The Gospel According to St. Matthew

Rating:
Summary: Excellent film, poor transfer
Review: Surprise, surprise. Waterbearer has produced yet another poor quality Pasolini DVD. While this disc admittedly isn't as bad as their release of, say, Porcile, it's nowhere near the treatment this film deserves.

As with the other Waterberer Pasolini DVD's, this one features burned-in subtitles that are really difficult to read, no chapter stops, and the same 30-minute documentary.

I understand that there is a superior Region 2 release of this film, but I don't have a region-free player so I can't really verify that information.

This is a fantastic film, and deserves better treatment. For now, however, this is all we've got.

Rating:
Summary: Disappointingly superfluous
Review: Take the gospel according to St. Matthew as it is rendered in the new testament and... add nothing. Add no interpretation, no emphasis. Add no character, no critical comment. Add no plot development, no new symbolism. Take nothing away either. What you have is a visual version of the original text, complete with all the preachings. Indeed the film is one long delivery of Jesus-quotes, the rest of the characters and environment only serving as backdrop. The character portrayal in general completely lacks the potential of empathy. We never seem to know Jesus or his followers or understand them. They are like players reciting, because that is exactly what they are. Whether this is what Pasolini intended for the actors to do is not to be know, but it is to be hoped on his behalf that it was not. For anyone at all familiar with the gospel, the 2h 20min are tedious, predictable to the extreme and worst of all completely unoriginal viewing. That noone else has done a Jesus-portrait this faithful to the text does not make the film either bold or daring or at all interesting. Anyone can duplicate; it is interpretation and emphasis that makes for compelling works of art. If you are more inclined towards viewing than reading, and want to know the original gospel according to St. Matthew, then you should see this film. Otherwise you are best advised to steer clear, unless perhaps you excell at 'seeing' boldness and originality where there is none.

Rating:
Summary: Saw it on the Screen in 1966.
Review: The day I turned 18, I took the day off from school to register for the draft and ruminate about turning into a man during the Vietnam War. I took in this movie. 35 years later I still remember it's impact. Yeah, I'd say it's good. And I'm an atheist.

Rating:
Summary: Review for class!
Review: The film on a whole is authenitic because it doesn't try to glamorize the action or put a typical "Hollywood" twist on things. It shows the way the people and circumstances of the times should be portrayed and not with the characteristic cleaned up look seen in so many biblical films.
The only drawback is with the subtitles. Many times the lightness of the film made it impossible to read what was being said. This is partly why I gave it three stars, also while viewing the film, when Herod sends his men out to kill the children, there was audible laughter from my classmates, which suggest the scene was not quite plausible. Also, there were several scenes which were given a "dramatic pause" but really just seemed to drag and lose meaning.

Rating:
Summary: Wow, a version of Jesus that you don't want to die!
Review: This acheived the seemingly impossible. Never before have I seen a biblical film and felt anything for any of the characters other than a deep longing for the supposed writer of the stories to strike them all down dead. this film however... this film was different. These seeemed like real people living real lives through hard times. You can actually identify with the characters and empathised with them. There is none of the bombast that afflicts Hollywood's attempts to tell the Jesus story. The temptation most directers seem to have for angelic choirs and the "wonder and awe" of God was ignored. Instead this was a genuinely touching portrayal, far closer to the Jesus portrayed in the gospel itself. Particularly poignant is the moment when Peter realises he has denied Jesus. He sobs, runs away and cries. This is not the cliche of a man who has denied the saviour, but the real emotion of a man who feels he has betrayed his friend. Coupled with Bach's St Matthews Passion, it is very moving. Overall... Brilliant.

Rating:
Summary: The Gospel According to Saint Matthew
Review: This film was gorgeous. Stark, beautiful, and simple with a fantastic, haunting soundtrack. A wonderful find.

Rating:
Summary: This is a movie you will never forget
Review: This is a movie unlike most other religious films, it is true, honest, mysterious, profound, and unforgettable. I was not expecting much the first time I saw it but was shocked at the greatness of this film. It is like a beautiful painting and makes Jesus Christ someone understandable and yet someone we could believe was the Son of God. I have never seen a movie that could rival this one yet. I think it is a great loss that most people have not heard or seen it. Everything in this movie is a work of art from the music, to the unbelievable reaslism. It takes you to an erra and a place you will never forget. Do not miss this!

Rating:
Summary: Wrong language
Review: This is great movie and all the other reviewers say is true. But if you can, do not get the version offered by Amazon, dubbed in English. Get the one in Italian, with subtitles. The English voice of Jesus does not capture the rage the Italian counterpart expresses. Also, the Italian original is 137 minutes long, the dubbed version only 122. I am not sure which scenes are missing. But there was one in the original with a communist era official funeral music. That one is sadly absent in the dubbed version.

Rating:
Summary: Worth seeing
Review: This is not, in my opinion, the best of Pasolini. Although I appreciate the stern and laconic approach to the theme, I think it follows the Gospel so closely that not much is left to that "zest" that makes a movie stand out. I liked the soundtrack, that was tastefully done. Of course, this is a must see for a Pasolini or Italian movie fan.

Rating:
Summary: Pasolini's first masterpiece
Review: This is one of the most astonishing films I have seen: probing, complex, lyrical, and at times emotionally overwhelming. NOTE: Do not blame WaterBearer for the poor-quality DVD; the Pasolini Foundation, which controls the film, provided the print and also vetoed chapters to encourage viewers to watch it only in its entirety. The overly edge-enhanced image is improved by turning your TV's sharpness setting to its 'blurriest.'

Can you imagine a less likely candidate to make what, after 40 years, may still be the greatest and most moving film about Jesus Christ? Pasolini was not only a gay Marxist but a devout atheist. His fascination with Jesus may have connected with his most personal theme, that of the outsider (with his artistic, political and sexual nature, he saw himself as the consummate outsider). Although one of Italy's leading intellectuals, he also moved among the laborers, indigents, and hustlers (some of whom were his lovers, not to mention the inspiration for his early poetry and novels), whose counterparts two millennia earlier had walked with Jesus.

Jesus's story also let Pasolini explore the complexities of real-world politics even while recreating an ancient culture with astonishing immediacy. He also relished the opportunity to play with a vast, and eclectic, artistic tradition, from Jean-Luc Godard's striking documentary style in "the two trials of Christ.... to painting... Piero della Francesca (in the Pharisees' clothes), Byzantine art, Christ's face like a Rouault, etc."

We also see El Greco not only in some compositions but in the intriguing casting of Enrique Irazoqui, a Catalan economics student, as Jesus. Pasolini had also considered such young, subversive literary lions as Jack Kerouac and Yevgeny Yevtushenko. With Pasolini's encyclopedic knowledge of all the arts, you could go on indefinitely trying to unravel the cultural allusions which make up just one strand of the film's rich texture.

The result, as they say, is history. It is like no biblical picture seen before; a quantum leap beyond the artificiality of, say, King of Kings, both De Milles's silent version and Nicholas Ray's 1961 remake, and later pictures like Scorsese's Last Temptation of Christ are inconceivable without Pasolini's model.

Pasolini had the uncanny gift for using the simplest, most economical means to bring his vision to life. Some of the locations are breathtaking, from an enormous city which seems to grow out of a mountainside to the surreal wasteland where Satan tempts Jesus (filmed on Mount Etna). By imaginatively selecting these locales - and not having to build sets - Pasolini powerfully recreated the feel of the ancient Middle East at a tiny fraction of the cost of a Hollywood production.

He also took enormous pains to cast exactly the right faces. Radically, he chose real farmers and workers to enact their historical counterparts (instead of John Wayne playing a Roman centurion as in The Greatest Story Ever Told). Perhaps the film's most intriguing aspect is that all the characters seem drained of an inner emotional life (which elsewhere Pasolini explores rigorously). This is sacred material presented in the style of legend. This visual and performance approach matches Matthew's prose to perfection. But there could also be more provocative reasons for it.

Take the Sermon on the Mount montage, consisting entirely of close-ups of Jesus preaching with immense force - the background reflecting each changing verse. (The footage came from the abandoned sacred-style approach; Pasolini ingeniously integrated it by using sharp editorial rhythms.) Here as throughout the film, Pasolini's Jesus is both earthly and otherworldly, harsh and tender. And although his inner life remains completely opaque, he emerges - perhaps in part because he has been 'de-psychologized' - as a figure of power but also complexity and ambiguity. Pasolini was forever picking apart the discrepancies not only in society - including religion and politics (as seen in Accattone and Hawks and the Sparrows) - but in himself. Here we see the "tough" Jesus, who "comes not to bring peace," smites a fig tree, violently hurls moneychangers out of the Temple, and warns people that they are either "with me or against me." But we also see the Jesus of love and compassion, who heals the sick, treats children with affection, and performs miracles (most are breathtaking, reproduced with the simplest means, as when he walks on water).

The only aspect of this magnificent film which does not work for me is the self-consciously eclectic (and Oscar-nominated!) use of music, which extends from Bach to Prokofiev to folk music. Pasolini wants this polyglot score to create subtle, and shifting, tensions between the world of ancient Judea and our own, but its incongruity and repetitiveness are sometimes distracting. By contrast, the use of silence is stunning. He communicates so much in the wordless opening scene between the pregnant Mary and her baffled husband, just by their faces and postures. These are people truly, yet to them confusingly, touched by the divine. He also captures the tactile reality of their world (you can feel the stones), even as his simple but striking compositions connect his own vision with such Renaissance masters as Giotto. This is filmmaking at its most subtle, resonant, and - while acknowledging the long tradition of Christian motifs in art - original. Pasolini brings together history, art and his own probing genius to depict Jesus in all of his humanity and divinity.