Enrique Irazoqui stars as Jesus in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO MATTHEW
IL VANGELO SECONDO MATTEO (THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO ST. MATTHEW) (Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1964)
MoMA Film, Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53rd St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Wednesday, December 19, 8:00, and Monday, December 31, 4:30
Series runs through January 5
Tickets: $12, in person only, may be applied to museum admission within thirty days, same-day screenings free with museum admission, available at Film and Media Desk beginning at 9:30 am
212-708-9400
www.moma.org
A biblical epic like no other, Pier Paolo Pasolini’s The Gospel According to St. Matthew is filled with poetic imagery, stark landscapes, and, perhaps most amazingly, a non-preachy style. Taking dialogue straight from the bible, which he read while holed up in a hotel room in Assisi during a visit by the pope, Pasolini, an avowed atheist, Marxist, and homosexual, personalizes the story by setting it in Basilicata in Matera and casting his own mother as the older Mary. A glum Jesus is played by Enrique Irazoqui, a nineteen-year-old student who came to Pasolini in order to write a paper about him. Dedicated to Pope John XXIII, The Gospel According to St. Matthew is documentary-like in its execution, using nonprofessional actors to tell the story of Christ’s birth, prophesizing, death, and resurrection. Shot in black-and-white by Tonino Delli Coli with an art-historical eye harkening back to the Italian Renaissance and the Baroque period, the film is more bleak and less reverential than most biblical epics, evoking the poverty and political revolution that was sweeping Pasolini’s home country and the world in the 1950s and 1960s, as well as the Second Vatican Council and the auteur’s own run-ins with persecution based on ideology. (At one point Pasolini considered casting Jack Kerouac as Jesus.) The score ranges from Bach’s “Matthäus Passion (BWV 244)” and Mozart’s “Mauerische Trauermusik in c minor (KV 477)” to Odetta’s haunting “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child” and Blind Willie Johnson’s “Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground,” again setting it apart from the traditional story. The Gospel According to St. Matthew is screening December 19 and 31 as part of MoMA’s “Pier Paolo Pasolini” series, a full career retrospective that includes such other films as Sopraluoghi in Palestina per il film Il Vangelo secondo Matteo (In Search of Locations for ‘The Gospel According to Matthew’), Uccellacci e uccellini (Hawks and Sparrows), Mamma Roma, and Teorema (Theorem). In addition, the exhibition “Pier Paolo Pasolini, Portraits and Self Portraits” continues at Location One through January 5.