Learning on ScreenThe Gospel According to Matthew
2012. GB. Blu-ray/DVD. The Gospel According to Matthew [Il vangelo secondo Matteo]. 138 minutes (+ extras). Eureka (Masters of Cinema series). Certificate U. Price £22.99
About the Author: Dr Miles Booy is the author of Love and Monsters: The “Doctor Who” Experience, 1979 to the Present (I.B. Tauris, 2012). He previously contributed chapters to several publications, including The Cult TV Book (I.B. Tauris, 2010).
Pier Paolo Pasolini joins Eureka’s Masters of Cinema series (the only question being how a series with that title could exclude him from its first 32 releases) in a deluxe edition of Il vangelo secondo Matteo (1964) which includes a blu-ray disc, a DVD and a 36-page booklet. The blu-ray wasn’t included in the review package, so I can’t comment on the quality of the high-definition transfer. By the time this sees print, online review sites will have all the evaluations and technical details anyone could need. The sound and visual quality of the DVD is indistinguishable, on my machine at least, from the DVD put out by Tartan in 2002. The film itself has new English subtitles. Italian linguists can analyse that. What’s being trumpeted is the fact that the English language title reads simply ‘The Gospel According to Matthew’, deleting the ‘St.’ which was inserted against Pasolini’s wishes and which has remained there until now.
Collected as extras are the film’s trailer, a rarely-seen documentary Sopralluoghi in Palestina (Scouting in Palestine), which records the search by Pasolini and producer Alfredo Bini for locations in the Holy Land and their failure to find anything authentic there. There are also some outtakes from this, though they really are rather minor, and some contemporary newsreel of Pasolini talking about the project. The booklet reproduces various pieces, much of them letters by, and interviews with, Pasolini himself. These are interesting, though they’ll be familiar to those who’ve been collecting film books for decades. Much of the material is taken from Oswald Stack’s book of interviews with the director, originally published in the ‘Cinema 2’ series. This makes the set the definitive collection of those items which already exist. On those grounds, the package is well worth buying and if you haven’t got a Pasolini biography this will cover a lot of ground. To really knit it all together it would require something that isn’t here: a contextualising essay by an Italian film/history specialist which explained the complex arrangements of the Catholic left, the varied political forces active at the time and the reasons for the film’s apparent approval by everyone except the far right (and a few on the left who felt Pasolini had sold out). That something like the excitement surrounding the Second Vatican Council should need restating might surprise some, but it was fifty years ago now, way before the lives – and way beyond the cultural experience – of many modern cinephiles.
Does the film still sand up? I am pleased to report in the positive. Leaving aside the many wonderful moments, the fine direction, the performances by non-professionals, the wonderful soundtrack from many sources and all the other beautiful aspects of this film, let’s mention Pasolini’s big innovation. He filmed the gospel in a way which made no historical claim for it at all. That contrasted with cinema’s earliest days when cinematic representation of Jesus was a risky subject, and the resultant films often came wrapped in suitably pious surrounding presentations. It also contrasted with the 1949-1965 Hollywood Biblical epic cycle (The Ten Commandments (1956), Ben Hur (1959), King of Kings (1961)) which added reams of historical research to the Bible text to back up the Christian view that the gospels are fully compatible with recorded history. That pleased many filmgoers (Charlton Heston was as huge at the box-office as he was on the screen), but was not always to the taste of others. It also diluted the poetry of the original as the biblical text was adapted to contemporary norms of dialogue and performance. Pasolini gave that poetry back to people who did not wish the standard pious presentation. Matteo is often viewed as the realist alternative to the epics of its time, but it’s Hollywood, not Pasolini, which insisted it was real. He just thought it was beautiful and he let his audience see that too.
Dr Miles Booy
