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Pasolini's Poetic Image: Il vangelo secondo Matteo/The Gospel According to Matthew

2023; Wayne State University Press; Volume: 64; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/frm.2023.a914983

1559-7989

Bruce Isaacs,

Comparative Literary Analysis and Criticism

Pasolini's Poetic Image:Il vangelo secondo Matteo/The Gospel According to Matthew Bruce Isaacs (bio) My fascination with the cinema of Pier Paolo Pasolini stems in large part from the filmmaker's dualistic approach to the film image. Contrary to movements in Italian cinema that wished to divorce the moving image from prior art forms, or at least render the art of moving images distinct from other art forms (Italian neorealism comes to mind), Pasolini engaged the medium of film images from the point of view of literature and, more precisely, poetry. The poetics of cinema, for Pasolini, inculcated a poetics of literary form and, in perhaps a more challenging and provocative semiotic move, a poetics of literary thought.1 There were distinctions but also essential interactions and synergies. In the following short analysis, I discuss the poetic nature of the film image in Pasolini's landmark work, Il vangelo secondo Matteo/The Gospel According to Matthew (IT, 1964) (hereafter The Gospel). In this film, Pasolini not only expresses the image as a moving poetic form but also reflexively presents the image as a mode of artistic representation and philosophical thought. Like Pasolini, in reflecting upon his film, I wish to consider how writing and moving images come together to form something meaningful, with each medium and its intricate forms enriching and expanding the experiential capacities of the other. Already a major poet, intellectual voice, and radical activist, Pasolini produced his first two feature films, Accattone (IT, 1961) and Mamma Roma (IT, 1962), as deliberate artistic and political interventions. These films, drawing on a complex engagement with a neorealist aesthetic and a modernist style that had informed his literature and poetry, activate the spectator into a reflexive, [End Page 42] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. 1964 Italian film poster by Due Fogli. philosophical engagement with the film image. Confronted with the opening frame of Mary (Margherita Caruso) in The Gospel (an image I will return to shortly), the spectator is compelled to reflect on the nature of the image—its composition in framing and montage—rather than its story-based content. That image alone signifies an entry point into a thoughtful, active, and philosophical mode of film spectatorship. Furthermore, in terms of a political imperative marked by story, narrative, and character, it is no less controversial than Salò o le 120 giornate di Sodoma/Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (IT/FR, 1975), Pasolini's [End Page 43] infamous final film. The Gospel chronicles the brief life of Jesus, as adapted from the Gospel of Matthew, and yet Pasolini had a complex, often contradictory, and certainly troubled relationship with faith, as well as with the mythology, doctrine, and institution of religion.2 It is this filmmaker—a Marxist intellectual, at times a self-avowed atheist, and yet a public intellectual who expressed a reverence for the act of faith—who chooses to adapt a biblical gospel as the subject matter of his third film. In the mid-1960s, Hollywood was enjoying its own fascination (and lucrative box-office returns) with the biblical epic and the life of Christ. George Stevens's The Greatest Story Ever Told (US, 1965), also chronicling the life of Jesus, appeared only one year after The Gospel. With a US$20 million Hollywood budget, it stars Max von Sydow, Charlton Heston (who adopted several biblical personas during Hollywood's late-classical era), Telly Savalas, and John Wayne as a Roman centurion who declares, "Truly, this man was the son of God!" The film, like Pasolini's, begins with the arrival of the three wise men bearing gifts, charts the relationship between Jesus of Nazareth (von Sydow) and John the Baptist (Heston), depicts each of the critical narrative points drawn from the gospels, and, again like Pasolini's film, concludes with the crucifixion and resurrection. These are two films ostensibly with the same subject matter. And yet the films—one a stark Italian neorealist work shot in black and white, the other a Hollywood studio film in Technicolor—have very little in common. While Pasolini rejected the mantle of neorealism as his overarching aesthetic (as would Fellini, who similarly wished to...