The Gospel According St. Matthew

Pier Paolo Pasolini's narrative method in his 1964 transcription of Matthew's Gospel is made clear about within the first ten minutes of his film:  a posse of young thugs have been deputized by Herod to murder first-born infants -- Pasolini's handheld camera jerks from face to face, surveying the handsome, mulish, and dispassionate murderers, each singled out for a brief close-up.  The cameraman starts to pan toward the next man in the sequence, generally tracking from right to left, but, then, realizes that he has left out a man standing to the right, and a little behind, a soldier whose close-up has just been recorded.  And, so, the camera movement stutters, pulled to the right as if by the magnetic force of the man's face.  Yet, there is nothing different about this fellow -- he is merely another stolid, inert-looking peasant from the impoverished south of Italy where Pasolini shot this movie.  (In an accompanying documentary, a commentator tells us that Israel was too "full of kibbutzim and light industry" for the movie to be produced on location.)  Pasolini's film is stubbornly "parametric" to use a term first developed by David Bordwell -- he constructs his movie on the basis of formal parameters that override his subject matter.  The parameters that characterize The Gospel according to St. Matthew are close-ups of faces and the concept of the apparition.  Whenever possible, Pasolini devises his narrative by a sheer accumulation of facial close-ups -- the film must contain hundreds of them, mostly of anonymous onlookers and bystanders.  Pasolini does not edit the film conventionally -- there is no cause-and-effect mise-en-scene presumably because we are dealing with the miraculous.  Indeed, Pasolini's technique looks primordial, ancient -- he uses a filmmaking style that seems to predate D. W. Griffith's discovery that narrative could be driven by montage or editing.  Pasolini's Gospel is shot as a series of tableaux, small groups of people traversing immense stony wastelands, and handheld tracking shots in which the camera follows someone climbing steps or crossing a piazza.  Shots are intentionally mismatched -- eye lines don't cohere and there is no attempt to build scenes according to a shot-reverse-shot film-syntax.  Scenes are often recorded from immense, uncommunicative distances with action blocked by foreground figures.  Since the editing is discontinuous and jagged, people simply appear, without any kind of transitional effects, on the screen.  This is Pasolini's technique used to introduce principal characters or angels -- and it is, in effect, annunciatory.   After showing a few faces, people shot from a close-up angle that does not reveal their location or relation to one another, Pasolini will cut to a surprising middle-distance shot in which an important or focal character has suddenly appeared -- the effect is that of an apparition.  There are no establishing shots and no attempts to develop any narrative continuity -- people simply appear next to smashed ruins or sinister-looking grottos.  The sense is that of an apparition, something uncanny associated with this sudden appearance of a figure into the scene coming from nowhere and, apparently, going nowhere as well.  Pasolini's two parameters are closely, even metaphysically related -- the brutal materialism of the film is undercut and contested by the director's obsessive focus on the faces of people who, generally, don't even matter much to the story.  The emphasis on unmotivated close-ups --the images are not designed as reaction shots (in fact, everyone seems to simply stare impassively at the lens) -- precludes any attempt to devise a coherent narrative space.  Like the earliest film-makers, Pasolini defines place by simply reverting to a stock shot, an image that always signifies one location -- in this case, the only location that matters is Jerusalem and Pasolini shows the place from a low-angle in a repeated shot directed up a hill at crumbling walls and parapets, pits and cisterns, a place that looks more ruinous than Pompei spread out along a deep and barren gorge.  (The stony, naked appearance of the city is like the backdrop of one of Giotto's paintings -- mineralized angles, edges, and a bit of a smashed wall.)  The Gospel seems not so much stylized or abstract as simply prehistoric -- it's like an ineptly edited silent film from about 1909.  People harangue the camera in full frontal shots.  The massacre of the innocents is shot in fast motion with thugs hurling babies here and there in the air -- it's horrific, dispassionate, and vaguely comical, like a Keystone Kops two-reeler from Hell.  Pasolini doesn't want to show relationships between people and so his figures are always isolated within the frame -- they don't talk to one another so much as they rant to the camera.  Everything is defamiliarized -- the movie starts with African tribal chants, but some scenes are underscored by Bach or Webern or, even, Negro spirituals.  (Pasolini, the Marxist atheist, is the most spiritually inclined of all modern Italian directors -- this spirituality is evident in his first film, Acccattone, in which the futile hustling of a small-time pimp is set to the choral music of Bach.)  The movie is so stubbornly true to its parametric principles and so austerely impassive that it is more than a little bit dull and difficult to watch.  Viewed from one perspective, the whole endeavor is somewhat foolish -- illiterate peasants parading around in enormous turbans or hats that are like inverted buckets or lampshades.  (The only effect that Pasolini transfers from medieval and renaissance Italian paintings of the Gospel is their predilection for immense, showy hats, turbans and helmets like castles or the prows of ships or miniature mosques.)  The Redeemer is played by a swarthy Spaniard, apparently a student that Pasolini met in Rome -- the fellow is short and wiry and he has a disconcerting uni-brow:  his eyebrows meet in asterisk-shaped furrow between his eyes which seem to be slightly askew.  There are no performances in this film, least of all Jesus, and the only criterion for judging this fellow's work in the movie is whether he has sufficient charisma to impersonate the Son of God -- by this standard, the actor is insufficient to the task, although, of course, very few professional thespians could rise to this occasion as well, even the redoubtable Willem Dafoe seemed a bit wan and whiny in Scorsese's version of the Passion.  True to his austere, almost geometric style, Pasolini ends the film with four or five centurions groggy and half-asleep at the tomb -- the handheld camera tours their faces, pausing for a moment on each inexpressive visage.  Then, we see Mary and a crowd of black-shawled women carrying flowers.  They kneel at the tomb.  Pasolini cuts to close-up of the door to the tomb rolling aside to reveal vacant and disheveled grave-clothes.  Then, he cuts to a close-up of an angelic boy who admonishes the off-screen women to "be not afraid for He is not here."  In a shot that could be lifted from Kurosawa's The Seven Samurai, we see peasants running parallel to the jerkily handheld camera -- true to Pasolini's Communist ideology, the peasants carry big and impressive sickles, flails, small children on their back.  Several jump-cuts track the running mob that assembles on a desolate hillside where Jesus is standing.  In close-up, Jesus says "Now I have come to be with you forever."  The soundtrack is exuberant with African voices crying out in call and response over a thunder of drums.  It's thrilling, remote, and horribly disciplined...