October 9, 2018 (XXXVII:7) Pier Paolo Pasolini: THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO ST. MATTHEW (1964, 137 min.) Online versions of The Goldenrod Handouts have color images & hot links: http://csac.buffalo.edu/goldenrodhandouts.html

DIRECTED BY Pier Paolo Pasolini WRITTEN BY Pier Paolo Pasolini PRODUCED BY Alfredo Bini MUSIC Luis Bacalov CINEMATOGRAPHY Tonino Delli Colli EDITING Nino Baragli PRODUCTION DESIGN Luigi Scaccianoce SET DECORATION Andrea Fantacci COSTUME DESIGN Danilo Donati MAKEUP Marcello Ceccarelli (makeup artist), Lamberto Marini (assistant makeup artist), Mimma Pomilia (hair stylist) ART DEPARTMENT Dante Ferretti SOUND Fausto Ancillai (sound mixer), Mario Del Pezzo (sound) VISUAL EFFECTS Ettore Catalucci COSTUME AND WARDROBE Piero Cicoletti (assistant Renato Terra...Un indemoniato costumer), Piero Farani (wardrobe) Eliseo Boschi...Giuseppe D'Arimatea Natalia Ginzburg...Maria di Betania CAST Enrique Irazoqui...Cristo PIER PAOLO PASOLINI (b. March 5, 1922 in Bologna, Margherita Caruso...Maria (giovane) Emilia-Romagna, Italy—d. November 2, 1975 (age 53) in Ostia, Susanna Pasolini...Maria (vecchia) Rome, Lazio, Italy) was published poet at 19 and had already Marcello Morante...Giuseppe written numerous novels and essays before his first screenplay in Mario Socrate...Giovanni Battista 1954. His first film Accattone (1961) was based on his own Settimio Di Porto...Pietro novel. He was arrested in 1962 when his contribution to Alfonso Gatto...Andrea Ro.Go.Pa.G. (1963) was considered blasphemous. The original Luigi Barbini...Giacomo Italian title of The Gospel According to St. Matthew (1964), a Giacomo Morante...Giovanni realistic, stripped-down presentation of the life of Christ, Il Giorgio Agamben...Filippo vangelo secondo Matteo, pointedly omitted “Saint” in St. Guido Cerretani...Bartolomeo Matthew. He would go on to make scandalously erotic Rosario Migale...Tommaso adaptations of classic literary texts: Oedipus Rex (1967); The Ferruccio Nuzzo...Matteo Decameron (1971); The Canterbury Tales (1972); Arabian Marcello Galdini...Giacomo figlio di Alfeo Nights (1974), as well as more personal projects, expressing his Elio Spaziani...Taddeo controversial views on Marxism, atheism, fascism and Enzo Siciliano...Simone homosexuality, notably Teorema (1968) (Theorem), Pigsty and Otello Sestili...Giuda the notorious Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975), a Juan Rodolfo Wilcock...Caifa (as Rodolfo Wilcock) relentlessly grim fusion of Benito Mussolini's Fascist Italy with Alessandro Clerici...Ponzio Pilato the 'Marquis de Sade' which was banned in Italy and many other Amerigo Bevilacqua...Erode I countries for several years. Pasolini was murdered in still- Francesco Leonetti...Erode II mysterious circumstances shortly after completing the film. He Franca Cupane...Erodiade directed 26 films and wrote 56 films. Paola Tedesco...Salomè Rossana Di Rocco...L'Angelo del Signore Pasolini—THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO ST. MATTHEW—2

These are the other films he directed: Mamma Roma (1962), La MARGHERITA CARUSO (1950 in Italy) acted in 1 film: The rabbia (1963, Documentary, part one), Love Meetings (1964, Gospel According to St. Matthew (1964). Documentary), Sopralluoghi in Palestina per il vangelo secondo Matteo (1965, Documentary), The Hawks and the Sparrows SUSANNA PASOLINI (b. March 10, 1891 in Casarsa della (1966); The Witches (segment "Terra vista dalla luna, La") and Delizia, Friuli-Venezia Giulia, Italy—d. February 1, 1981 (age Pasolini intervista: Ezra Pound (TV Short documentary, 89) in Udine, Friuli-Venezia Giulia, Italy) acted in two films. She uncredited) in 1967; Capriccio all'italiana (segment "Che cosa was married to Carlo Alberto Pasolini, and was Pier Paolo sono le nuvole?"), Appunti per un film sull'India (TV Short Pasolini’s mother. We can only speculate about the significance documentary), and of Pasolini casting his Teorema in 1968; Love mother to play Mary, and Anger (segment "La the mother of Christ sequenza del fiore di in The Gospel carta"), Porcile, and According to St. Medea in 1969; Appunti Matthew (1964). She per un romanzo also appeared as an dell'immondezza “Old Peasant” in (Documentary) and Pasolini’s Teorema Notes Towards an (1968). African Orestes (Documentary) in 1970; MARCELLO The Walls of Sana'a MORANTE (b. 1916 (1971, Documentary in Rome, Lazio, short) and 12 dicembre Italy—d. 2005 (age (1972, Documentary, 89) in Italy) acted in 1 uncredited). film: The Gospel According to St. Matthew (1964). TONINO DELLI COLLI (b. November 20, 1922 in Rome, Lazio, Italy—d. August 16, 2005 (age 82) in Rome, Lazio, Italy) MARIO SOCRATE (b. 1920—d. March 27, 2012 (age 92) in did cinematography for 143 films, some of which are: Rome, Lazio, Italy) acted in 1 film: The Gospel According to St. Finalmente sì (1944), O sole mio (1946), City of Pain (1949), Matthew (1964). Toto the Third Man (1951), and Mid-Century Loves (1954); Female Three Times, Questo nostro mondo (Documentary), and SETTIMIO DI PORTO acted in 1 film: The Gospel According Seven Hills of Rome (director of photography) in 1957; First to St. Matthew (1964). Love (1959) and The Thief of Baghdad (1961, director of photography); Mamma Roma and Swordsman of Siena (director JUAN RODOLFO WILCOCK (b. April 17, 1919 in Buenos of photography) in 1962; The Executioner (1963, director of Aires, Argentina—d. March 16, 1978 (age 58) in Lubriano, photography); Amori pericolosi (segment "Il generale") and The Lazio, Italy) was an Argentine writer, poet, critic and translator. Gospel According to St. Matthew in 1964; The Good, the Bad He acted in one film: The Gospel According to St. Matthew and the Ugly (1966, director of photography), Once Upon a Time (1964). in the West (1968, director of photography), Pussycat, Pussycat, I Love You (1970, director of photography), The Decameron ALESSANDRO CLERICI acted in one film: The Gospel (1971), and The Canterbury Tales (1972); Lacombe, Lucien and According to St. Matthew (1964). Till Marriage Do Us Part in 1974; Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (director of photography) and Seven Beauties in 1975; PAOLA TEDESCO (b. March 28, 1952 in Rome, Lazio, Italy) I'm Photogenic (1980) and Once Upon a Time in America acted in 35 films, including: The Gospel According to St. (1984); Ginger and Fred (director of photography) and The Matthew (1964), Romeo and Juliet (1968), Satyricon (1969), Name of the Rose (director of photography) in 1986; Death and Lady Barbara (1970), and Crime Boss (1972); Fury and Battle of the Maiden (1994) and Life Is Beautiful (1997, director of the Amazons in 1973; Dream of Zorro (1975), Ring of Darkness photography). (1979), Lucky and Zorba (1998), and Idomeneo, re di Creta (2005, Video). ENRIQUE IRAZOQUI (b. July 5, 1944 in Barcelona, Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain), at nineteen, was a Spanish PIER PAOLO PASOLINI (From World Film Directors, Vol. economics student who after meeting in a political event was cast II, ed. John Wakeman, H.W. Wilson Co, NY:1988). by Pasolini to play the role of Christ in The Gospel according to Italian director, scenarist, actor, poet, and critic, was born in St. Matthew (1964). He has occasionally taken acting roles since, Bologna. He grew up there and in various other northern Italian including a 2016 comedy that shares the title of his 1964 film towns where his father, a regular army officer, was stationed. with Pasolini: Il vangelo secondo Mattei. His other films are: “My origins are fairly typical of petit bourgeois Italian society,” Noche de vino tinto (1966), Dante no es únicamente severo Pasolini told Oswold Stack. “I am a product of the Unity of Italy. (1967), The Long Winter (1992), A la soledat (2008), and El My father belonged to an old noble family of the Romagna, aullido (2009, Short). while my mother comes from a Friulan peasant family which Pasolini—THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO ST. MATTHEW—3 subsequently became petit bourgeois.” Pasolini was in constant still sustain, though the bourgeoisie has done all in its power to conflict with his father, who supported fascism and was destroy it.” “overbearing, egotistic, egocentric, tyrannical, and authoritarian, The thesis on contemporary Italian painting that although at the same time extraordinarily naïve”; his mother he Pasolini had begun at Bologna was lost in his escape from the loved with an “excessive even monstrous love.” Pasolini wrote Germans. When he returned to the university in the late 1940s, and illustrated his first poems when he he switched to literature, writing a thesis on was seven. Ten years later he began to the nineteenth century Friulan poet write verse in Friulan, the old Giovanni Pascoli. In 1950 he went to Rome, language (not dialect) spoken by the where he endured great poverty before peasants of his mother’s region, which finding an ill-paid teaching job. During he often visited. these lean years he lived on the Ponte Educated in an assortment of Mammolo, a suburban slum. There he came Catholic and state schools, Pasolini to know the male and female prostitutes, became an agnostic when he was pimps, thieves, and hustlers whose company fourteen or fifteen. By then he was as he continued to enjoy all his life. Pasolini interested in painting as in poetry, and was himself on various occasions charged at the University of Bologna began as with criminal offenses—attempting to rob a a student of the history of art. His first filling station, helping a bandit to escape book of poems was published in 1942 from the police–earning journalistic as Poesie a Casarsa (“Poetry to comparisons with François Villon and Casarsa,” his mother’s home town in (partly on account of his homosexuality) Friul). Pasolini’s studies were with Jean Genet. The criminal and near- interrupted in August 1942 when he criminal Roman subproletariat populated his was drafted into the collapsing Italian novels and acted in his films, and in the end army, then sill on the German side. A one of them killed him. week after his conscription, Italy Pasolini’s first novel, Ragazzi di vita surrendered, and a few days after that (1955, translated The Ragazzi) caused a Pasolini’s entire regiment was national uproar. A series of loosely captured by two German soldiers in a connected sketches about a group of slum tank. Pasolini escaped and made his way to Casarsa. youths in the postwar years, it gives a cool, almost documentary There he remained for some years, immersing himself account of lives reduced by poverty and indifference to in the peasant culture of the region, founding a small school of subhuman moral squalor. It led to Pasolini’s prosecution for Friulan poets and throwing himself into the struggle of the obscenity (the first of many such), and was followed by another braccianti (day laborers) against their exploiters, the landlords. H powerful and more coherent study of a slum boy, Un vita joined the Communist party in 1946 but was expelled three years violenta (1959, translated as A Violent Life. later following an arrest for “moral indignity”—a charge of At the same time, Pasolini was making his name as a which he was later acquitted. At any rate he was permanently poet. Raleigh Trevelyan wrote that “there is something influenced by Marxist thought and especially by the writings of omnivorous in the way his poems cover such various and Antonio Gramsci, with whom he shared a belief in the potentially contrasting fields of experience and comprehension. None of the revolutionary role of the Italian peasantry. young poets in Italy can match him in content or technique.” Throughout his life, Pasolini continued to identify Leceneri di Gramsci (“The Ashes of Gramsci,” 1957), the best- himself as a “rank-and-file communist, without a card, but in any known of these early collections, received the Viareggio Prize. case irreverent toward any institution.” As he told Italo Calvino From 1955 to 1958 Pasolini edited the influential avant-garde in 1974, “Like Dr. Hyde, I have another life. To live it I I have magazine Officina, forced to close down because of the outrage to break down the natural (and innocent) barriers between caused by a poem in which he attacked the dying Pope Pius XII classes, charge the walls of Italietta [the uniformity of Italian for his sins of omission. culture], and thus make my way in another world: the world of It was in this same hectic decade that Pasolini turned his the peasant, of the subproletarian, of the worker.” And as Oswald “omnivorous” attention to the cinema, initially as a scriptwriter Stack wrote, “the restlessness and eclecticism of Pasolini’s whose novels had established him as an authority on urban career, which has shifted incessantly from one genre to lowlife. He first contributed to the script of Mario Soldati’s La another…and from one style of subject matter to another, reflects donna del fiume (1954), a Sophia Loren vehicle, and during the a search for some appeasement of the multiplicity of next seven years collaborated on the scenarios of films by Louis incompatible contradictions which have formed his view of the Trenker, Fellini (La Notti di Cabiria), Mauro Bolognini’s (five world and art. Pasolini’s Marxism is far from being a unifying films), Franco Rossi (Morte di un amico), Cecili Mngini, system: in his thought it is but one of many conflicting strands, Florestano Vancini, Gianni Puccini, and Luciano Emmer. now surfacing, now submerging. If there is one constant, one Bolognini’s La Notte brava iand Mangini’s La canta della invariant, it is Pasolini’s uncritical attachment to the Marane were both based on Pasolini’s novel Ragazzi di vita, and peasantry….He lays increasing stress on the need to restore an in 1962 Pasolini collaborated on an adaptation of La vita violenta epic and mythological dimension to life, a sense of awe and filmed by Paolo Heusch and Brunello Rondi. reverence to the world: a sense which, he believes, the peasantry Pasolini—THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO ST. MATTHEW—4

By this time, Pasolini had made his own debut as a reality.” He later developed this thesis in a famous paper called director. Abandoning the first script he had written for himself, “Il cinema di poesia” 1965), in which he suggested that the La commare secca (which he later handed to Bernardo filmmaker, unlike the author, “has no dictionary but infinite Bertolucci), he wrote a second called Accattone, set in the same possibilities”—that he not only has to decide what to say but first milieu which he filmed in 1961. Made on an extremely small has to create a vocabulary of images in which o say it, out of the budget, it was produced by Alfredo Bini for his company Arco infinite possibilities with which the world is stocked. Film, which financed the majority of Pasolini’s early movies. It The squalor and violence of Pasolini’s first film caused tells the story of a preening young Roman pimp who loses his as great a furor in Italy as his first novel had done, dividing prostitute, finds another and rashly falls in love with her. He tries critics of the left, right, and center. Brandished by moralists as to go straight but finds the effort shocking evidence of the need too much for him and turns for further censorship, it was ineptly to petty thieving. Almost passionately defended by caught, he is killed while others, including the influential escaping from the police. lawyer Francesco Carnelutti, Just after the who wrote: “This is not a completion of Accattone, shameful film but a painful one, Pasolini explained: “My taste as perhaps the most painful film I filmmaker originates not with have ever seen. And there lies the cinema but with painting. its nobility….Woe betide us if The images, the visual fields I art does not show evil, but still have in my head, are the more woe if it does not make us frescoes of Masaccio, Giotto— feel the pain of evil.” the painters I lie the best—along Abroad, Accattone was with certain Mannerists like received with something close Pontormo.” Bertolucci, who to unanimous enthusiasm and it acted as Pasolini’s assistant on won the main prizes at Karlovy, Accattone, claims that at this Vary and Montreal. The stage, Pasolini’s only references were pictorial [rather than deliberate naivety of the style gives the film a quality of cinematic] and his direction—frontal—was very much strangeness far removed from neorealism, and its transcendental influenced by such fourteenth- and fifteenth-century painters as note is underlined by the selections from Bach that form the Cimabue and Masaccio. The only film he cared for was Dreyer’s score, to give Accattone’s squalid progress something of the Joan of Arc. He entered movies via literature….Accattone was a quality of a tragic pilgrimage—a quality wholly in keeping with veritable invention for Pasolini. The day he shot his first dolly the “reverential” humanism that so distressed Pasolini’s Marxist shot, I felt almost as if I’d witnessed the birth of a language.” friends. Some, indeed, thought that the picture did not escape There is, obviously, a degree of exaggeration in this. Pasolini had sentimentality, especially in “an eerie dream sequence that wants been a moviegoer since the age of five. As a student at Bologna to mirror Accattone’s finer aspirations.” John Colman found he had joined a film club “and saw some of the classics—all of some of the latter implausible but concluded that “a little as René Clair, the first Renoirs, some Chaplin, and so on. That’s Brando cancelled inconsistencies in On the Waterfront, so does where my great love for the cinema started.” After the war he Franco Citti’s sulky, volatile presence transform this.” remembered “going specially from Casarsa to Udine to see Franco Citti appeared again in Mamma Roma (1962), Bicycle Thieves, and above all, Rome, Open City, which I saw up starring Anna Magnani as a prostitute trying to reform for the in Friuli.” He followed he example of De Sica and Rossellini in sake of her son Ettore (played by another of Pasolini’s young shooting Accattone on location with a non-professional cast discoveries, a former waiter named Ettore Garofolo). drawn mostly from the slums where it was set; Accattone himself Traumatized when he learns the truth about his mother’s trade, was played by a ragazzo named Franco Citti, younger brother of Ettore turns to crime, and died on a prison punishment bed—a Pasolini’s friend and adviser on slum mores, Sergio Citti. letto di contenzione. Pasolini was praised for drawing attention to All the same, there was a large measure of discovery for this barbaric instrument, but most critics found little else to Pasolini in the making of his first movie and it is true that the admire in a “patchy” and melodramatic movie, further visual style is extremely unsophisticated. It is, however, imbalanced by Magnani’s histrionics. Nonetheless the film appropriate for Bertolucci to speak of the “birth of a received the International Critics’ prize at Venice as well as language.”Pasolini wrote in World Authors that “the one Italy’s Silver Ribbon. important thing in my life is to write….By ‘to write’ I mean, Another major scandal blew up around Pasolini’s next according to the terminology of the linguists of the school of film. “La ricotta.” One of the episodes comprising RoGoPaG Saussure, ‘to connote’ When I was a youth I ‘connoted’ through (1962), which also had contributions from Rossellini, Godard, the sign system of painting and now I do so through the sign and Ugo Gregoretti. “La ricotta” is a forty-minute sketch about a system of the cinema.” The difference, in Pasolini’s opinion, is director (Orson Welles) making a Cinecittà spectacular on the that the cinema is “a non-conventional and non-symbolic life of Christ, contrasting the subject with the unredeemed language” which “expresses reality not through symbols but via corruption and callowness of the filmmakers (who in their reality itself….If I want to express that tree I express it through negligence allow the actor playing the good thief to die on the itself. The cinema is a language which expresses reality with cross of a surfeit of cottage cheese). Pasolini—THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO ST. MATTHEW—5

Filmed in black and white in Pasolini’s simple and with movements that are almost Godardian, for example in the straightforward early style (but with excerpts from the film- two trials of Christ, shot like cinéma vérité….The point that…I, a within-the-film in color of Florentine richness) this brutally witty non-believer, was telling the story through the eyes of a believer. if unsubstantial piece was obviously intended as a protest against The mixture at the narrative level produced the mixture the vulgarization of religion. It stylistically.” was nevertheless prosecuted It might have been expected for “publically maligning the that Pasolini, a Marxist, would religion of the state” and produce a hostile version of the banned, Pasolini receiving a Christ story. In fact, the film is a four-month suspended direct and sober illustration of the sentence and being subject to Gospel, stressing Christ’s much public abuse. After proletarian origins and his some cuts had been made, the revolutionary role, but with no ban was rescinded and attempt at demystification. It was RoGoPaG was eventually very warmly praised by most released in Italy (without reviewers (including many but much success) as Laviamoci il not all Christian reviewers) and cervello. widely recognized s the finest Pasolnini was more Biblical mover ever made.’ fortunate with his next project Phillip French called it “a noble La rabbia (The Frenzy, 1963), film” and several critics called it a compiled at the request of great one. Alexander Walker Gastone Ferrante (Opus Films) from newsreel footage about life wrote that “it grips the historical and psychological imagination in the 1950s. Pasolini’s selection (for which he wrote a verse like no other religious film I have seen. And for all its apparent commentary) formed a Marxist denunciation of the decade’s simplicity, it is visually rich and contains strange disturbing hints developments, and to balance this Ferrrante added a quite about Christ and his mission. It won two awards at Venice different selection made by Giovanni Guareschi, author of the (where Pasolini was mobbed before the screening and cheered at Don Camillo books. There was an outcry against what was seen the end of it) and the grand prize of the International Catholic (perhaps unjustly) as racism in Guareschi’s section of the film, Film Office. and La rabbia as never released. Comizi d’amore (Assembly of The picture had its opponents, nevertheless, some found Love, 1964), seen in only a few art houses in Italy, and not t all it, in its literalness and simplicity, “more than a little dull.” There abroad, is a documentary—an inquiry into views on love, were objections to the stress on the harsher aspects of the marriage, sex, and sexual repression in Italy. character of Jesus (deliberately emphasized by the use of a When he satirized a commercial movie about Christ in dubbed voice, not Irazoqui’s own), and some found the “La ricotta,” Pasolini was already planning his own very “documentary” treatment of the crucifixion almost off-hand. The different version of the same story, Il vangelo secondo Matteo Marxist critics, on the other hand, were appalled by what Oswald (The Gospel According to Saint Matthew, 1964). He at first Stack called the movie’s “abject concessions to reactionary scouted locations in Israel (an expedition recorded in the ideology.” Pasolini himself acknowledged subsequently that documentary Sopraluoghi in Palestina (On Location in in “there are some horrible moments I am ashamed of….The Palestine), but decided “to remake the Gospel by analogy” miracle of the loaves and the fishes and Christ walking on water instead of reconstruction, shooting the film in the arid landscapes are disgusting pietism.” What he had tried to show, he said, of southern Italy. Pasolini chose a young Spanish architecture was “the life of Christ plus two thousand years of storytelling student, Enrique Irazoqui as his stern. forceful Christ. Hw cast about the life of Christ.” H thought that part of the film’s his own mother as God’s, and assigned most of the other roles to ambiguity came from the fact that, without believing in the Calabrian peasants (though he gave parts to some of his divinity of Christ, he nevertheless had a “religious vision of the intellectual friends as well, the poet Alfonso Gatto playing world” and an urge “to re-consecrate things as much as Andrew and the novelist Natalia Ginzburg appearing as Mary of possible….to re-mythicize them.” Elsewhere, he confessed to “a Bethany). There I very little dialogue, what there is being reaction against the conformity of Marxism. The mystery of life faithfully quoted from the Bible and underpinned by sacred and death and of suffering—and particularly of religion….is music from various periods and cultures, from the African Massa something Marxists do not want to consider. But these are and Luba to Bach. The images are likewise full of references to two always have been questions of great importance for human thousand years of Christian painting and sculpture. beings.” Pasolini made the movie in what was, for him, a A very different (though not wholly unrelated) sort of completely new style or mixture of styles. “Already in Accattone film followed, a comic fable called Uccellaci e uccellini (The my style was…’reverential,’” he explained to Oswald Stack, but Hawks and the Sparrows, 1966) A bourgeois father (played by this manner applied to a sacred text “came out rhetoric…and then the comic actor Toto) and his son (Ninetto Davoli), walking when I was shooting the baptism scene near Viterbo I threw over along the dusty road of life, encounter a leftist talking crow. He all my technical preconception. I started using the zoom, I used translates them in a dream sequence into Franciscan friars, new camera movements, new frames which were not reverential, charged with evangelizing the birds. They eventually convert the but almost documentary” combining “an almost classical severity hawks and the sparrows to the love of God, but without altering Pasolini—THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO ST. MATTHEW—6 the hawks’ tendency to eat the sparrows. St Francis prophesies into a wasteland; the mother searches for the Stranger’s image in that one day a man will come to preach the end of the class a succession of young pick-ups, the son leaves home to become struggle. Later sequences show Toto and Ninetto preying on their an artist; the daughter sinks into a trance, the maid becomes a own kind, and in the end they eat the crow. saint, levitating, performing miracles, and eventually immolating By devouring the crow, according to Pasolini, the pair herself. absorb his Marxist message Nothing is explained in the and achieve a new level of film, and indeed there is very little political consciousness. The dialogue at all. Nevertheless, it director maintains that the seems reasonably clear that these film is also about Italian developments are meant to be cinema after neo-realism— understood as a manifestation of hence the visual references to an anarchic but fundamentally Rossellini and Fellini. life-affirming spirit released by However, as John Russell the visitor in this too-orderly Taylor points out, “Pasolini household. This spirit is sexual in has an explanation for its nature, and the picture seems everything, many of his to posit a connection between explanations confected with sexual release, spiritual growth, almost perverse ingenuity. It is not so much that any of them are and the development of political consciousness. Pasolini said specifically true or not true, but it is part of the way his mind vaguely that he originally intended the visitor “to be a fertility works that he will embark on an explanation in general Marxist god” but,” confronted with things as they were, I had to abandon or Christian or whatever terms and then regard it as an my original idea and so I made Terence Stamp into a generically intellectual challenge to fit every detail into the general pattern, ultra-terrestrial and metaphysical apparition: he could be the maybe just for the hell of it.” In any case, Taylor thinks this “one Devil, or a mixture of God and the Devil. The important thing is of Pasolini’s most fascinating films,” showing him “in an that he is something authentic and unstoppable.” unusually relaxed and playful mood.” Oswald Stack disagrees, Such statements did very little to clarify the film’s complaining that “the irony is lost in the imprecision of quotation intentions, and the Church, in particular, reacted with striking and comment.” And that much of the film looks like bad Fellini.” inconsistency. The International Catholic Film Office gave Two more eccentric and indeed surrealistic vignettes starring Teorema a special award for the sincerity and precision with Toto followed. Originally intended as part of a second full-length which is suggested “the dramatic and unavoidable presence of film, they wound up after Toto died as episodes in separate religion in modern life,” but withdrew the award when the compilation movies. “La terra vista dalla luna” in Le streghe Vatican, sniffing sacrilege, denounced the film. The secular (The Witches, 1967) and “Che cosa sono le nuvole?” in authorities also seemed confused, at first impounding Teorema Capriccio alla italiana (Italian Capriccio, 1968). for obscenity, then (after Pasolini was acquitted on this charge) Edipo Re (Oedipus Rex, 1967) was translated by allowing its release. Some Marxists were troubled because the Pasolini himself from Sophocles, with the addition of a prologue film shows “a certain compassion” for the bourgeoisie. and an epilogue, set in modern times, that extend the myth into Those who tried to assess the movie on more purely the present. The prologue, in which the army-officer father aesthetic grounds ranged from Pierre Leprobon, who thought it expresses his jealousy of his own baby, makes explicit the film’s “a concoction of half-baked symbolism,” to the much greater autobiographical significance (and Pasolini maintained that “the number who share the opinion of John Russell Taylor—that it relationship of hatred and love between father and son” is “what was Pasolini’s masterpiece, the single work that triumphantly produce history.”) Franco Citti was cat as Oedipus, Silvana brings together all his talents at their highest, all his Mangano as Jocasta, with Julian Beck as Tiresias and Pasolini preoccupations at their most intense.” Taylor wrote that, himself as the high priest. The film was shot mostly in the whatever the film’s meaning, “the first thing that strikes one is its Moroccan desert, the dreamlike timelessness of the story being mastery as a piece of storytelling….The style is pure, simple, and emphasized by the use of primitive music and by bizarre direct, in Pasolini’s familiar ‘reverential’ manner….Sometimes, costumes than look more African than Greek in their inspiration. as in the episode of the maid’s levitation...the effect is Critics tended to admire it, but without much enthusiasm. It was deliberately analogous to that of primitive painting, the followed by “La sequenza del fiordi carta,” an episode in Amore filmmaker withdrawing into an apparent naïve literalness that e rabbia (Love and Anger, 1969) and then by Teorema (Theorem, leaves us to supply our own comment, should we feel any 1968), the most discussed of all Pasolini’s films, originally comment is necessary.” conceived as a verse tragedy for the stage. Porcile (Pig Pen, 1969) similar in manner, interweaves Teorema begins by introducing us (in black and white) two apparently unrelated stories. One, set in the same black to a wealthy bourgeois family: father (Massimo Girotti), mother desert that the father enters at the end of Teorema, is about a (Silvana Mangano), adolescent son and daughter, and famished exile who resorts to cannibalism and finds it good, maidservant (Laura Betti). A mysterious young man (Terence going to his execution saying, “I have killed my father, I have Stamp) arrives and moves in, and the film switches to color. The eaten human flesh, and I tremble with joy.” The other centers on visitor has sexual relations of one sort or another with every the son of a powerful German industrialist whose self-imposed member of the household. By the time he leaves again, everyone isolation and alienation conceal a sexual passion for pigs, and is changed: the father gives away his factory and wanders naked who is eventually consumed by his favorite sow. Both the Pasolini—THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO ST. MATTHEW—7 cannibal and the pig lover are presented as characters with a team of beautiful young men and women in a palatial house and certain heroic integrity, pursuing their strange passions to the force them to perform every imaginable kind of sexual atrocity death. Once again, critics offered a variety of political and on each other, including torture, mutilation, and murder—any act religious interpretations of the fable, only agreeing that the two that is not normal, natural, or tender. stories are developed and balanced against each other with Pasolini had explained that these atrocities were to be supreme skill. Medea ((1970) stars a dubbed Maia Callas in a seen as a metaphor for the psychological dissociation that made it straightforward if rather possible for the Fascists and the rambling retelling of the Nazis to perpetrate their horrors, but story, without the the film is also a reflection of the autobiographical overtones despair that seized him in the last part that Pasolini had imposed of his life. He himself felt on Edipo Re. It confirmed “uneasiness and fear” at what he had the view of most critics created. Gideon Bachman wrote that that “the making of merchandise out of he had less to offer as an human bodies which Dev Sade interpreter of ancient described and Marx codified, is here myths than as the inventor stylized into objective horror. of his own, contemporary Everything is calculated to pull the ones. viewer down into Pasolini’s hell: the Seeking relief, elimination of feeling, of psychology, perhaps, from this succession of dark fables, Pasolini then of drama, of human interaction, of natural physical functions, and astonished his critics by producing “a lovely, bawdy, simple of social values….What we are told here, again and again, is that piece of entertainment” based on Il Decamerone of Boccaccio. there is no history, no change, no evolution, and that the human This thronged, vigorous and richly colored panorama of continuity is only a series of variations on the principle of medieval life provided parts for all the members of Pasolini’s anarchic power application. Never has this message been more informal repertory company, including Franco Citti and Ninetto impressively and more brutally delineated, but also accepted, by Davoli. Pasolini himself plays the painter Giotto, brooding over a an author.” great fresco, and providing a link between the various (but Francesco Rosi suggested that there was something in generally erotic and/or scatological) anecdotes that accompany Pasolini that was perhaps emotionally attracted to the sexual the movie, winner of the Silver Bear at Berlin. perversion and even the violence he shows us in the film.” Pasolini attempted to repeat the trick with The Richard Roud thought that it “exhibits a fascination with being Canterbury Tales (1972), casting himself as Chaucer in an oddly reduced to an object and called it “a terminal film in every sense garbled film that seems to have very little to do with anything of the word.” Many critics —even some of those who found the Chaucer wrote. Pasolini’s trilogy of medieval entertainments film morally equivocal—considered that it was Pasolini’s major ended triumphantly with Il fiori delle mille e una notte (The formal achievement: a forbidding, “crystalline,” and desperate Arabian Nights, 1974), a visual feast gorgeously photographed work of art. by Giuseppe Ruzzolini in locations that included the Yemen, Although his interest in writing diminished as he Iran, Eritrea, and Nepal. This “youthful and joyous” film, packed became fully involved in filmmaking, Pasolini published two with “processions and pageants of exotic beauty” won a special more novels during the 1960s, an three volumes of verse, as well jury prize at Cannes. as several collections of essays on literature, the cinema, In November 1975, at the age of fifty-three, Pasolini semantics, semiotics, and politics. was murdered by seventeen-year-old Giuseppe Pelosi—one of He regarded his film scripts as an important part of his literary the raggazzi di vita whose brutalization Pasolini described in the output and published all of them though not always in the form in novel that had made him famous. Picked up in a prostitute’s bar which he filmed them —several of them in the collection called and driven to a waste ground near Ostia, Pelosi bludgeoned his Ali dagli occh azzuri. client to death and drove Pasolini’s Alfa Romeo twice over the Pasolini was an auteur of an unusually thoroughgoing body. Pasolini had just completed a series of blackly sort, writing and directing his films, choosing the locations, the disillusioned articles in which he blamed the materialism and music, the actors, and often the extras. He relied on Nino disorientation of urban society for the growth of social violence, Baraghli for the technical aspects of the editing of his films and writing that “young people today are ugly or despairing, wicked Danilo Donati as his costume designer. The excitement and or submissive.” According to David Leitch, the Ostia wasteland debate that greeted each new Pasolini film has died away now is a “lunar rubbish dump” which could serve as “a metaphor for and his reputation has slumped since his death. It will be some the ‘ruined Italy’ of late industrialism that Pasolini was writing time before the products of his passionate but bewildered about so hysterically in his last months of life.” humanism can be objectively assessed. Pasolini’s last film was released soon after his death as Pasolini’s films have come to be seen and appreciated in a Salo, o le centoventi giornate di Sodoma (Salo, or The 120 Days different light in the 1980s. In a special Pasolini issue of Cahiers of Sodom, 1975). It is an adaptation of de Sade’s novel, translated du cinéma Alain Bergala discusses how Pasolini departed to Salo on Lake Geneva where, in the last part of World War II, significantly from the avant-garde of the 1960. In seeking his the deposed Mussolini stablished a Fascist “republic” notorious inspiration from outside the cinema—in painting, literature, for its decadence. Four pillars of Fascist society gather together a folklore, music, language studies—and in focusing his attention Pasolini—THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO ST. MATTHEW—8 not so much on the process of filming as on the things filmed. It That is certainly the case with "The Gospel According Is this “double impurity,” Bergala observes, “that puts Pasolini’s to St. Matthew," which tells the life of Christ as if a cinema in quite a paradoxical position, enigmatic in the documentarian on a low budget had been following him from modernity of the sixties but suddenly very close to the cinema of birth. The movie was made in the spirit of Italian neo-realism, today, where, at the outset of the eighties, certain filmmakers which believed that ordinary people, not actors, could best (Syberberg…Fassbinder) seem ready to leave this post-New embody characters -- not every character, but the one they were Wave modernity behind, so that today’s [Pasolini’s] film can be born to play. seen for the first time perhaps, in their raw strangeness, in their Pasolini's Christ is Enrique Irazoqui, a Spanish fundamental difference from that modern cinema that Pasoliini economics student who arrived to talk to him about his work. found himself historically thrown into and somewhat Irazoqui had never acted, but Schwartz quotes Pasolini: "...Even detrimentally associated with.” before we had started talking, I said 'Excuse me, but would you act in one of my films'?" Schwartz describes Irazoqui as the "...son of a Basque father and a Jewish mother ... thin, stoop- shouldered, heavy-browed, anything but the muscular Christ of Michelangelo." For his other roles, Pasolini cast local peasants, shopkeepers, factory workers, truck drivers. For Mary at the time of the Crucifixion, he cast his own mother. Whether these actors could handle the dialogue was beside the point. Pasolini decided to shoot without a screenplay, following Matthew page by page and compressing only as much as necessary to give the film an acceptable running time. Every word of dialogue is from Matthew, and much of it is heard during long shots so that we need not see the lips moving. Jesus is however often seen speaking, and his presence Roger Ebert: “The Gospel According to St Matthew” (2004) and appearance are unusual in terms of traditional depictions. Pier Paolo Pasolini was stuck in St. Francis' hometown Like most of Jewish men of his time, he wears his hair short -- of Assisi. He had come there in 1962 to attend a seminar at a none of the flowing locks of holy cards. He wears a dark, hooded Franciscan monastery. Although it was well known that Pasolini robe so that his face is often in shadow. He is unshaven but not was an atheist, a Marxist and a homosexual, he had accepted the bearded. invitation after Pope John XXIII called for a new dialogue with His personal style is sometimes gentle, as during the non-Catholic artists. Sermon on the Mount, but more often he speaks with a righteous Now the streets were jammed because the pope was in anger, like a union organizer or a war protester. His debating town, and Pasolini waited in his hotel room. He found a copy of style, true to Matthew, is to answer a question with a question, a the Gospels, and "read them straight through." The notion of parable, or dismissive scorn. His words are clearly a radical basing a film on one of them, he wrote, "threw in the shade all rebuke of his society, its materialism, and the way it values the the other ideas for work I had in my head." The result was his rich and powerful over the weak and poor. No one who listens to film "The Gospel According to St. Matthew" (1964), which was this Jesus could confuse him for a defender of prosperity, filmed mostly in the poor, desolate Italian district of Basilicata, although many of his followers have believed he rewards them and its capital city, Matera. (Forty years later, Mel Gibson would with affluence. film "The Passion of the Christ" on the very same locations.) The film, in black and white, is told with stark Pasolini's is one of the most effective films on a simplicity. Consider the opening shots. We see Mary in closeup. religious theme I have ever seen, perhaps because it was made by We see Joseph in closeup. We see Mary in long shot, and that a nonbeliever who did not preach, glorify, underline, she is pregnant. We see Joseph regarding this fact. We see him sentimentalize or romanticize his famous story, but tried his best go out of his house and fall asleep against a boulder, and then he to simply record it. is awakened by an angel (who looks like an ordinary peasant Full credit: I learned the story of the hotel room and girl), and the angel tells him that Mary will bear the son of God. found much of the other information below from Barth David The angel later warns them to flee to Egypt before Herod orders Schwartz's Pasolini Requiem, an invaluable book about the artist, the killing of the first-born. whose work ranged from the profane to the divine, and whose untidy private life ended with his murder in a city wasteland. The massacre of the babies is a brief scene, the more Although Pasolini directed some 25 films (most horrific because Pasolini does not use closeup details of violence. famously "Accattone!," "Hawks and Sparrows," "Salo, or the 120 Here and later, he uses the spiritual "Sometimes I Feel Like a Days of Sodom," "The Decameron," "Mamma Roma" and Motherless Child" on the soundtrack; the singer I believe is "Teorema") and contributed to the screenplays of Fellini's Odetta, although some sources cite Marian Anderson. The arrival "Nights of Cabiria" and "La Dolce Vita," he considered himself a of the Three Wise Men is filmed as it might have happened, with poet before a filmmaker, and his films are built of images, their horses (not camels) followed by a joyous, shouting crowd impressions and words that sometimes function more as language of children. than as dialogue. Indeed, curious children seem drawn to Jesus, and in the scene where he debates the elders in the temple, the little ones sit Pasolini—THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO ST. MATTHEW—9 in a row at his feet, and when he makes what they consider a good point, they turn around and grin triumphantly at the old men. The miracles of the loaves and fishes and the walking on the water are treated in a low key. Christ tells his disciples to depart in their boat, "and I will follow you." No triumphant music, no waving of hands and shouts of incredulity, no sensational camera angles -- just a long shot of a solitary figure walking on the water. The trial of Jesus in this film, as in Gibson's "The Passion," places much of the blame on the Jewish high priests, as Matthew does. But those who found Gibson's depiction of them as anti-Semitic may appreciate Pasolini's decision to film the debates mostly in long shot, and to show the priests not as angry and spiteful, but as learned and ponderous, dealing soberly with James Blue: Pier Paolo Pasolini Inverview (Film Comment, heresy. Pasolini's priests conclude, "He must die. Deliver him to 1965) Pontius Pilate." And Pilate refers to Jesus as "an innocent man." I have been wondering what I should ask you. Often Later we hear Matthew's notorious line "May his blood be on our I ask questions of directors that seem a little stupid, you see, children," which Gibson excised from his subtitles (not but from but I don’t want to avoid those, for finally the stupid the Aramaic dialogue). questions are the ones to which I most want reply. I know The crucifixion is entirely lacking in the violence of the that it will be difficult—I don’t think I would be able to Gibson version. It is almost underplayed, and we note that for answer very well concerning my own films—but I hope that much of the way to Calvary, the cross is carried only by Simon, your replies help me to arrive at certain conclusions later. while Jesus walks behind it. There is a crown of thorns, but only Have you understood? a few drops of blood. Yet this version is not softened and Yes, I understand. dramatized in the style of Hollywood's biblical epics; in its harsh You know I’m compiling a book on the directing of realism, it seems matter-of-fact about a cruel death. the non-actor. I am meeting many directors. The book is The Rev. Andrew Greeley, in his essay on Gibson's primarily a way for me to organize my own thinking and to film, corrects Catholic school graduates (like me) who were take advantage of the experiences of other directors in order taught that Christ died to take away original sin. Greeley says he to see how I may be able to create more completely a kind of died to show that he felt our pain, and that he loved us. That is a human existence in front of the camera, without the use of Christ closer to Pasolini's version, but what Pasolini also insists professional actors, and without falling into cinema is that his Christ did not love those whose kingdom was of the conventions. The ideas I’m looking for have been discreetly earth; his Christ is of the left, not the right, and would have developing for 20 years. So that’s why I’m writing this book, lumped many current Christians with the Scribes and Pharisees. to clarify my ideas. Have you understood? "The Gospel According to St. Matthew" won the Yes, very well. Special Jury Prize at the Venice Festival (the Golden Lion went Let me start with a question that may seem stupid— to Antonioni's fiercely secular "Red Desert"). Right-wing how do you create? Are you aware—even vaguely—of Catholic groups picketed it, but the film won the first prize of the certain recurring processes? What helps you? What pushes International Catholic Office of the Cinema, which screened the you to create? When you want to work, what steps do you film inside Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris; the French left was as take to get started? outraged as the Italian right, and Sartre met with Pasolini, telling What is it that urges me to create. As far as film is him somewhat obscurely, "Stalin rehabilitated Ivan the Terrible; concerned, there is no difference between film and literature and Christ is not yet rehabilitated by Marxists." poetry—there is this same feeling that I have never gone into To see the film a few weeks after seeing Gibson's is to deeply. I began to write poetry when I was seven years old, and understand that there is no single version of his story. It acts as a what it was that made me write poetry at the age of seven I have template into which we fit our ideas, and we see it as our lives never understood. Perhaps it was the urge to express oneself and have prepared us for it. Gibson sees Christ's suffering as the the urge to bear witness of the world and to partake in or to overwhelming fact of his life, and his film contains very little of create an action in which we are involved, to engage oneself in Christ's teachings. Pasolini thought the teachings were the central that act. Putting the question in that manner forces me to give story. If a hypothetical viewer came to "The Passion" with no you a vaguely spiritualistic answer . . . a bit irrational. It makes previous knowledge of Jesus and wondered what all the furor me feel a bit on the defensive. was about, Pasolini's film would argue: Jesus was a radical Some artists collect information on a subject, like whose teachings, if taken seriously, would contradict the values journalists. Do you do this? of most human societies ever since. Yes, there is this aspect, the documentary element. A naturalistic writer documents himself through his production. Because my writing, as Roland Barthes would say, contains naturalistic elements, it is evident therefore that it contains a great interest in living and documentary events. In my writing there are deliberate elements of a naturalistic type of realism and Pasolini—THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO ST. MATTHEW—10 therefore the love for real things . . . a fusion of traditional modifications, to represent Bethlehem. And I did the same thing academic elements and of contemporary literary movements. for the characters. The chorus of background characters I chose What brought you to The Gospel According to St. from the faces of the peasants of Lucania and Puglia and Matthew, and once you had the idea, how did you start work Calabria. on it? Why did you want to do it? How did you work with these non-actors to integrate I recognized the desire to make The Gospel from a them into a story that was not their own, although analogous feeling I had. I opened the to their own? Bible by chance and began to I didn’t do anything. I didn’t read the first pages, the first tell them anything. In fact, I lines of St. Matthew’s Gospel, didn’t even tell them precisely and the idea of making a film what characters they were of it came to me. It’s evident playing. Because I never chose an that this is a feeling, an actor as an interpreter. I always impulse that is not clearly chose an actor for what he is. That definable. Mulling over this is, I never asked anyone to feeling, this impulse, this transform himself into anything irrational movement or other than what he is. experience, all my story began Naturally, things were a little to become clear to me as well more difficult with regard to the as my entire literary career. main actors. For example, the Once you had this fellow who played Christ was a feeling, what did you look for to give it form, to make the student from Barcelona. Except for telling him that he was feeling concrete? playing the part of Christ, that’s all I said. I never gave him any I discovered first of all that there is an old latent kind of preliminary speech. I never told him to transform himself religious streak in my poetry. I remember lines of poetry I wrote into something else, to interpret, to feel that he was Christ. I when I was 18 or 19 years old, and they were of a religious always told him to be just what he was. I chose him because he nature. I realized, too, that much of my Marxism has a was what he was, and I never for one moment wanted him to be foundation that is irrational and mystical and religious. But the anyone else other than what he was—that’s why I chose him. sum total of my psychological constitution tends to make me see But to make your Spanish student move, breathe, things not from the lyrical-documentary point of view but rather speak, perform necessary actions—how did you obtain what from an epic point of view. There is something epic in my view you wished without telling him something? of the world. And I suddenly had the idea of doing The Gospel, Let me explain. It happened that in making The Gospel, which would be a tale that can be defined metrically as Epic- the footage of the characters told me almost always the truth in a lyric. very dramatic fashion—that is, I had to cut a lot of scenes from Although St. Matthew wrote without metrics, he would The Gospel because I couldn’t “mystify” them. They rang false. I have the rhythm of epic and lyric production. And for this don’t know what it is, but the eye of the camera always manages reason, I have renounced in the film any kind of realistic and to express the interior of a character. This interior essence can be naturalistic reconstruction. I completely abandoned any kind of masked through the ability of a professional actor, or it can be archaeology and philology, which nevertheless interest me in “mystified” through the ability of the director by means of themselves. I didn’t want to make an historical reconstruction. I cutting and divers tricks. In The Gospel I was never able to do preferred to leave things in their religious state, that is, their this. What I mean to say is that the photogram or the image on mythical state. Epic-mythic. the film filters through what that man is—in his true reality, as he Not desiring to reconstruct settings that were not is in life. philosophically exact—reconstructed on a sound stage by scene It is possible at times in movies that a man who is designers and technicians—and furthermore not wanting to devious and shady can play the part of one who is naïve an reconstruct the ancient Jews, I was obliged to find everything— ingenuous. For example, I could have taken a professional and the characters and the ambiance—in reality. And so the rule that given him the part of one of the three magi—an unimportant dominated the making of the film was the rule of analogy. That part—and by the way it is clear that there is a deep candor in the is, I found settings that were not reconstructions but that were souls of the three magi. But I didn’t use professionals, and analogous to ancient Palestine. The characters, too—I didn’t therefore I couldn’t have their ability to transform themselves in reconstruct characters but tried to find individuals who were to others. I used real human beings, and so I made a mistake and analogous. I was obliged to scour southern Italy, because I misjudged a man psychologically. My error was immediately realized that the pre-industrial agricultural world, the still feudal evident in the photographed image. There is another rather area of southern Italy, was the historical setting analogous to unpleasant example that has sprung to mind—for the two actors ancient Palestine. One by one I found the settings that I needed who played those possessed by the Devil, I chose actors from the for The Gospel. I took these Italian settings and used them to Centro Sperimentale film school in Rome. I chose them in a represent the originals. I took the city of Matera, and without hurry. Later, I had to cut the scene because I was obvious that changing it in any way, I used it to represent the ancient city of they were two actors from the Centro Sperimentale. Jerusalem. Or the little caverns of the village between Lucania In reality, my method consists simply of being sincere, and Puglia are used exactly as they were, without any honest, penetrating, precise in choosing men who psychological Pasolini—THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO ST. MATTHEW—11 essence is real and genuine. Once I’ve chosen them, then my What did you do with your Spanish non-believing work is immensely simplified. I don’t have to do with them what non-actor to get the results you wanted? I have to do with professional actors: tell them what they have to Nothing really. I simply appealed to his good will. He do and what they haven’t to do and the sort of people they are was a very intelligent and a very cultured young man who supposed to represent and so forth. I simply tell them to say these became bound to me by the friendship that grew up between us words in a certain frame of mind and that’s all. And they say in those few days—however, he had the basis of an ideological them. background and a rather strong desire to be To get back to Christ, once I useful to me. It was by this means that he had chosen the person whose essence or succeeded in overcoming his timidity. interior was more or less that needed to As far as the rest goes, I had him play the part of Christ, I never obliged perform in very small segments, one at a time, him to do any specific things. My without even preparing them first. I would suggestions were made one by one, suggest the expressions while he acted. instance by instance, moment by Inasmuch as we were shooting without sound, moment, scene by scene, action by I could talk to an actor while he was action. I said to him, “do this” and “get performing. It was a little bit like a sculptor angry.” I didn’t even tell him how. I who makes a sculpture with little improvised simply said, “you’re getting angry,” and blows of the chisel. While the actor was acting, he got angry in the way he usually got I said to him “Look here”—and I told him each angry and I didn’t intervene in any way. expression, one by one, and he followed them My work is facilitated by the almost mechanically. I shot everything that fact that I never shoot entire scenes. way. He had the speech memorized more or Being a “non-professional” director I’ve always had to “invent” a less, and he began to say it. He had to—for example—take 10 technique that consists of shooting only a very brief bit at one steps forward, or move, or look at someone. I never told him time. Always in little bits—I never shoot a scene continuously. beforehand, except in a very vague way, what it was all about, And so even if I’m using a non-actor lacking the technique of an and gradually as he performed, I said, “now look at me . . . now actor, he’s able to sustain the part—the illusion—because the look down there with an angry expression . . . now your takes are so brief. And if he doesn’t have the technical ability of expression softens . . . look toward me and soften your an actor, at least he doesn’t get lost, he doesn’t freeze up. expression slowly, very slowly. Now look at me!” And so while Although I was able to find characters analogous to the the camera rolled, I told him these things. I prepared the action wise men or to an angel or to Saint Joseph, it was extremely beforehand, in a very vague way, so that he would know more or difficult to find a character analogous to Jesus Christ. And so I less what he was supposed to do and where he was supposed to had to be content with finding someone who at least came close go. Whatever the nuances, the little movements, I suggested to to resembling Christ externally and interiorly, but actually I had him one by one. Prior to the shot, I gave him general movements to construct Christ in the cutting room. and told him more or less what he was supposed to do. Then I Although other directors make tests, I never make them. explained these things more precisely while we shot. Once in a I had to make one for Christ, though—not for myself—but for while I would surprise him—I would say to him, “Now look at the producer who wanted a certain guarantee. When I choose me with a sweet expression on your face.” And while he did this actors, instinctively I choose someone who knows how to act. I would say suddenly, “Now get angry!” And he obeyed me. It’s a kind of instinct that so far hasn’t betrayed me except in Didn’t this request make him attempt to imitate the very minor and very special cases. So far I’ve chosen Franco way an actor he had seen got angry? Citti for Accattone and Ettore Garofolo for the boy in Mamma No. Actors would be tempted to do this, but one who is Roma. In La Ricotta, a young boy from the slums of Rome. I’ve not an actor—for example, those whom I chose—would never do always guessed right, that from the very moment in which I this. It’s not possible, because they have never confronted chose the face that seemed to me exact for the character, themselves with the technical problems of an actor—that is, he instinctively he reveals himself a potential actor. When I choose doesn’t have a technical idea of “anger,” he has a natural and non-actors, I choose potential actors. genuine idea of anger. Naturally, Christ was a more difficult thing for me than I’ve done this rather often in other films. For example, I Franco Citti because Franco, after all, was to play a part that was would have the person say a line that was not what it was more or less himself. First of all, this young Spanish student at supposed to be in the text. If he was supposed to say “I hate the beginning was inhibited about playing the part of Christ—he you,” I would have him say “Good Morning,” and then when I wasn’t even a believer. And so the first problem was that I had dubbed I would put in “I hate you.” Normally, I should have said playing Christ a fellow who didn’t even believe in Christ. to him, “All right now, say ‘I hate you’ as if you were saying Naturally this cause inhibitions. This young student wasn’t an ‘good morning.’” But this is pretty complicated reasoning for a extrovert or a simple, normal type of person. He was person who is not an actor. So I simply tell him to say “Good psychologically very complex, and for this reason it was difficult morning,” and then in the dubbing I put in his mouth “I hate the first few days to get him to win out over his timidity, his you.” restraint, his inhibitions, while for the other actors I didn’t have For dubbing, do you use non-actors or professionals? this problem. The very minute I put them in front of the camera, I do both. That is, I take non-actors who generally they acted the way I wanted them to. reveal themselves to be splendid dubbers. For Christ, I was Pasolini—THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO ST. MATTHEW—12 obliged to use a professional actor, so it depends on the How did you work with the intellectuals to rid them circumstances. More than anything else, I try to balance of their inhibitions? everything out between the professional and non-professional The process was identical with that for the lower-class performances. For instance, the boy in Mamma Roma did his performers. With the former naturally, I used a language that was own dubbing. But Franco Citti could not do his own dubbing, for on a more elevated level. But my methods were the same. even though he was bravissimo Do you feel the need of his voice was rather unpleasant. knowing your people a long So I had him dub another time before shooting, to make character. friends with them, to learn If you don’t give the their natural gestures in order non-actor much explanation of to use them later? character, do you at least tell I had known Franco Citti for him the story? years, because he was the Yes, I do, in two words. brother of a friend. I knew his Just out of curiosity. But I never character more or less. On the go into a serious discussion with other hand, Ettore Garofolo of him. If he has any doubts . . . if Mamma Roma—I saw him he says to me “what do I have to once in a bar where he was do here,” I try to explain to him. working as a waiter. I wrote But always point by point, my whole script around him particular by particular, never the whole thing. without speaking to him further. Because I preferred not to know Do you add expressive gestures, which are not him. I took him and began to shoot after having seen him for just normally a part of the non-actor’s personal comportment? that one minute. I don’t like to make an organized and calculated No, I never have him do gestures that are not his. I effort to know someone. If you can intuit a person, you know always let him use the gestures that are natural to him. I tell him him already. what he has to do—for example, slap someone or pick up a Generally I have very precisely in mind what I’m going glass—but I let him do this with the gestures that are natural to to do. Because I’ve written the script myself, I’ve already him. I never intervene regarding his gestures. organized the scene in a given way. I see the scene not only as a If I want to underline some act, I do so with my own director but also with the different eyes of the scriptwriter. In means, with technical means—with the camera, with the shot, addition, I choose the settings. I go to these places and make an with editing. I don’t have him emphasize it. Actually, I am very adjustment of what I’ve written in my script to fit the place careful not to indicate to him the “intention,” because these where we are going to shoot. And so when I go to shoot, I more “intentions” are the phony part of the actor. or less know already how the scene is going to go. Do you trick at all, in order to produce emotional I did this for every film except The Gospel. With The responses? Gospel, the thing was so delicate that it would have been easy to Up to now it has never happened. If it were necessary, fall into the ridiculous and the banal and the typical costume film I’d do it. It’s never happened to me because my actors do not genre. The dangers were so many that it wasn’t possible to have petit-bourgeois inhibitions. They don’t care. They do what I foresee them all. And it being so difficult, we had to shoot three tell them, generously. Franco Citti, Ettore Garofolo, the or four times more material than necessary. In effect, most of the protagonist of La Ricotta, and my Christ as well—they gave of scenes I created in the cutting room. I shot the whole Gospel with themselves completely, blindly. They don’t have that two cameras. I shot every scene from two or three angles, conventionality or false modesty of hypocrites, so I’ve never had amassing three or four times more material than necessary. It was to do this. However, if I had to trick, I’d do it. as if I had done a documentary on the life of Christ. By chance. Do you see a way of directing the bourgeois-class With the moviola, I constructed the scene. person who is a non-actor? Did you seek a particular style in the framing, and I was faced with this problem filming The Gospel. was this possible with two cameras going? Whereas in my other films my characters were all “of the Yes, I always have a rather clear idea of the shot I want, people,” for The Gospel I had some characters who were not. a kind of shot that is almost natural to me. But with The Gospel I The Apostles, for example, belonged to the ruling classes of their wanted to break away from this technique because of a very time, and so obeying my usual rule of analogy, I was obliged to complicated problem. In two words it’s this: I had a very precise take members of the present-day ruling class. Because the style or technique with which I had experimented in Accattone, Apostles were people who were definitely out of the ordinary, I in Mamma Roma and in the preceding films, a style which is, as I chose intellectuals—from the bourgeoisie, yes—but intellectuals. said before, fundamentally religious and epic by its very nature. Although these non-actors as Apostles were And so I thought that my style—possessing naturally these intellectuals, the fact that they had to play intellectuals removed, qualities of sacredness and epicness—would go well with The no instinctively but consciously, the inhibition of which you Gospel also. But in practice, that was not the case. Because in spoke. However, in the case of one’s having to use bourgeois The Gospel this sacredness and epic quality became a prison, actors who are not intellectuals, I think that you can get what you false and insincere, and so I had to reconstruct my whole want from them, too. All you have to do is love them. technique and forget everything I knew, everything that I had Pasolini—THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO ST. MATTHEW—13 learned with Accattone and Mamma Roma, and begin from the as an intellectual director rather than as an actor. Because he’s an beginning. I relied on chance, on confusion, and so forth. extremely intelligent man, he understood right away and there All this was due to the fact that I am not a believer. In was no problem. He brought it off well.. It was a very brief and Accattone, I myself could tell a story in the first-person because I simple part, with no great complications. I told him my intention was the author and I believed in that story, but I could not tell the and I let him do as he pleased. He understood what I wanted story of Christ—making him the son of God—with myself as the immediately and did it in a manner that was completely author of this story, because I’m not a believer. So I didn’t work satisfying to me. as an author. And so this forced With Magnani, it was much me to tell the story of Christ more difficult. Because she is indirectly, as seen through the an actress in the true sense of eyes of one who does believe. the word. She has a whole And as always when one tells baggage of technical and something indirectly, the style expressive notions into which I changes. While the style of a was unable to enter, because it story told directly has certain was the first time I had any characteristics, the style of a kind of contact with an actor. story told indirectly has other At present, I’ve had a little bit characteristics. That is, if in of experience and at least can literature I am describing Rome face the problem—but at that in my own words, I describe it in time, I couldn’t even face it. one style. But if I describe Now that you have Rome—using the words of some Roman character—the result is experience, have you thought how you may overcome this a completely different style because of the dialect, the popular acting “baggage” of the professional performer? You said language, and so forth. The style of my preceding films was a you are using Totò in your next film—have you reflected simple style—almost straightforward, almost hieratic—while the upon your way of directing him? style of The Gospel is chaotic, complex, disordered. Despite this Yes, I think the way to get around this problem is to use difference in style, I shot all my films in little pieces all the same. the fact that they are actors. Just as with a non-actor I use a Except the frame, the point of view, the movements of the extras whole series of things unexpected and unforeseen—leaving them were changed. to their own vital confusion (for example, when I tell them to say I have read that you have said that you have trouble “Good morning” instead of “I hate you”), leaving them to the with actors. Why is that? ambiguousness of their being—so I must use the actor I wouldn’t like people to take this too literally, not in a specifically for his actor’s baggage. If I try to use an actor as if dogmatic way. In La Ricotta I used Orson Welles and I got along he were not an actor, I would be wrong. Because in the cinema— beautifully with him. In the film I’m making now I’m going to at least in my cinema—the truth always comes out sooner or use Totò, a popular Italian comic, and I’m sure everything will later. On the other hand, if I use an actor knowing that he is an work out fine. When I say I don’t work well with actors I’m actor, and therefore using him for that which he is and not for uttering a relative truth—I want to be sure that this is clear. My that which he is not, I hope to succeed. Naturally, the character difficulty lies in the fact that I’m not a professional director, and whom he interprets must be adapted to this idea. so I haven’t learned the cinematographic techniques. And that It just happens that the characters in my new film are all which I have learned least of all is what they call the “technique ambiguous characters who have something real, human, of the actor.” I don’t know what kind of language to use to profound about them, and at the same time something invented, express myself to the actor. And in this sense, I’m not capable of absurd, clownish and fable-like. The double nature of the actor, working with actors. Totò-man and Totò-Clown, this double nature can be used by me After your directing experiences with Anna Magnani for my character. In Totò himself this double nature—man and in Mamma Roma and Orson Welles in La Ricotta, what have clown, or man and actor—functions because it corresponds to the you learned about using professional actors as distinct from double nature of the character in the film. non-actors? Do you plan to explain to Totò this double nature The principal difference is that the actor has an art of his you’ve outlined? own. He has his own way of expressing himself, his own Yes, of course. As soon as I met him I explained that I technique which seeks to add itself to mine—and I cannot needed a character just like himself. I needed a Neapolitan. succeed in amalgamating the two. Being an author, I could not Someone profoundly human, who as at the same time this art that conceive of writing a book together with someone else, and so is clownish and abstract. Yes, I told him right away. the presence of an actor is like the presence of another author in Are you not afraid that now that he knows, Totò will the film. try to play both the clown and the human being? With Welles, how did you get a result you felt was No, I told him to make him feel freer. Because I saw fruitful? that he would worry about it. It’s the first time that he has For two reasons—first of all in La Ricotta Welles did worked on a film that has this kind of ideological content. Of not play another character. He played himself. What he really did course, he has made several good films, but they were always on was a caricature of himself. And also because Welles, in addition an artistic level, without political commitment. So probably he to being an actor, is also an intellectual—so in reality, I used him was a little worried. In order to leave him completely free, I told Pasolini—THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO ST. MATTHEW—14 him—so that he could go on doing what he had always done, so goal of development, in progress as improvement . . . but I don’t he won’t have to do anything different. believe in a “bettering,” an improvement. I think that one grows, Do you rehearse a lot or do you shoot immediately? but one does not improve. “Improving” seems to me an I never rehearse. I shoot right away. hypocritical alibi. Now, believing in the pure growth of each one Does this impose simple camera work? of us, I see the development of my style as a continuous My camera movements are very simple. For The modification about which I can say nothing. Gospel, I used camera movements that were a little more How do you conceive the structure of your films, complicated, but I never use a dolly, for example. I’ve always what makes them move from one end to another? shot in pieces. Shot by shot,. A It’s too demanding a few pans and very simple question. For the moment it’s tracking shots but nothing impossible to answer. But I more. would like for you to read in What are your Cahiers an article I wrote. This observations about the question implies not only an aesthetic and technical examination of my films and my characteristics of film as you conscience, it brings up the have gained experience? question of my Marxism and my My lack of whole cultural struggle during the professional experience has not Fifties. The question is too vast. encouraged me to invent. It’s impossible. Rather it has urged me to “re- But let me say this now in a invent.” For instance, I never very schematic fashion. At this studied at the Centro point, the cinema is dividing Sperimentale or any other itself into really two large trunks, school, and so when the time and these two different types of came for me to shoot a films correspond to what we panoramic shot, for me it was like the first time in the history of already have in literature: that is, one type on a high level and cinema that a panorama was shot. And so I re-invented the another type on a low level. While cinema production until now panoramic. has given us films of both a high and low level, the distribution Only a person with a great deal of professional apparatus has been the same for both. But now the organization experience is capable of inventing technically. As far as technical or structure of the cinema industry is starting to differentiate . . . inventions go, I have never made any. I may have invented a the cinema d’essai is becoming more important and will soon given style—in fact, my films are recognizable for a particular represent a channel for distribution through which certain films style—but style does not always imply technical inventions. will be distributed, whereas the remainder of the distribution will Godard is full of technical inventions. In Alphaville there are four take place normally. This will bring about the birth of two or five things that are completely invented—for example those completely different cinemas. The high level of cinema—that is, shots printed in negative. Certain technical rule-breakings of the cinema d’essai—will cater to a selected public and will have Godard are the result of a pains-taking personal study. its own history. And the other level will have its own story. As for me, I never dared to try experiments of this kind, In this important change, the selection of non-actors will because I have no technical background. And so my first step be one of the most important structural aspects. Probably the was to simplify the technique. This is contradictory, because as a structure of this high level cinema will be modified by the fact writer I tend to be extremely complicated—that is, my written that no longer will there be an industrial organization hanging page is technically very complex. While I was writing Una Vila over it. And so all kinds of experiments will be possible, Violente— technically very complex—I was shooting Accattone, including that of using non-actors, and this will transform the which was technically very simple. This is the principal cinema even stylistically. limitation of my cinematic career, because I believe that an In Cahiers, do you speak of aesthetic structure? author must have complete knowledge of all his technical The structure of cinema has a special unity. If the instruments. A partial knowledge is a limitation. Therefore, at structuralist critic were to describe the structural characteristics this particular moment, I believe that the first period of my of the cinema, he would not distinguish a story cinema from a cinematic work is about to close. And the second period is about non-story cinema. I don’t believe that this story distinction to start, in which I will be a professional director also as far as affects the structure of cinema; rather it affects the technique in concerned. superstructure—I mean the style. The lack or the presence of a But what have you discovered about film in an story is not a structural factor. I know that some of the French aesthetic sense? structuralists have attempted to analyze the cinema, but I don’t Well, to tell the truth, the only thing I discovered is the believe that they have succeeded in making these distinctions. pleasure of discovery. Literature is unique, it has unity. Literary structures are You’re talking like Godard now. unique and include both prose and poetry. Nevertheless, there is I answered like Godard because the question is a language of prose and a language of poetry, although the impossible to answer. Look, if I believed in a teleology of the literary structure is one. In the same way, the cinema will have cinema, in a teleology of development, if I believed in an end- these distinctions. Obviously, the structure of cinema is one. The Pasolini—THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO ST. MATTHEW—15 structural laws regarding any film are more or less the same. A being narrated in its integrality, it is narrated elliptically, with banal western or a film by Godard have structures that are spurts of imagination, fantasy, allusion. It is narrated in a fundamentally the same. A certain rapport with the spectator, a distorted way—however, there is a story. certain way of photographing and framing are the identical Fundamentally, the distinction to be made is between a elements of all films. cinema of prose and a cinema of poetry. However, the cinema of The difference is this: the film of Godard is written poetry is not necessarily poetic. Often one may adopt the tenets according to the typical characteristics of poetic language; and canons of the cinema of poetry and yet make a bad and whereas the common cinema is written according to the typical pretentious film. Another director may adopt the tenets and characteristics of prose language. For example, the lack of story canons of the prose film—that is, he could narrate a story—and is simply the prevalence of poetic language over prose language. yet he creates poetry. It isn’t true that there isn’t a story; there is a story, but instead of

COMING UP IN THE FALL 2018 BUFFALO FILM SEMINARS SERIES 37 OCT 16 ROBERT BRESSON, MOUCHETTE, 1967 OCT 23 MIKE HODGES, GET CARTER, 1971 OCT 30 DAVID LYNCH, THE ELEPHANT MAN, 1980 NOV 6 KRZYSZTOF KIESLOWSKI, THREE COLORS: BLUE, 1993 NOV 13 ALAN MAK AND WAI-KEUNG LAU, INFERNAL AFFAIRS, 2002 NOV 20 MARTIN SCORSESE, THE DEPARTED, 2006 NOV 27 TOM MCCARTHY, SPOTLIGHT, 2015 DEC 4 JOHN HUSTON, THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING, 1975

CONTACTS:...email Diane Christian: [email protected]…email Bruce Jackson [email protected] the series schedule, annotations, links and updates: http://buffalofilmseminars.com...to subscribe to the weekly email informational notes, send an email to addto [email protected] cast and crew info on any film: http://imdb.com/ The Buffalo Film Seminars are presented by the State University of New York at Buffalo and the Dipson Amherst Theatre, with support from the Robert and Patricia Colby Foundation and the Buffalo News.

Pasolini—THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO ST. MATTHEW—16

Mexican Cinema & Culture Bending Borders • Free admission made possible this year by October 10-12, 2018 riverrun, the Burchfeld Penney Art Center and Burchfeld Penney Art Center M&T Bank 1300 Elmwood Avenue Bufalo, New York • Mexican-inspired cuisine available at the Burchfeld Café

riverrunbuffalo.org: Director Patrick Martin Series Curator: Professor Tanya Shilina-Conte, UB English Assistant Directors: Jocelyn E. Marshall and Jake Sanders, UB English WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 10 4 PM - 5:50 PM Poetic Mode: Border Experimentations: El Mar La Mar (2017), Joshua Bonnetta & J.P. Sniadecki. 1 hr 35 min. Introduced by: Ekrem Serdar, Squeaky Wheel Film & Media Art Center 6 PM - 7:50 PM Restored Classics Night I: Time to Die (Tiempo De Morir, 1966), Arturo Ripstein. Screenplay by Gabriel García Márquez and Carlos Fuentes. Restoration Company: Alameda Films. 1 hr 30 min. Introduced by: Bruce Jackson, Buffalo Film Seminars/SUNY Distinguished Professor & James Agee Professor of American Culture, English, UB 8:15 PM - 10 PM LGBTQ Films/Women Filmmakers: Smuack (2015), Alejandra Sánchez. 24 min. Casa Roshell (2017), Camila José Donoso. 1 hr 11 min. Introduced by: Ana Grujic, Buffalo-Niagara LGBTQ History Project THURSDAY, OCTOBER 11 4 PM - 5:45 PM Observational Mode: Mexico and Minors (dedicated to the children separated from their parents on the US-Mexico border): The Inheritors (Los Herederos, 2008), Eugenio Polgovsky. 1 hr 30 mins. In memory of of Eugenio Polgovsky. Introduced by: Meg Knowles, Television and Film Arts, SUNY Buffalo State 6:30 PM - 7:30 PM Keynote Lecture: “Mexico’s Contemporary Bi-national Cinema: from Migrations to Co-productions,” Ignacio Sánchez Prado, Washington University, St. Louis

7:45 PM - 9:30 PM Restored Classics Night II: Two Monks (Dos Monjes, 1934), Juan Bustillo Oro. 1 hr 25 min. Restored by Martin Scorsese’s World Cinema Foundation. Introduced by: Margarita Vargas, Romance Languages and Literatures, UB FRIDAY, OCTOBER 12 October M&T Bank Second Friday at the Burchfeld Penney Art Center 2 PM - 3:50 PM Buñuel in Mexico: A Mexican Buñuel (1995), Emilio Maillé. 55 mins. Courtesy of Emilio Maillé. Simon of the Desert (Simón del desierto, 1965), Luis Buñuel. 45 mins. Introduced by: Elizabeth Scarlett, Romance Languages and Literatures, UB 4 PM - 5:30 PM Risky Territories: Devil’s Freedom (La Libertad Del Diablo, 2017), Ernesto Gonzales. 1 hr 15 mins. Introduced by: Ignacio Sánchez Prado, Washington University, St. Louis 5:30 PM - 7:00 PM Happy Hour: Music by La Marimba 5:30 PM - 7:30 PM Coco Hour (Studio Classroom): Día de Muertos Arts and Crafts Work- shop. Run by: Mara Odette Guerrero, Casa De Arte. Book Reading for Children (Collection Study): Coco Book (2017), Disney/Pixar. Living in Mexico (2016), Chloe Perkins. Off We Go to Mexico (2008), Laurie Krebs. 7 PM - 8:50 PM Documenting/Animating the Border and Other Stories: Shorts: Ties, Not Walls (Lazos, No Muros, 2017), LuisPa Salmón. 1 min. Creativity Does Not Recognize Borders (La creatividad no reconoce muros, 2017), Fernando Campos. 2 mins. Endogamy (Endogamia, 2017), Arnold Abadie. 2 mins. Best of Luck with the Wall (2016), Josh Begley. 7 mins. Love, Our Prison (2016), Carolina Corral. 6 mins. The Good Mother (La Madre Buena, 2017), Sarah Clift. 6 mins. Symphony of a Sad Sea (Sinfonía de un mar triste, 2017), Carlos Morales. 11 min. Birth on the Border (2017), Ellie Lobovitz. 27 mins. Artemio, Sandra Luz López Barroso (2017). 48 mins. 9 PM - 10 PM Borders and Immigration Panel: Facilitator: Richard Reitsma, Modern Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, Canisius College. Participants: Ignacio Sánchez Prado, Washington University, St. Louis; Abigail Cooke, Department of Geography, University at Buffalo; Irene Rehkviashvili, Journey’s End Refugee Services; Jennifer Connor, Justice for Migrant Families; Alyssa Erazo, ECBA Volunteer Lawyers, New York Immigrant Family Unity Project; Monica Wrobel, Canisius College/“Latinitas” Project; Mara Odette Guerrero, Casa De Arte; Secil Ertorer, Canisius College

ABOUT THE RIVERRUN GLOBAL FILM SERIES: The riverrun Global Film Series aspires to create a dialogue between local community and institutions of higher education in Buffalo through a selection of films that provide a better understanding of our present existence in the globalized networked world. The riverrun Global Film Series is produced by riverrun, Patrick Martin Director; with support from the Burchfield Penney Art Center, the UB Department of English, the UB Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, and James Agee Chair in American Culture, SUNY Distinguished Professor Bruce Jackson. Further information about the riverrun Global Film Series at: riverrunbuffalo.org | globalfilmseries.wordpress.com