Representation

Abstract

What makes Pasolini’s The Gospel According to St. Matthew a unique film in the series of films on Jesus Christ? Although it is apparent in the film credits that the script was written by Pasolini himself, it is, in fact, written by an anonymous writer of the Gospel. This is not the case with other films which focus on the Bible or Jesus Christ, such as Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ, or even Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ. It also differs from other film scripts about St. Paul that Pasolini intended to shoot, as he focused on transformation through the process of rewriting. However, in The Gospel According to St. Matthew, Pasolini uses biblical verses in order to transform the Gospel into an audiovisual work. The Gospel becomes a series of moving images, and should be understood through gaps between what is heard and what is seen, between sounds and images, than through the spoken word only. The cinematography in its double, audiovisual dimension dominates over the spoken word. Paradoxically, although Pasolini’s Gospel moves through time with a straight narration line, it is much more dynamic and radical from the temporarily point of view. This is in contrast with the ultraviolent Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, which covers only the last 12 hours of the life of Jesus Christ and uses flashbacks to go back in time seeing Jesus teaching his Apostles during his childhood. The spoken language of Gibson’s film is Aramaic and Latin, and it draws from many sources (New Testament, many other Catholic writings, canon of the Hebrew Bible, and so on). Unlike Gibson, Pasolini makes Jesus Christ speak Italian and his first and only source is the Gospel of Matthew. Pier Paolo Pasolini does not rewrite the screenplay, but, instead, edits the Bible. Although he omits some scenes, Pasolini creates scenes on the basis of Matthew’s dialogs. He takes the text of Matthew out of the Bible and treats it as a book on its own. That is to say, he decontextualizes the Gospel of Matthew, and in doing so, he “de-sanctifies the biblical Matthew by quoting it whole, and as though it were isolated from the rest of the Bible.” Given this, the question beckons: How exactly does Pasolini edit the Bible? A good example is the scene of the Sermon on the Mount (which Pasolini on one occasion characterized as “stupendous, interminable”), in which his “film rendition of the sermon highlights this uncertainty about the sayings’ context, presenting most of the sermon through a series of head shots of Jesus speaking, but varying the background sky.” This poses another question: that of fidelity and transformation. Is it possible to remain faithful to an original work and successfully transform it? Earlier, I argued that Pasolini presents a specific reality of the cinematographic art. Now, one can argue that the specificity of this transformation resides in the dialectical combination between the original work (i.e., the Bible) and the esthetic currents of Pasolini’s period: Pasolini transformed Matthew’s Gospel also through music, location, architecture, and so on. In this sense, the original book is subjected to the influences and currents of “our” period. From Pasolini’s perspective, the only way through which we can understand the “essence” of an original work is through its transformation. In “Observations on the Long Take,” talking precisely about the transformation of reality that takes place in the editing process (montage), Pasolini writes that as a result of it, we get “a multiplication of ‘presents,’ as if an action, instead of unwinding once before our eyes, were to unwind many times.”