In a cultural moment saturated with religious spectacle and politicised faith, Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1964 The Gospel According to Matthew remains a radical film. It is part cinematic retelling of scripture and it is part poem. It reads as a poem because of its close-up camerawork, showcasing an interpretation that moves beyond the beyond, as far as religious doctrine, by presenting Jesus as a poet-prophet, whose personal yearning is akin to an ancient thing and whose public lessons become most fully realised from the countenance.
The language of the film – verbal and corporeal – suggests an alternative way of understanding scripture and of viewing adaptation: one rooted in reverie. Pasolini’s film is not really about Matthew’s Gospel. Rather, it’s about how scripture can be lived and seen through the gaze. As scholar Javid Aliyev points out, “The language we use today—a mixture of medieval hermeneutics and Renaissance humanism with its faith in reason, intellect, and progress—has created vast silences.” Pasolini’s film seems to enter one of those silences, neither didactic nor dogmatic in that it gestures viewers towards a poetics of encounter. My aim has been to show how Pasolini’s approach to adapting The Gospel According to Matthew into a film by using stillness to speak in the framing characters’ gazes creates a meditative space, an “in reverie” subjectivity contrasted against the excessive material world.
The contemplative gazes of Jesus, his disciples, and the crowds elevate the film’s landscape into a moving album of sites. In particular, the meeting between John the Baptist and Jesus is a moment in which two figures of radical devotion recognize, in each other’s presence, the passing of an ethical mantle. Pasolini captures the liminal space of closure and non-closure, evoking the paradox of circular motion by filming these two characters seeking answers outwardly versus inwardly, and forming a thematic mandala of John and his Messiah into the film’s circular narration.
While studying the Gospels through literature, I found myself wondering aloud: How could such a stripped-down, politically radical film be embraced by the Church? My suspicion is that part of the answer lies in Pasolini’s framing. His close-ups of Jesus are poetic gestures. The characters’ gazes are silent, often anguished, and this matrix of rhetorical affect creates a contemplative space that transcends traditional notions of adaptation and theology.
Pasolini as filmmaker does not preach; instead, he observes. His camera work echoes Simone Weil’s belief that, “Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer. It presupposes faith and love.” It is as if Pasolini seeks the right cinematic language to bring a spiritual vision to light without naming it too heavily or flattening it to dogma. In this essay, I risk doing the very thing he resists, but have tried to remain faithful to the Pasolinian spirit by allowing space for unanswered questions while attempting to distill the quiet power of his poetic vision of Christ as prophet, as presence, in gaze.
The path is decidedly not linear. The image that surfaces is of outward observation contracting an inward association. When John moves from observation to reverie, there culminates in his declarative statement, “I need to be baptised by you. And you come to me?” The camera lingers on the charged stillness between their gazes. The gaze, then, interrogates solitary being while affirming our existence within a shared world: specifically, in the waters of an idyllic and replete river. This moment suspends ordinary chronology, an instance of what Erich Auerbach called the “overwhelming suspense of the present” (6). In the same spirit, it calls to mind Byung-Chul Han’s insight to love as a steppingstone toward divine beauty and truth,
“Eros [love] awakens only in view of the ‘countenance’ that gives and conceals the Other. The ‘countenance’ stands diametrically opposed to the ‘face’ that holds no secrets, which exhibits itself in pornographic nakedness and hands itself over to total visibility and consumption.”
The Gospel, in this telling, is about an embodied encounter and relational depth: presence. What makes the scene between Messiah and Baptist so stirring goes beyond an inherited fidelity to dogma, but instead, its faith in the power of gaze, gesture, and place to transform both characters and viewers alike. Adaptation theorist Linda Hutcheon reminds us that an adaptation is, “a creative and interpretive act.” In the absence of special effects or grand choral scores, though the soundtrack merits its own separate meditation, Pasolini, by offering a montage of what Jesus renounced and loved, offers a vital invitation to see and to listen and to dwell in spiritual ambiguity.
The stillness and depth of Pasolini’s framing become a kind of cinematic prayer, a reverent form of looking that requires a covenant including: patience, faith, and ethical commitment from both filmmaker and viewer. The high symbolic form is spiritual in a nuanced dimension of sharing sights. Roland Barthes wrote, “From word to word, I struggle to put ‘into other words’ the ipseity of my Image… at whose end my final philosophy can only be to recognize—and to practice—tautology.” This struggle toward tautology, a recursive attempt to return through expression to the original presence of the image, is precisely the tension Pasolini explores through his cinematic framing. His Jesus is not explained, but seen; not adorned, but exposed. What remains is not commentary, but encounter. What is more, this black and white film is not a parable: it is a meditation. In contrast to the mythic spectacle of most biblical epics of the era, I mean films like Ben-Hur or The Ten Commandments, like swelling orchestras, blinding Technicolor, and triumphant hero-postures, most biblical epics adhere to certain tired tropes. Want a symbol of revolution, compassion, suffering, or divine mystery? Pasolini’s Christ contains multitudes. Passolini’s Christ is emphatically human. He goes off to pray alone, scolds his disciples, upturns the “den of thieves.” And yet, the result is not a loss of divinity but a new intimacy with it.
Pasolini’s poetic gaze also carries a theological weight. When Jesus preaches the Beatitudes, the camera moves across the faces of the listening crowd. These moments enact a form of witnessing a singular moment. The filmmaker’s adaptation is a poetic process and democratizes the human experience into images in the life-flow of time, becoming no longer discrete and unique, but leading to, while inheriting, depths from other times and places, including our own. As Hannah Arendt suggested, “significant meaning lives on through acts of narration.” To look is to be implicated; to hear the Gospel is to be offered a chance to decide.
The film’s neorealist aesthetic: filming in real villages with peasants and landscapes untouched by industrialization, infuses the Gospel narrative with raw, tangible power. The rocky hills, the sky, the proximity of the crowds: these backgrounds become active participants. For the layperson viewing this film, it is almost as if Pasolini were filming in biblical times – an empowering gesture. The aesthetic experience of things become the fruits of a new vision; whereas, the ghostly traces of the past supply token presence for those first followers of Christ who were dispersed. As the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard wrote, “The phenomenological requirement with respect to poetic images is simple: it returns to putting the accent on their original quality.” In Matthew, every image is elemental. In one sense, this is a deeply Catholic vision: the Incarnation made visible through materiality. But Pasolini’s version is also politically charged. His Jesus, played by the Catalan student Enrique Irazoqui, (lines spoken by an Italian actor) speaks with the urgency of a revolutionary and the sorrow of a poet, as the Gospel as text reminds us: “I did not come to bring peace, but a sword,” which, given the character’s framing, Pasolini lets those words hang in the air like a wound.
For Pasolini, an openly Marxist homosexual and non-practicing Catholic filmmaker, it is perhaps inevitable that some form of religious critique surfaces in his work. In this sense, he shares common ground with philosopher Jürgen Habermas, who observed that the modern condition demands a kind of religious tolerance on behalf of the faithful that, “imposes on the faithful the burden of having to endure the secularization of knowledge and the pluralism of world pictures regardless of the religious truths they hold.” In practice, this means that religions must submit to the rational conditions of public discourse. That Pasolini would become a beloved figure among Christian audiences is, on the surface, improbable. And yet his nineteen sixty-four movie, filmed with non-professional actors in the austere hills of southern Italy, was praised by the Vatican and remains one of the most spiritually resonant portrayals of Christ on screen. Pope Paul VI reportedly called it “the best film about Jesus ever made.”
Pasolini’s Jesus moves toward transformation by neither occupying a static place nor being fully knowable. He gazes out at the wreckage of human suffering. Pasolini’s subtle reinvention revives the gospel as a source and renews the joy in viewers and readers alike in acts of wondering. This called to my mind what Walter Benjamin said of Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus: “His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet.” Pasolini’s case is a useful one to describe the boundary conditions of what is as much a temperament as a theological position. In a homogenized society priding itself on being well-informed in nearly all matters, including ideology, we are overwhelmed by image and noise. What Pasolini’s Gospel returns viewers to is the ethical heart of a faith-based life: presence, witness, and vision. In its refusal to oversimplify, the film dares to ask: What if Jesus were not a Tragic Hero (in the Kierkegaardian, Breaking the Waves Bess McNeill sense), but strictly human? What if our calling is merely to see differently?
The Church today faces a similar question. How can it re-present Christ as a lived encounter? How can the Church move beyond spectacle to the difficult work of ethical seeing? The film doesn’t explain Christ because it doesn’t need to. It just lets us see him and lets him look back. Especially from the Cross, this is the divine part of the God-Man, Jesus Christ, staring down deep into our souls. His gaze brings us peace and a kind of quiet joy. In a moment of divisive squabbling and hassled as we are by racial, generational, and religious conflict, noiseless openings grant us the opportunity to speculate the feelings involved with what might be conveyed in a gaze.
The Gospel According to Matthew is available on DVD and all the usual streaming channels
Article by Nicholas Skaldetvind
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Works Cited
Aliyev, Javid. “One Nature, Two Confessions: Comparing Outlooks in the Middle Ages and the Anthropocene.” Writing the Anthropocene, 9 Aug. 2024, https://anthrowrite.hypotheses.org/205.
Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Translated by Richard Howard, Hill and Wang, 1981.
Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. Edited by Hannah Arendt, translated by Harry Zohn, Schocken Books, 1968.
Boxall, Ian, and Bradley C. Gregory, editors. The New Cambridge Companion to Biblical Interpretation. Cambridge University Press, 2023.
Habermas, Jürgen. Between Naturalism and Religion: Philosophical Essays. Translated by Ciaran Cronin, Polity Press, 2008.
Han, Byung-Chul. The Agony of Eros. Translated by Erik Butler, MIT Press, 2017.
Hutcheon, Linda. A Theory of Adaptation. 2nd ed., Routledge, 2013.
Lattimore, Richmond, translator. The New Testament. North Point Press, 1996.
Rindge, Matthew S. Bible and Film: The Basics. Routledge, 2021.
Weil, Simone. Waiting for God. Translated by Emma Craufurd, Harper Perennial, 2001.