THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO ST. MATTHEW

A committed Marxist, director Pier Paolo Pasolini made this chronicle of the life of Christ faithfully according to St. Matthew’s account, clearly showing the revolutionary and radical fervor implicit in the story and imparting the nature of its appeal to common people over so many centuries. Shooting with non-actors against the rugged landscapes of southern Italy, in a style simultaneously suggesting Quattrocento painting and contemporary cinéma vérité, Pasolini strips the Gospel down to its core, in the process rediscovering the radical thought at the heart of Christ’s teachings. The result is a film that drew praise from both doctrinaire communists and the Vatican newspaper.

"But thinking of the film only on Marxist lines too often misrepresents it as an intellectual soapbox, trivializing its stark, unpretentious, elegantly tossed-off beauty. THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO ST. MATTHEW is a lament for a bygone era and a celebration of Christ’s life, work, and death, told without cynicism, irony, or doubt, where every plangent image embodies Scripture at its most rapturous." - Ed Gonzalez, Slant