Immense Pasolini.
Approaching a film like this (strong, vibrant, immense) can be one of those experiences that forges and shakes your life forever.
To witness the almost literal transposition of the Gospel of Matthew by one of the greatest directors and talents that the peninsula has ever had the grace to welcome to itself is one of those basic formative experiences to grow with the right critical conscience and to form a minimal ethical and human skeleton, essential for a harmonious growth as a man, citizen, and person.
An obligatory work, in my opinion, that should be screened in nursery or middle schools, both to better frame the character of Christ and to approach a spiritual search that can and must be only individual.
Chronicles say that Pier Paolo Pasolini publicly read passages from the Gospel in Assisi in 1962 and, dazzled by those pages full of sacredness and harmony, he decided, against his reputation as an uncomfortable and controversial character (he had just been sentenced for contempt of state religion!), to make a film from it.
A film more precisely drawn from the Gospel of Matthew (a deliberate choice), the closest to the carnality and the more human and earthly part of the figure of Jesus, looking with a secular and curious eye from the perspective of someone distant, or even diametrically opposed, from the Christian vision of life (Pasolini had repeatedly declared himself a Non-Practicing Atheist).
A film that was a real calvary, organizational and productive in the first place, in an almost parallel path with the Passion of Christ it would represent on film. A kind of dual and parallel journey between real life and fiction.
A film born from the collaboration with the Pro Civitate Christiana for the screenplay, almost as if P.P.P. wanted to seek some sort of reconciliation with the Church. A courageous choice that earned him charges of High Treason from the most radical leftist factions and accusations of softening from a director who until then had undertaken completely different directions. But the film wanted to represent Something Else and rise above the sides, beyond the easy judgments expressed so far.
The newspapers of the time wrote:
Il Tempo: The director highlighted some episodes in the life of Jesus that seem to contain more revolutionary seeds...
Il Corriere della Sera: Torn between ideology and sentiment, Pasolini attempted to recover for his secularism the characteristics of religiosity, but because the operation has a voluntaristic accent, he missed that peculiar character which is the sense of mystery...
L'Osservatore Romano: Faithful to the story, not to the inspiration of the Gospel...
But all these controversies did not affect the slow rise of the film which will soon become one of the best cinematic transpositions - with a religious character - in the history of cinema.
A film that also goes against the trend compared to certain Kolossal productions to which predecessors made about Christ's life had been inspired.
A lean, sparse, deliberately poor film (shot almost entirely in Lucania, presumably similar to the places where the events occurred and with semi-unknown and anonymous actors) in which you can feel the presence of dust, of heat. A minimalist film I would dare say, almost devoid of music (except for rare passages) and with dialogues reduced to the bone and literally taken from the sacred texts, in a mixture of sacredness and poetry rarely reached by a work on the big screen.
A film that fundamentally narrates through images, in a black and white that exudes spirituality with every choice, with every glance, with every camera movement. A film that, in an Italy in full economic boom, measures the conscience of a nation that seems to be on the verge of forgetting the fundamental values on which it was founded and which serves as a reminder to always keep high the inner faith that animates each of us, whether secular or religious.
Bitter words that managed to see far ahead and foresee an Italy morbidly sick and deeply empty, which is the one we live in today, almost 45 years after this film.
A priceless masterpiece for the eyes, mind, and heart.
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