinema Book" (2013) which Bondanella edited) means that the sheer volume of works which one could consult are overwhelming. However, as the above will hopefully demonstrate, Bondanella is so insightful that in the end I had to resist the urge just to copy out the entire text. As it is I think I have just one more scholar to visit before trying to draw this discussion to a close.

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Bondanella, Peter (2003) Italian Cinema: From Neorealism to the Present. New York/ London: Continuum.

Bondanella, Peter and Pacchioni, Federico (2017) A History of Italian Cinema. New York/ London: Bloomsbury.

Stack, Oswald (1969) Pasolini on Pasolini. London, Thames and Hudson/British Film Institute.

Delving Deeper into Il vangelo secondo Matteo - Part 5

I've been intrigued by P. Adams Sitney's book "Vital Crises in Italian Cinema" for some time, but only recently managed to find a copy to read the interest stems in a large part from the fact he looks at mainly at only a few directors, but those selected map nicely to my list of favourites. There are significant sections on Rossellini, De Sica, Visconti, Antonioni and Pier Paolo Pasolini. Furthermore, the book's opening few pages (free for Kindle) start by discussing some of Pasolini's ideas, including this passage, quoted on page 1, which inspired the book's title:

"Neorealism was not a regeneration; it was only a vital crisis, however excessively optimistic at the beginning...Now the sudden withering of neorealism is the necessary fate of an improvised, although necessary superstructure: it is the price for a lack of mature thought." (Fellini, 231)

Now for a director who is often talked about as practising Neorealism, writing before the period in which he was supposedly making "neorealist" films (1957, though the essay does not seem to have been published until 1965 alongside Fellini's script for the film), this is a fairly significant criticism. However, as I mentioned in the opening article in this series, the neorealist movement was actually fairly short lived. Whilst it's influence undoubtedly lived on, and it's influence is clearly visible in the films Pasolini made in the early 1960s, it was mainly limited to the decade following the end of the Second World War. Certainly, the above quote suggests that it was unlikely that Pasolini would then go on to make a series of films that he would consider to be neorealist. Indeed after some other initial comments, Sitney devotes the final part of his introduction to a more in-depth look at Pasolini's Uccellacci e uccellini (Hawks and Sparrows, 1966) which Sitney describes as "an elegaic essay on the sociology and iconography of neorealism" (15).

Before that, however, he makes a number of interesting comments about Pasolini. Firstly he praises "his recognition of continuity between filmic iconography and that of the history of painting (which he studied under Roberto Longhi), and his locating a context for ambitious cinema in contemporary literary phenomena)" (11). Clearly this is particularly relevant for Il vangelo secondo Matteo (The Gospel of Matthew, 1964) which deals with a subject that is not only a literary adaptation - and one that largely limits itself to the words from one particular literary source - but also a subject that has been central to the history of painting. Indeed, shortly afterwards Sitney is discussing the iconography of Italian cinema and notes "By far the largest pool of such iconographic images have their source in the painterly tradition of Italy. The conventional visual code of the Church prescribed the representation of Christ and the narrative events of the Gospels" (12). Sitney, then, appears to agree with Marcia Landy (see part 4) that Pasolini does reference historical artworks on the subject. Furthermore, Sitney argues Pasolini's referencing of these historical works is made with a specific intention in mind, to point to the way that the iconography of Italian cinema is in "continuity" with historic paintings and other works.

This is something that Sitney views as inevitable with Italian film in particular. He notes how such "icongraphical representation so permeates Italian life that it is not surprising to find it central to narrative cinema" (12). In looking for contrasts between Italian Jesus films and their American counterparts this is a key observation: Italian culture is soaked in a biblical iconography to an extent that quite unlike, and indeed beyond, that of the United States.

Sadly, Il vangelo barely gets discussed at all. What Sitney does do, however, is highlight the centrality of Christian iconography in his other major films of the time, specifically Uccellacci e uccellini, Accatone (1961) Mamma Roma (1962) and La Ricotta (1963). Indeed Sitney notes how "Pasolini’s obsession with the via crucis dominates all his early black and white films" (172). Clearly, in certain ways, Il vangelo is the culmination of this. Crucially, however, "this obsession is not a measure of his piety, but almost the reverse, that is, the ground from which he argues with the church and with the Italian tradition, from the perspective of a self-proclaimed 'heretic' or...a prophetic rebel (172).

This, I think, is a crucial point and again one that is sometimes overlooked in discussion of Il vangelo, no doubt because of some of Pasolini's own statements which appear to the contrary. I think there is sufficient material on this to merit a piece on its, so I will pick this idea up in a future post.

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Fellini, Federico (1965) Le notti di Cabiria. Modena: Cappelli.

Sitney, P. Adams (2013, 1995) Vital Crises in Italian Cinema: Iconography, Stylistics, Politics. Oxford: Oxford University Press

Delving Deeper into Il vangelo secondo Matteo - Part 4

Having introduced this series in part 1, and covered the analysis of Zygmunt Barański and Naomi Greene in part 2 and part 3 respectively, I now want to turn to Marcia Landy and her work on Antonio Gramsci. In fact, Landy only deals specifically with Il vangelo secondo Matteo fairly briefly, but it comes a a crucial point in her broader argument, but it feels so fresh and insightful that it's worth going through the broader material that brings her to that point.

Landy's book, simply titled "Italian Film", begins in the silent era and carries on through to the present day, but it takes a chapter, following on from one on neorealism (121-148) to look at "Gramsci and Italian Cinema" (149-180). She starts by quoting David Forgacs observation that even at the height of neorealism, "films by directors associate with neorealism in the widest sense accounted for...less than a third" (Forgacs 117), noting that whilst they were successful abroad they typically flopped at their domestic box office.

Landy identifies five reasons for "their demise", "(a) the return of Hollywood products, (b) the ongoing intervention of the Roman Catholic Church through censorship, (c) the consolidation of power by the Christian Democrats, and (d) the economic encouragement and support for films that promoted 'positive' images of Italian life" finally (e) filmmakers questioning the "constraints of neorealism, seeking forms of cinematic expression that...addressed the advent of consumer society and reexamined the political role of culture (149). [letters in brackets mine]

This newer movement of the late 1950s/early 1960s is particularly significant in this respect because "the preoccupation with cinematic style and the reintroduction of historical subjects became a source of investigation for many of the filmmakers who were, in greater or lesser ways, influenced by Gramscian thinking" (149). For Landy "no other figure's ideas play such a large role in the development of the post-World War II Italian cinema" than Gramsci and she specifically cites his influence on Pasolini amongst others (149).

It must have been hard enough for Landy to condense Gramsci's ideas down to the few pages she does here, but it's even harder for me to boil it down to something even smaller now, but here goes. A key concerns for Gramsci was the transfer of knowledge and ideas and he was concerned to see that the 'subaltern' (lower working class/peasants) learnt the critical skills to move away from 'common sense' towards 'good sense' which was at the opposite end of the spectrum to folklore.

He saw the need for the subaltern not only to see "institutional reform" (151), but also to develop its own intellectuals (as opposed to those propping up the state) and see cultural change that would empower subaltern groups not least by studying folklore and national myths. Having grown up in Sardinia Gramsci was particularly concerned with the tension between the industrial North and the rural south, noting the lack of "unity between the workers in the North and the peasants in the South" (152).

The role of intellectuals is particularly interesting as those aligning with the state were often "perpetuating the status quo and obstructing the creation of new intellectual strata and hence new social forms" (152).

For me (and not necessarily Landy), this gives a new angle on Pasolini's portrayal of the pharisees and teachers of the law who are portrayed as much as intellectuals as anything else in Il vangelo. Certainly they prop up Rome (the status quo) but their intentions are not necessarily bad. And of course, many of the intellectuals in the film are played by Pasolini's friends, a level of self examination on a par with Orson Welles' damning portrayal of the director in La ricotta (1963).

Whilst Pasolini's Jesus is in many ways portrayed as subaltern, in many ways he is distinct from the peasants amongst whom he spends his time. This is partly because of his good looks and cleaner appearance, but also, as noted in the third entry in this series, because of the way Pasolini's camera isolates him from them. So Jesus can be read as either an intellectual who has arisen from the subaltern, or perhaps as a Gramsci/prophet type figure, apart from the ordinary people, but seeking to raise up intellectuals to rethink and to challenge their myths and folklore.

For the Italians, particularly those from the South at the time the film was made, a key element in their national myth and folklore was the Risorgimento (unification) of the country under Garibaldi. Landy discusses Visconti's Il gattopardo (The Leopard, 1963) which I have seen, but don't recall a great deal of, and also Blasetti's 1860 (1934), which I have not, but it leads me to think of another Garibaldi film which strangely Landy does not cover given the discussion of it in the context of neorealism (perhaps because of a lack of availability in 2000 when she was writing), Rossellini's Viva l'Italia! (1961). For me, the abiding image of this film, released only a few years before Pasolini's Il vangelo, is that of Garibaldi charging round the countryside in his revolutionary zeal. Is there a parallel to be drawn with Pasolini's similarly fast-paced protagonist? Now I've noticed it, I'm finding it hard to ignore.

Landy notes how films such as Il gattopardo which are set in the past often "pick up the Gramscian concern to analyze the persistence of past forms of belief and action in the present" (153). Whilst this is not written with Il vangelo in mind, it is not difficult to see how it also applies. For Pasolini the myth defining event of the past he is concerned with in Il vangelo is not as recent as the Risorgimento, or the overthrow of Mussolini, but nonetheless influential on Italian society at the time he was making it, and his "analogical approach" to the Gospel of Matthew (Stack, 82).

Having examined various other filmmakers, Landy arrives at Pasolini by saying his cinema "offers a perspective on modernity and capitalism from the vantage point of subaltern groups" (173). She notes however that he was trying to re-contextualise Gramsci's ideas in a new economic, political and cultural context, but also his "ongoing preoccupation with...relations between high and popular culture" (173). "His complex portrait of the world in his writing and films entailed mixing styles, disrupting expectations, challenging clichés, and offending audiences" (173-4). Whereas neorealism tended to assume its images could only be interpreted one way, Pasolini "drives a wedge of difference into neorealist plenitude. Accatone makes the image the site of an ambivalent decoding." (Viano 71)

Landy's point is that as with Gramsci, "in Pasolini, one must find the difference in the usual assumptions of commonality and sameness" (174, emphasis mine). As a result "there are no unified narratives in his films, just different histories, affects, beliefs, and actions - fragments of a world torn from familiar contexts. There is...a blurring of the lines between fiction and 'the real', a preoccupation with theatricality,...allusions to other works of art,...the constructed, not essential and absolute, nature of the image" (175). "They adhere to the Gramscian notion of...the importance of demystifying common sense, cliché, and habituation" (175) Note here the use of "common sense" is that as defined above, the midpoint between folklore and good sense. To a certain extent this turns the understanding of Il vangelo as reverent on its head. The aim is to present a gospel of the people, demystified, so that the subaltern class will re-examine the role of the religious faith in Italian society and see how its current position is holding them as a group, back.

Landy's specific discussion of Il vangelo is only around 400 words and follows on from her discussion of Accatone and she notes that "the film again creates a portrait that conforms to Gramsci's emphasis on questions of leadership and the role of intellectuals" (178). She disagrees however with Greene's claim that the film "scrupulously avoids the traditional iconography and cultural echoes" (Greene, 74). Indeed Landy finds that it ties episodes from the Gospels "to images of Renaissance painting..., earlier cinematic versions of the life of Christ, and the Sicilian landscape" (178). The point of this is "to link the past to contemporary history...The critical and political role of religion as the common sense of subaltern groups is central" (178).

Her conclusion, though, is that "Il vangelo seems to offer a last gasp in his films of the Gramscian emphasis on the need to create 'a national-popular culture'" his later films would "express an increasing discomfort with Gramscian conceptions of cultural politics" (180).

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Forgacs, David (1990) Italian Culture in the Industrial Era: Cultural Industries, Politics, and the Public. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Greene, Naomi (1990) Pier Paolo Pasolini: Cinema as Heresy. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Landy, Marcia (2000) Italian Film. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Stack, Oswald (1969) Pasolini on Pasolini. London, Thames and Hudson/British Film Institute.

Viao, Maurizio (1993) A Certain Realism: Making Use of Pasolini's Film Theory and Practice. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Delving Deeper into Il vangelo secondo Matteo - Part 3

In my previous post in this series I reviewed Barański's 1999 essay "The Texts of Il Vangelo Secondo Matteo". Here I want to look at another key work on the subject, Naomi Greene's chapter "The End of Ideology" from her book "Pier Paolo Pasolini : Cinema as Heresy". Originally published in 1990, three years before even Babington and Evans' "Biblical Epics", it's a text that many of those writing about Jesus on Film turn to. Of the many books about Pasolini, not only is it relatively old, but its title also suggests that Il vangelo will be discussed at length. (Where quote only receives page numbers it is Greene's book to which I am referring.)

That said, however, the book's main coverage is barely over ten pages (70-80), though there is also several pages of discussion (60-67) on La ricotta (1962), Pasolini's contribution to the collaborative RoGoPaG, which I learn from Greene's book is also known as Laviomoci il cervello (Lets Talk About the Brain). For Greene the two works are very much linked, and she also notes how La ricotta is "Considered one of the high points of Pasolini's cinema" (60). There is also some discussion of Sopraluoghi in Palestina (On the Scene in Palestine, 1964) which she calls "virtually a cinematic afterthought" (70).

Greene starts by looking at the (potential) tension between those reading the film from a Marxist perspective and those coming it from a Catholic perspective. In general Pasolini managed to appease many of those from both camps, though there were some detractors from his fellow Marxists. In particular Pasolini's depictions of several miracles caused some consternation. Quoting Pasolini's extended 'interview' with Jean Duflot, Greene notes how Pasolini:

...defended his portrayal of the supernatural on the grounds that what he called the 'subjective reality' of miracles exists. 'It exists,' he said, 'for the peasants of Southern Italy, as it existed for those in Palestine. Miracles are the innocent and naive explanation of the real mystery which lives in man, of the power hidden within him.' And it was precisely this 'subjective reality' that he sought to convey in Il Vangelo where, he maintained, the life of Christ is seen through the eyes of a 'believer'."
(Greene 73-74) - with quotations from "Entretiens avec Pier Paolo Pasolini" Duflot (1970)

Greene, however, is unconvinced that this approach works. For one thing, she suggests that the depiction "was given added credibility by the very fact of being seen. No literary description found in the Gospels can compete with a filmic sequence where Christ walks calmly upon the water or cures lepers of their sores." (73)

The importance of the images also comes into the following section where Greene claims Pasolini "scrupulously avoids the traditional iconography and cultural echoes" aside from "the costumes
of the Pharisees and the Roman soldiers, which evoke a specific painter, Piero della Francesca" though she also quotes Pasolini's citation of Duccio and Mantegna (74). Other writers have found a number of other painterly influences, and this raises a few interesting points, particularly with respect to Barański's point that what Pasolini says is not always backed up by the film itself, or indeed with other points he himself has made. For one thing Pasolini has described the film as not being so much as about Jesus, but as about Jesus plus 2000 years of Christian interpretation (Stack 91). (For more on Pasolini's references to paintings see this anonymous blog post). On the other hand, however, Pasolini's film is clearly trying to distance itself from the overall look and feel of renaissance art, and indeed films that have tried to reproduce it such as DeMille's The King of Kings (1927) or The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965).

Of course, films such as The King of Kings, Ray's 1961 'remake' and the biblical epics of the 1950s were very much part of what Pasolini was targeting in La Ricotta (1963). Greene picks this up noting how the two films "work against traditional representations of Biblical scenes" even so "they do so in almost opposing ways" (75). She points out how in essence whereas "La ricotta reproduces familiar iconography only implicitly to denounce its falsity and distance from reality; Il Vangelo deliberately, and consistently, rejects such iconography" (75). Whereas his earlier films not adapting religious stories adopted elements of Christian iconography, here, "where the subject is mythic and epic" he uses a a more realistic approach (75). Greene nicely describes some of the key, iconoclastic depictions, which include Mary's depiction as a "bewildered young peasant woman" and Salome not as "the erotic goddess of Hollywood films but a graceful, almost timid adolescent" (75).

In the opening article of this series I mentioned Antonio Gramsci and Greene is one of those authors who discuss his influence on Pasolini. This starts before the section dealing with this film specifically, and is first voiced in a quotation from Pasolini's discussion with Sartre:

"I have created a national-popular work in the Gramscian sense. Because the believer through whom I see Christ as the son of God is a humble Italian [un personnagio popolare italiano]... seeing the world through his eyes I came close to Gramsci's national-popular conception of art." (Cristo e il Marxismo)

Pasolini's comments about the "subjective reality" of the miracles very much relate to this and, as is clear, his phrase here about the film being a "national-popular work" is straight from Gramsci. Particularly in Gramsci's "Prison Notebooks" he explores the idea of literature (and beyond) in which the author identifies with the people by sharing their needs and problems. Gramsci perceived a paucity of Italian literature from the subaltern classes (peasants/working class/sub-proletariat, loosely speaking) seeing literature from other nations (e.g. France) or the intellectual class (which he saw as distinct in Italian society) and longed for a literature that reflected that strata of Italian society. In the early sixties we can see how Pasolini attempts to create works of national-popular cinema through works such as Accatone (1961) Mamma Roma (1962) and, of course, Il vangelo.

Greene returns to this phrase and Gramsci's influence throughout, though noting that Pasolini's faith in it began to disappear around the time of Hawks and Sparrows (1966). It's interesting, in this respect, how a number of "his intellectual friends play those in power" particularly in contrast to the ordinary people who play the more minor roles (176). In Il vangelo we can clearly see Pasolini's desire to bring subalterns to the fore and yet the films also represents something of a failure in this regard. Greene discusses a number of  critics who found fault with the portrayal of the ordinary people in the film calling them "lifeless" and "expressionless" (78). There's also a lengthy and damning quote from Sandro

"a single scene in which a character from the crowd succeeds in resisting the absolute fierceness of the messiah, not a single frame in which one of them emerges from a perspective which flattens and crushes the multitudes into a sub-human homogeneity." (Petraglia, 61-62)

Greene finds that in "several respects" such criticisms "are valid" (emphasis hers), finding "little doubt that Pasolini does indeed drain the people of life and vitality" (79). She find this partly due to the "silence of Christ's followers" in the source material and Pasolini's "fidelity" to it, but significantly due also to the way "Pasolini consistently isolates Christ through visual means", particularly the film's use of close-ups. The above image captures this well, Jesus in close up in the foreground with the people some distance behind him in the background.

Greene's summary to this line of thought has been quoted a few times, but it bears repeating as it's a nice piece of writing and an essential counterpoint to much of the unqualified praise given to the film

"Christ appears, in fact, as a kind of Biblical intellectual who, despite an intense desire to be 'organically' linked to the people, cannot breach the immeasurable gap between them. One is left to wonder how his mute and passive followers will be able to further his teachings once he himself is gone." (79)

One final quote, that flows from the discussion of Gramsci and Pasolini's desire to make a "national-popular epic" is a quote from his interview by Marisa Rusconi. Discussing why he chose Matthew's Gospel rather than any of the other three he dispensed with the usual 'stuck-in-a-hotel-room-because-of-the-pope' story and talked about why he thought Matthew was the most suitable for his purposes. "Mark's seemed too crude, John's too mystical, and Luke's sentimental and bourgeois." (Rusconi, 16). It's an interesting, alternative perspective to the usual story and also a nice summary of the four gospels. That said it perhaps says more about each gospel's adaptability, rather than their inherent characteristics. I don't think Matthew's Gospel does a particularly good job of reflecting the lives of the sub-proletariat - either in Jesus' day or in Pasolini's. It's formal structuring and repeated citations seem to have a more scholarly angle. That said, many scholars consider it the oldest extant version of the hypothetical Q source which, according to the theory, underlies both Matthew and Luke. Whilst I'm not sure I buy the theory, the argument could be made that the 'Q' material has more of a Gramscian national-popular feel to it than either of the Gospels that contain it, or the gospels that would follow it.

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"Cristo e il Marxismo: Dialogo Pasolini-Sartre," (1964) L'Unita, December 22, p. 2

Duflot, Jean (1970) Entretiens avec Pier Paolo Pasolini Paris: Pierre Belfond.

Greene, Naomi (1990) Pier Paolo Pasolini: Cinema as Heresy. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Petraglia, Sandro (197) Pier Paolo Pasolini. Florence: Nuova Italia

Rusconi, Marisa (1964) "4 Registri al magnetofono"  Sipario 222 (October) p.16

Stack, Oswald (1969) Pasolini on Pasolini. London, Thames and Hudson/British Film Institute.

Delving Deeper into Il vangelo secondo Matteo - Part 2

Having outlined in my first post in this series the need to take in wider perspectives on Pasolini's Il vangelo secondo Matteo I thought I would now look at some of the other key writings on the film that I have been studying.

First is Zygmunt G. Barański's "The Texts of Il Vangelo Secondo Matteo" in the book he himself has edited, "Pasolini Old and New". (Page numbers alone in brackets refer to this work) The fact that Barański is established enough to be able to pull together a series of essays on Pasolini and considers of all the Pasolini's films, the one he wishes to cover is Il vangelo gives a certain air to his commitment to the subject. This is important because he main thrust of Barański's argument is that it is a mistake to give too much weight to what Pasolini has said on the subject, as opposed to the filmic text itself.

Barański starts by noting that "incongruities may be noticed between the finished film and many of Pasolini's statements about it" (282). This is in part because Pasolini began developing this film two years before its release in 1964, during which time he made frequent statements about it to the press meaning that "discrepancies between the film and comments about it were inevitable" (282). However he also finds that many of Pasolini's statements about the film, even after it was completed, do not tally with the film itself. This problem is worsened by the fact that much of the discussion about the film has tried "to integrate Pasolini's comments...with the film itself. The "film has been lost among its interpretations" (282). Barański never actually makes the observation that Pasolini's pronouncements on the film have 'become Gospel', but as a native English speaker, I'm afraid I cannot resist. In particular, as interesting as Oswald Stack's Pasolini on Pasolini is, Pasolini's words there get repeated time after time after time in scholarly discourse, as if authorial intent, or rather authorial claims of intent are the final word on a film's meaning.

Nevertheless, Barański starts by outlining those very statements, alongside a number of other pronouncements, particularly those around the film's "analogical" approach (Stack, 82); presentation of "the history of Christ constructed out of two thousand years of Christian interpretation" (Pasolini, 33); and, its supposed "fidelity to the original" (284). Barański finds, however that these ideas are in conflict with each other and that "it is difficult to escape the conclusion that he was openly adding to the myriad interpretations of he Gospel" (288). "His diverging pronouncements do seem to fit in with that general intellectual uncertainty which characterized his thinking during the early to mid-Sixties" (288).

Barański then examines the films structure, including a detailed examination of an example of how "Pasolini fashioned a single new narrative unit by synthesizing...four discrete yet contiguous episodes" from Matthew 11:25-12:21 (292). In particular he notes how the film "is more tightly organized than its source, since it has quite a marked circular structure which the Gospel lacks" (295). He also notes how "Pasolini eliminates Matthew and substitutes himself as a new 'evangelist' and source of information about Christ" even excluding his calling (296). This leads him to another section on Pasolini's "Deletions" from the text (296-300), most notably the miracles which Barański finds "presented as something illogical and arbitrary" suggesting that they are "marginal to Pasolini's view of Jesus"(298).

I started this series by discussing he film's much vaunted "neorealism" and Barański eventually takes on questions of Pasolini's style, citing "documentary techniques (the sequences in cinema vérité and newsreel style" (303), "unearthed 'home movie'" (304), and a range of "'realist' practices", but also "'expressionistic' stylistic devices" (305). He (Barański) does however consider that the "role of 'analogy' is actually much less evident than might appear from Pasolini's explanations" (304). He summarises as follows:

"He depicts Jesus according to different stylistic conventions, from the expressionism of the Baptism to the cinema vérité treatment of the trials, and from Neo-realism to his own sacralità frontale. It is as if Pasolini hopes that one or a combination of all these techniques might offer a definitive insight. (310)

.In Barański's final analysis the film is not the "faithful adaptation" (314) it is considered to be, indeed it "diverges sharply from its source "to challenge its status (314). He finds Pasolini's film is "not so much about Christ as about texts on Christ" (314). "He is adding a new layer to the image of Christ by highlighting the conventionality of his apparently 'realistic' film" (314). Calling it Pasolini's "great Godardian moment" (314) he concludes that the film's "style and structure" (314) articulate that which Pasolini could not at the time.

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Barański, Zygmunt G. (1999) "The Texts of Il Vangelo Secondo Matteo" in Barański (ed.) Pasolini Old and New: Surveys and Studies. Dublin: Four Courts Press.

Pasolini, Pier Paolo (1983) Il sogno del centauro: a cura di Jean Duflot Rome: Editori Riuniti.

Stack, Oswald (1969) Pasolini on Pasolini. London, Thames and Hudson/British Film Institute.

Delving Deeper into Il vangelo secondo Matteo - Part 1

This is a more off-the-top-of-my-head post, so please don't quote me on any of it just yet!
I've written various pieces on Pier Paolo Pasolini's Il vangelo secondo Matteo (1964) over the years but recently I've been feeling the need to re-examine some of the scholarship about the film. Mainly this is driven by the realisation that whilst many of my favourite works on the subject Jesus on Film raise the issue of neorealism, important things are being omitted. Take, for example, the impact of Antonio Gramsci on Pasolini's films. A quick scan of the indices of Tatum; Stern, Jefford and Debona; Walsh; Baugh; Reinhartz; and others reveals not one mention of Gramsci (though in some cases his would not necessarily be within the work's scope.

Part of the problem stems, I think, from the distance between those scholars approaching the film from a biblical studies point-of-view, and other writers on Pasolini's cinema, but it also stems from the distance between Pasolini's time and our own, and between Pasolini's location and North America where the above writers all come from. For example, neorealism was very much a mid-to-late 1940s movement. It continued in the the early 1950, but, having never been hugely popular in Italy itself, fizzled out. It proved hugely influential, not least on subsequent Italian cinematic movements, but across the world. By the time Pasolini was directing his Gospel of Matthew it was over, but Italian cinema was entering another vintage period heralded by the likes of Fedrico Fellini, Michaelangelo Antonio and the like. This second period tended also to be in black and white - the most obvious similarity between the two sets of films and the greatest contrast between its American contemporaries, and indeed the cinema that most people today are familiar with. Clearly other aspects were in continuity with neorealism but have since fallen out of fashion and so again, conflating these two distinct periods is somewhat understandable.

The questions that come back to me are then, firstly to what extent does Il vangelo secondo Matteo exhibit distinctives of neorealsim; and, why does Pasolini do so?

There is, it seems to me a modern parallel, twenty four years ago Lars von Trier, Thomas Vinterberg and a number of other directors created and swore to uphold Dogme 95's Vow of Chasity. Festen, The Idiots, Italian for Beginners and a host of other films came out adhering to Dogme's rules and for a while the movement was much discussed and influenced all kinds of filmmakers even if they didn't take a purist approach to it. If you've seen Vinterberg or von Trier's more recent work you'll have noticed that they have moved on. Melancholia's special effects were not part of the manifesto. So if a director today was again to take up the rules of Dogme it would be worthy of closer consideration.

This is essentially what Pasolini does. Il vangelo was released 18 years after Roberto Rossellini's pivotal Roma, città aperta (1946). It could possibly be nostalgic, retro, an homage, a pastiche or something else entirely neo-neorealism) but more needs to be said.

And so my question is, why? I hope to get into that in a future post. And Antonio Gramsci, because I think he provides some of the answers.

Battleship Potemkin in Pasolini's Gospel According to St Matthew

On Sunday we held an outdoor silent film night and we watched Sergei Eisenstein's 1925 classic Battleship Potemkin. It was the first time I had seen the film and enjoyed finally seeing such a well-renown film and finding it matching up to its reputation. I could probably write a great deal about it, given the time, but for now I'll restrict myself to the observation that is most pertinent to this blog, namely how it relates to Pasolini's 1964 Il Vangelo Secondo Matteo (Gospel According to Saint Matthew).

Pasolini was, as is often noted, a Marxist, and many commentators note the ways that he portrays Jesus as some kind of revolutionary leader. One of the other main things that is frequently discussed about his Jesus film is the eclectic mix of songs on the soundtrack. Strangely, though, I don't recall anyone ever mentioning how Pasolini includes one of the key pieces of music from the film's original score in Il Vangelo, particularly as it appears at such moment to make it clear it's a reference.*

For those unfamiliar with Battleship Potemkin I should explain that it's a Soviet propaganda piece released to celebrate 20 years since the famous 1905 uprising of the crew of the titular vessel. In the film, at least, the person whose outcry starts the overthrow of the ship's oppressive leadership is one of only a few of his comrades killed in the battle that follows. There then follows a poignant scene where his body is brought to shore and the people of Odessa form a mighty procession to mourn his passing and celebrate his sacrifice and denounce the oppressive authorities.

Eisenstein apparently wanted a new score to be recorded ever ten years. The first was apparently uninspiring but one written the following year by Edmund Meisel, stuck, at least until 1950 when Nikolai Kryukov wrote a new one for the film's 25 year anniversary. More recently a whole range of new scores have been written and performed for the film including ones by the Pet Shop Boys and, Roger Ebert's favourite version, Concrete. But, effectively, it's Miesel's version that is considered the "original" and, significantly, it's the only one that the BFI included in their recent Bluray release. (There's a nice piece on Miesel's and Kryukov's scores here by S. Lopez Figueroa).

So it's interesting that Pasolini takes this music and uses it to accompany a few scenes of Jesus gaining widespread popularity whilst preaching his seven woes against the Jewish authorities. Like Battleship Potemkin there are scenes of swelling crowds with sometimes people rushing to join the throng, others being more reflective. Jesus' criticism of the Pharisees links to the angery speeches made against the Russian authorities.

Whilst a few of the shots are formally reminiscent of Eisenstein's (such as the one above compared to the ones from Potemkin below), it's much more the overall impression from a sequence of similar shots, aided, at least for modern viewers, by the fact both films are in black and white, but more to do with the movement of people and the camera, the close ups, the expressions and so on. And of course it's the identical music.

[Shazaming Pasolini's version of it brought up "La chanson des martyrs" (The song of the martyrs) from the album "Les Choeurs de L'Armée Rouge" (Choir of The Red Army) by Boris Alexandrov, but the dearth of any further information elsewhere suggests it was original to Meisel.]
But as well as this being the moment when Jesus is at his most revolutionary, it's also the moment when its starts to look like his demise is imminent. So the music links him to the Russian revolutionary seaman Vakulinchuk who loses his life in the fight for freedom and the audience knows that Jesus' life will be similarly lost.

Watching the scenes from Pasolni's film again, I'm also struck by the way the Roman soldiers appear in the scene. In almost all Jesus films the soldiers are the enemy, usually totally dehumanised, barring the centurion who will convert as Jesus dies. But the rank and file are usually presented as little more than cogs in the machine that will ultimately crush this Jewish saviour. Pasolini's film does particularly develop these soldiers into three dimensional characters.

Apart from anything the nature of the project leaves them no dialogue, but they are significantly more sympathetic here than in most films. And I think that rests as much on these scenes as anything. Jesus is preaching revolution and the soldiers are happy to let it go on, interested, even, in what is being said. And in the light of Eisenstein's film this becomes a little more obvious why. Pasolini's portrayal is not because they, like him, is Italian. It's because they, like his heroes, are part of the proletariat. Indeed in Eisenstein's film it is the fighting men of the navy who first rise up. Jesus' revolutionary message, then, is for them and indeed to Pasolini they are part of the crowd rather than just a means to control it.

Perhaps I shouldn't be surprised that this connection is overlooked. Not only are the majority of those studying Jesus and film from the theology side of the equation, rather than the film studies, but also it's worth remembering when Pasolini's film was released. In 1964 (or 1966 in the US), the Cold War was at its peak. McCarthyism had reached its zenith in the previous decade and the ban on Battleship Potemkin in the UK had only been lifted because its widespread distribution was seen as unviable.

I think it is very significant though. To any film student, least of all an avowed Marxist, Battleship Potemkin is a critical film. And Pasolini's link with it is deliberate and full of meaning.

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*I must confess this statement is built on combination of recollection, Googling and checking the key books on the subject. I'm sure someone has made the connection before. I just don't recall anyone saying it and it appears (from an admittedly briefish scan) that not one of Babbington, Evans, Stern, Jefford, Debona, Walsh, Tatum, Reinhartz or Baugh mention it in their tomes.

Nativity Scenes Revisited - Part 1:Il Vangelo Secondo Matteo

I thought a good way to resurrect this blog would be to revisit some of the film portrayals of the Nativity story in the run up to Christmas. It's a good way to attempt to ensure that the kids don't get so focussed on the fat guy in the red suit that they forget about why we celebrate Christmas in the first place.

In many ways Il Vangelo Secondo Matteo (The Gospel According to St. Matthew) is not an obvious place to start with a 3 year old and a 5 year old, but the more I thought about it, the more it seemed like an interesting idea. Firstly I occasionally hear some of my friends complain that all their kids ever watch is cartoons. That's always seemed a shame to me, so we've always tried to give them a mix of cartoons/CGI with films with people. The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) and Singin' in the Rain (1952) have long been favourites and there are plenty of others.

Secondly, I also want to broaden their horizons so they are not just limited to Anglo-American fare. Studio Ghibli is a great place to start, and the more I thought about it the more I could see Pasolini's film as being another easy access point. After all they are already familiar with the Nativity story, and this part of the film has relatively little dialogue. As it happens Nina has all kinds of snippets of language under her belt that are unknown to me: just the other day she was saying hello in Romanian or Albanian (she wasn't quite sure which) that she had picked up from a Romanian/ Albanian friend at school.

There's a third reason as well that Il Vangelo is good place to start. Most images of the nativity picture it rather laviously. Mary wears royal blue and salmon pink robes, the wise men are dressed as kings, even the shepherds are relatively handsome. Pasolini cuts his images from a more basic fabric. His wise men - clearly rich due to their substantial entourages - are ordinary looking. They have time weathered faces and their dress is - compared to their rivals from other films - relatively threadbare. When they bring their gifts they are not conveniently smelted lumps of gold nicely packaged in a decorative case, they are a selection of jugs and goblets held in a blanket (I have Nina to thank for drawing my attention to that).

Whilst there are many anachronisms in Pasolini's images, clothes and backgrounds, his locating of the story primarily in a peasant culture, in a poorer, less luxurious age is quite striking, and a nice antidote to the typical religious Christmas card image.

Aside from the educational advantages that Pasolini's film provides, it's also just a great piece of filmmaking. One of my favourite moments in all cinema is the silent arrival of the magi accompanied by the haunting sounds of Odetta's "Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child". It's remarkably moving and poignant and captures the holiness and spirituality of the moment, whilst simultaneously highlighting the relative loneliness of Jesus' birth and calling compared to most these days.

The other major segment of this part of the film is, of course, the annunciation. This is also simply wonderful. The opening dialogue-free scenes convey far more in their close-ups and images than most films with dialogue. Mary has, presumably, just told Joseph of her pregnancy and is at a loss for any further explanation. Joseph is similarly speechless. When the angel appears in a dream there are no flashing lights, just a girl in a white dress against a toned down background sound. The reconciliation is similarly wordless. In a sense little has changed - neither can find the words to express what is going on. Yet clearly, in another sense everything has changed. Margherita Caruso (Mary) allows the corners of her mouth to flicker the smallest bit at Joseph's return, and then Pasolini makes us wait for what feels like an age before allowing her a proper smile. The delay triggers a far greater emotional response than such a flicker of happiness would normally provide.

Around these two scenes we get Herod and his cronies, again ordinary looking, but with a nicely underplayed hint of the sinister, and the girl angel appearing again to Joseph and the magi to warn them of the impending attack from Herod. The later is again wordless. The angel stands in their path, looks in one direction and then leas them in another.

The gamble worked. The kids enjoyed it, even the three year old Digory managed sat relatively engrossed, and Nina declared at the end "I like watching Italian film". As a lover of Pasolini and Rossellini's neo-realist cinema I can't wait until she can read well enough to be able to introduce her to some more.