Beginning with Teorema (1968), the cinema of Pier Paolo Pasolini becomes conceptually elitist and stylistically hermetic, the privileged terrain of a disillusioned Marxist engaged with a suprahistorical and purely intellectual activity, of an aesthete who treats history as mere content, raw material for the Spirit and stimulus for artistic intuition. However, with 1964’s The Gospel According to St. Matthew, Pasolini still strove to bring the spiritual under the sway of consciousness, to make it mundane, productive, and alive for civility, organic with the stream of Italian politics and history. In fact, I want to summon the Italianness of Pasolini’s cinematic adaptation of the Scriptures in xenophobic response to Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ (2004), which as with The Gospelwas produced in the palaeolithic town of Sassi di Matera (in the region of Basilicata, Italy), but strips Pasolini’s location of its regionally specific political overtones, impregnates it with foreign cultural incompetence, violates its sovereignty by feeding it to the voracity of Hollywood’s globalizing stomach.

Far more belligerent than that of Mark, Luke, or John, Matthew’s Gospel provides Pasolini with a fertile framework within which to cut through the deadlock between the autonomy of the ideal and the Marxist urgency to bring the ideal down to earth. To pursue such ambition in a theologically satisfying yet civilly conscious way, Pasolini must contemplate the Christ phenomenon in neither exclusively spiritual nor historical materialistic terms. He can safely perceive Christ as armed with a revolutionary ideology, and conceive of him as a Marxist intellectual intent on showing the oppressed the road to emancipation. Still, such ideology must be contained by Christ’s very sacredness, exist a priori, not by virtue of Marxism’s de-sacralizing interpellations. For it assumes that the agency of the sacred shall have historical repercussions despite remaining above history, the idea of safeguarding Christ’s sacredness while granting it revolutionary potentials seems to trust exclusively the indolent autonomy of Spirit, but it does so only when contemplated from a bourgeois perspective. In fact, the cultural hegemony that Pasolini strives to scandalize and upset is precisely that which keeps the ideal from castigating the real, which worships Christ but fears and dares not imagine what would happen if Christ came to the world.

The project of The Gospel is indeed to explore this hypothesis, to have the sacred impregnate history for the sake of initiating public discourse. In other words, Pasolini historicizes the myth, treating the Gospel not as an object of indolent contemplation (as Mel Gibson does), but as a tool through which to read history analogically, as characterized by recurring dialectical patterns—hence the holy family’s flight into Egypt modeled on photographs of Spanish refugees fleeing the Civil War, and the costumes of the Roman military and of Herod’s soldiers evoking respectively the uniform of the Italian police and of Mussolini’s militia). The analogy between the Roman-occupied Judea and the Southern Italian locales where the film was shot reflects the effort to remain organically engaged with the cases of Italian history—the widely held notion, still in vogue, of the South as a colonized third-world entity. By resorting to analogy, Pasolini does not de-sacralize Matthew’s Christ, who doesn’t need a Marxist re-reading in order to be perceived as revolutionary, although he certainly does have the Evangelic message contaminate the political discourses of postwar Italy, thereby anchoring the sacred to an idea of public usefulness. As sanctioned by the dedication to “the dear, familiar shade of Pope John XXIII,” whose Second Vatican Council had opened a dialogue between Italian Marxists and Catholics, Pasolini positions The Gospel quite firmly within the pacifiable agenda of what Italianists have termed historical compromise. That The Gospel is indeed a “dialogue” film seems unquestionable. More debatable, perhaps, is the exact nature and purpose of the larger reconciliatory project governing the attempt to combine into a proverbial Pasolinian pastiche discordant elements such as atheism and religiosity, rigorous respect for the Evangelist’s perspective and national historiography, neorealism and aestheticism.

A tapestry of competing aesthetic mediations disrupts the film’s stylistic unity. The conventional neorealist image achieved by utilizing unreconstructed outdoor sets gets punctually aestheticized by the soundtrack, be it a jazz lament or a Negro spiritual, while the film’s overall iconography allows for the juxtaposition, often in the same shot, of visual sources ranging from the figurative tradition of the Italian Renaissance to that of the Byzantine mosaics. The empathic denial of any sanctioned ideal of stylistic decorum, this penchant for contamination works towards a specific political goal, namely towards granting the text the kind of exhibitionist spectacle necessary for the author in order to win the public’s attention. In The Gospel, the resonance of Pasolini’s dissident politics is contingent precisely upon the scandal of disposing of those conventional representational codes that, taming and domesticating Christ in the same way that modern-day church does, make us numb to the force of the Gospel, unable to hear the ferocious implications of Christ’s message.

Enticing Pasolini to adapt the Gospel may well have been the episodic, disjointed nature of Scriptural narrative, which, in line with his proverbial aversion to the conventional narrative of “prose cinema,” does away with transitions, withholds expository data, and rejects cause-and-effect logic, thereby submitting the horizontal progression of events to the verticality of an overreaching idea. Yet such preference for verticality describes less a vision of history than a mere aesthetic technique. The recourse to analogy re-establishes the past in the present (Basilicata is now what Palestine was then) and grieves admittedly at the stagnancy and self-perpetuation of a bourgeois dialectic of history. (Basilicata shall inevitably become what Palestine is now, modern and thus no longer sacred.) On the other hand, however, because analogy in The Gospel also functions pedagogically, as a moralizing critique of contemporaneity based on the extolment of the sacred past, Pasolini seems to appropriate the positivistic assumptions of the parable, elevating the ideal to historical disposer of the real, paradigm of an alternative “ought to be.”

Critiquing a state of cultural affairs in which the sacred seems to have no jurisdiction over historical understanding, over the factual and experiential world, Pasolini subsumes history under the concept of art, entrusting with the Spirit, usually relegated to occupy an abstract plane, the task of bearing the marks of concrete history. Yet one is left to wonder whether the sacred can, in effect, fulfill its political potential: materialize, heighten our consciousness of the real and depart from a formal history of concepts that in the last analysis risks amounting to nothing more than an autobiographical history of the thought of the author.