Word: pasolini
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...Pier Pasolini’s seminal work The Gospel According to St. Matthew, the vast majority of the film is committed to imparting the teachings of Jesus, as he serenely strolls from parable to parable uttering the familiar sacred idioms that have now been fully disseminated into secular vocabulary. Pasolini often floods the screen with the prophet’s unassuming, uni-browed visage, his immobile facial features accentuating the authority of his compassionate words. His crucifixion and subsequent resurrection are terse and understated, barely even serving their proper roles as climax and denouement to the film. In this Gospel...
...Pier Pasolini’s seminal work The Gospel According to St. Matthew, the vast majority of the film is committed to imparting the teachings of Jesus, as he serenely strolls from parable to parable uttering the familiar sacred idioms that have now been fully disseminated into secular vocabulary. Pasolini often floods the screen with the prophet’s unassuming, uni-browed visage, his immobile facial features accentuating the authority of his compassionate words. His crucifixion and subsequent resurrection are terse and understated, barely even serving their proper roles as climax and denouement to the film. In this Gospel...
...Pasolini said he responded to the literary brilliance and narrative propulsion of the Matthew gospel. He made the film, in part, to show that the greatest story ever told was, among other things, a great story. His dark-haired, dark-eyed, unibrowed Jesus (played by Enrique Irazoqui, a Basque Jew who, like the other performers, was not a professional actor) spits out the parables and prophesies with a brisk ferocity, like a union organizer with a spiel to finish before the end of the lunch break. He is testy with his inquisitors and abrupt with his Apostles...
...removed from his film. (Turned out, he removed only the subtitle for the Aramaic translation of the curse.) We leave for another day the debate over whether a film is anti-Jewish if it repeats a line swathed in 18 to 20 centuries of Gospel tradition. Anyway, in the Pasolini film, with Italians chasing Italians, the curse seems one not of race or religion but of clan. Besides, Pasolini, a poet before he was a filmmaker, would be unlikely to excise a controversial line from a text he felt bound to honor...
...version, of which the Passion section takes about an hour) is to Easter: definitive TV entertainment for a holiday, or holy day. Lusciously pictorial, elaborating on the Gospel narrative while tightroping above controversy, the film is the fullest standard text from which more extravagant versions like Pasolini's and Gibson's are encouraged to meander freely...