The Gospel According to Saint Matthew is probably the best film ever made about Jesus. While the film is beautifully executed, fully embodying the spirit of Jesus's life simply through his teachings, it really is the director that makes the story behind the story compelling.One IMDb reviewer says, “Certain films haunt me. The Gospel According to Saint Matthew is one of them. The only possible explanation is the passion of its maker. Everything about it is so real that I remember the first time I saw it, I felt I had met Jesus.”
When I recently saw the film, I felt the same.
So what of the maker of this film? Italian director, Pier Paolo Pasolini, was a well known homosexual Marxist who also considered himself to be an atheist. When asked why would an atheist bother to make a film about Christ, he responded: “If you know that I am an unbeliever, then you know me better than I do myself. I may be an unbeliever, but I am an unbeliever who has a nostalgia for a belief.” It seems Pasolini intuited we are condemned to religion, whether we believe or not.
In making the film, he decided to take the dialogue directly from the Gospel of Matthew and filmed without a screenplay. He believed images would never reach the poetic heights of the text, and therefore reportedly chose Matthew's Gospel over the others because he had decided that “John was too mystical, Mark too vulgar, and Luke too sentimental” (wiki).
The film was shot in the the poor Italian district of Basilicata during the summer of 1964. Pasolini decided to cast most of the roles to local peasants and workers to align with Jesus's reverence for the poor and outcasts. In regards to Jesus, he cast Enrique Irazoqui, a 19-year-old economics student and communist activist from Spain, who just showed up to discuss the director's work.
Pasolini's directorial style displayed a beautiful, stark simplicity that mixed in Italian Neorealism with French New Wave. As such, his sensibility for understated direction allowed for the subtlety and depth of Jesus's teachings to come through more vividly in the cinematic medium.
Roger Ebert noted, “If a hypothetical viewer came to The Passion with no previous knowledge of Jesus and wondered what all the furor was about, Pasolini's film would argue: Jesus was a radical whose teachings, if taken seriously, would contradict the values of most human societies ever since.”
We do seem to forget this and ironically, it took an unbeliever to remind us.