Pasolini on Terra Sancta : Towards a Theology of Film

What I tell you in darkness, that speak ye in Light.

—Matthew 10:27

On Sacred Ground

Winter 1960–61 marks the beginning of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s work as a filmmaker; it is also the time in which he began to travel. ¹ Filmmaking and traveling were to become closely linked in the following years, when the search for locations itself became a key creative moment of the filmwork, while the cinema in turn served as a pretext for further exploration of foreign cultures and remote landscapes, from the margins of Europe (Anatolia, Palestine) ² onward to the Arabian peninsula and Africa. Even a superficial glance at the films reveals this mutual implication of the two activities—filmmaking and travelling—as fundamental to Pasolini’s work. This ambition appears dormant in such early works as Accattone and Mamma Roma; but it can be identified even in these films’ exploration of the Roman borgate—the subproletariat neighborhoods—as sites of marginality: vital, exotic landscapes external to hegemonic Italian culture. Here the borgate inhabitants, often southern immigrants or their descendants who in Pasolini’s mythicizing view still bear the traces of archaic physiognomies and pre-modern cultural forms, could enact saints’ tales of martyrdom. ³ Later on, in a complementary motion, classical and medieval texts will be “exported” outward, beyond Europe, adapted to historical and social processes at work in the third world of the present. The presence of an archaic past within contemporary life complements in Pasolini’s oeuvre the representation of the present in an allegorical vision of the past.

Il Vangelo secondo Matteo (The Gospel According to Saint Matthew, 1964) ⁴ can be located at the crossroads of these two complementary modes: between the original scripts located by and large in contemporary Italy, and the works of adaptation, shot largely abroad. The latter were often preceded by elaborate sopraluoghi: “location-hunting” voyages of exploration documented in writings and diary-like films. In fact, Pasolini’s documentary cinema consists almost entirely of such work done in preparation for his adaptations (some left unrealized). These relate the search for actors and locations, the faces and places that are the materials of Pasolini’s work. Three of the travel documentaries constitute in this respect a trilogy, launched by the Sopraluoghi in Palestina (Locations in Palestine, 1963), followed by the Appunti per un film sull’India (Notes for a Film on India, 1968), and the Appunti per un’orestiade africana (Notes for an African Oresteia, 1969/70). Rather than historical reconstruction towards a “natural” faithfulness to his source texts, Pasolini’s travels led him to experiment with geographical, contextual, and stylistic displacements that resulted in a jarring, heterogeneous textuality. In the years following Il Vangelo, with the experience of sopraluoghi travels and the production of Edipo Re (1967) and Medea (1969–70), notions of “analogy” and “contamination,” elaborated in his theoretical work, were to further inform this practice of adaptation. In the location hunting documentaries one finds Pasolini’s most forceful reflections on analogical adaptation as a working principle and an instantiation of the relation between representation and represented in the cinema. The passage from the Sopraluoghi in Palestina to Il Vangelo secondo Matteo serves to clarify this relation; in the course of this passage we may glimpse the evolution and crystalization of a film aesthetic and practice.

The story of the production is complex. In October 1962, as guest in Assisi of the Pro Civitate Christiana, an institution for the promotion of Catholic culture in contemporary (including left and liberal) Italy, Pasolini read the Gospel he found at his bedside there. In an exchange of letters with his producer Alfredo Bini and members of the Pro Civitate, Pasolini described his response in glowing terms that connote a sense of religious possession, interchangeable in his mind with an aesthetic revelation. ⁵ In view of such enthusiasm on the part of a notorious cultural figure, the directors of the cinema office of the Pro Civitate, upon consultation with priests, theologians, and Bible scholars, agreed to support Pasolini’s project. ⁶ In preparation for this, they sponsored Pasolini’s...