Il vangelo secondo Matteo
| The Gospel According to St. Matthew | |
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Original Italian release poster
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| Directed by | Pier Paolo Pasolini |
| Produced by | Alfredo Bini |
| Written by | Pier Paolo Pasolini |
| Based on | Gospel of Matthew |
| Starring | Enrique Irazoqui |
| Music by |
Luis Enríquez Bacalov Uncredited: Carlo Rustichelli |
| Cinematography | Tonino Delli Colli |
| Edited by | Nino Baragli |
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Production
company |
Arco Film
Lux Compagnie Cinématographique de France |
| Distributed by | Titanus Distribuzione |
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Release date
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Running time
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137 minutes |
| Country | Italy France |
| Language | Italian |
The Gospel According to St. Matthew (Italian: Il Vangelo secondo Matteo) is a 1964 Italian biographical drama film directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini. It is a cinematic rendition of the story of Jesus Christ according to the Gospel of Saint Matthew, from the Nativity through the Resurrection. In 2015, L'Osservatore Romano called it the best film on Christ ever made.
The dialogue is taken directly from the Gospel of Matthew, as Pasolini felt that "images could never reach the poetic heights of the text." He reportedly chose Matthew's Gospel over the others because he had decided that "John was too mystical, Mark too vulgar, and Luke too sentimental."
In Palestine during the Roman Empire, Jesus of Nazareth travels around the country with his disciples, healing the blind, raising the dead, exorcising demons and proclaiming the arrival of the Kingdom of God and the salvation of Israel. He claims to be the son of God and so, therefore, the prophesied messiah of Israel, which brings him into direct confrontation with the Jewish temple leaders. He is arrested, handed over to the Romans and charged with sedition against the Roman state of which he is declared innocent by the Roman governor of Palestine, but is, nevertheless, still crucified at the behest of the Temple leaders anyway. He rises from the dead after three days.
In 1963, the figure of Christ appeared in Pier Paolo Pasolini's short film La ricotta, included in the omnibus film RoGoPaG, which led to controversy and a jail sentence for the allegedly blasphemous and obscene content in the film. According to Barth David Schwartz’s book Pasolini Requiem (1992), the impetus for the film took place in 1962. Pasolini had accepted Pope John XXIII’s invitation for a new dialogue with non-Catholic artists, and subsequently visited the town of Assisi to attend a seminar at a Franciscan monastery there. The papal visit caused traffic jams in the town, leaving Pasolini confined to his hotel room; there, he came across a copy of the New Testament. Pasolini read all four Gospels straight through, and he claimed that adapting a film from one of them "threw in the shade all the other ideas for work I had in my head." Unlike previous cinematic depictions of Jesus' life, Pasolini's film does not embellish the biblical account with any literary or dramatic inventions, nor does it present an amalgam of the four Gospels (subsequent films which would adhere as closely as possible to one Gospel account are 1979's Jesus, based on the Gospel of Luke, and 2003's The Gospel of John). Pasolini stated that he decided to "remake the Gospel by analogy" and the film's sparse dialogue all comes directly from the Bible.
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Wikipedia