The Gospel According to St. Matthew

Pier Paolo Pasolini was a Marxist and did not believe in God, and in 1965 he made the most convincing film about Jesus we know of. His method was to take the Gospel of Matthew and use nothing else. Every line spoken on screen comes from the text; Pasolini, credited as writer, has cut and arranged, but not invented. He shot in the poor stone towns of southern Italy, Matera among them, and filled the cast with people who had never acted. The result runs 137 minutes and looks like nothing else made about the subject before or since.

The opening tells you what kind of film it will be. Maria (Margherita Caruso), a girl of perhaps sixteen, stands in a doorway, visibly pregnant. Giuseppe (Marcello Morante) looks at her. She looks at him. Nobody speaks, and Tonino Delli Colli simply holds each face in turn until Giuseppe walks off down the road. We were moved before a word had been said, and the reason is that Pasolini has understood the story as something that happens to ordinary, frightened people who do not have the vocabulary for it. The angel, when he comes, is a boy with a haircut, standing in a field.

Enrique Irazoqui, a Spanish student when Pasolini cast him, plays Cristo as a thin, dark-browed young man who barely smiles and is nearly always angry. He preaches at a march, half-turned back over his shoulder, so the disciples have to hurry to hear him. The Sermon on the Mount is done as a series of close-ups against changing skies, Nino Baragli cutting from one pronouncement to the next as if they were delivered on different days in different weather, which they may have been. We found it hectoring for a few minutes, and then something turned and we were on his side. This is a Christ who is impatient with the poor being kept poor, and Pasolini plainly loves him for it.

Delli Colli shoots in black and white, mostly with a handheld camera, and he uses long lenses and zooms in a way that was new for the subject and still feels reportorial, as though a newsreel crew had got into first-century Palestine. He photographs faces as landscapes and landscapes as faces: the same lined, weathered surface. Danilo Donati’s costumes and Luigi Scaccianoce’s production design take their shapes from Italian painting, the tall hats of the Pharisees, the soldiers’ odd helmets, without ever looking like a pageant. The crowds are peasants in rough wool, and their skin is the film’s texture.

Luis Bacalov is credited with the music, and the soundtrack is a collision: Bach, Mozart, a Congolese sung mass, an American spiritual, put over shots of a Galilee that is really Basilicata. It ought to be a mess. It is instead the single most persuasive argument the film makes, that this story belongs to no one country and no one century.

It is not flawless. After the disciples are called there is a long stretch that is almost entirely speech, parables and denunciations delivered straight to camera, and Pasolini’s refusal to dramatise means that the film for a while becomes a reading with pictures. The dubbing, standard for Italian cinema of the period, leaves some voices floating a little free of the mouths. The disciples, other than Pietro (Settimio Di Porto), are faces rather than people; we could not have told you which one Filippo (Giorgio Agamben) was without the credits. And Herod’s slaughter of the children, staged early and at a distance in a bare field, is brutal in a way that will surprise anyone expecting a devotional film.

The last act covers the events everyone knows, and we will say only that Pasolini does not linger, and that he gives the older Maria to his own mother, Susanna Pasolini, whose face in those scenes is the thing we carried out of the cinema. Against Hollywood’s Christs of the 1950s and 1960s, with their lighting and their orchestras, this looks like the truth. Against Pasolini’s own later work it is the calmest thing he made, and the one he made with the least contempt.

Watch it in the original Italian with subtitles, and watch it in one sitting. It is a film about a man who does not stop walking, and it should not be paused.