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About This Film
Pier Paolo Pasolini approaches the Gospel of Matthew with an austerity that makes the familiar story feel newly immediate. Nonprofessional and little-known performers move through stark southern Italian landscapes; dialogue adheres closely to the Gospel text; the music ranges from Bach to spirituals and other sacred traditions. Pasolini’s Jesus, played by Spanish student Enrique Irazoqui, is compassionate but also forceful, speaking against hypocrisy and social exclusion with a severity that reflects the director’s own political concerns. The film’s Easter connection is foundational rather than seasonal. Its final movement dramatizes the Passion, Crucifixion, and Resurrection that Easter commemorates, but the film refuses to isolate those events from the teachings and confrontations that precede them. By keeping material conditions—dust, crowds, poverty, faces—constantly visible, Pasolini makes religious history feel embodied rather than polished into pageantry.
Vibe
Easter —
Watch For
- Watch the faces Pasolini selects for close-ups; casting and physiognomy often carry as much expressive weight as dialogue.
- Listen to the deliberately eclectic soundtrack and how different musical traditions reframe familiar biblical scenes.
- Notice how southern Italian landscapes stand in for biblical geography without attempting glossy historical reconstruction.
- Track the balance between tenderness and anger in Enrique Irazoqui’s Jesus; the film emphasizes both compassion and confrontation.
Production Notes
Criterion describes The Gospel According to Matthew as Pasolini’s intensely faithful 1964 adaptation of Matthew, starring Enrique Irazoqui, then a Spanish economics student and Communist activist, as Jesus. Alfredo Bini produced the film; Tonino Delli Colli photographed it; Nino Baragli edited it; and Danilo Donati designed the costumes. Pasolini filmed in southern Italy rather than attempting expensive historical reconstruction in the Middle East. His casting drew heavily on nonprofessional performers and intellectual acquaintances, including his own mother as the older Mary. The soundtrack’s mixture of Bach, Black spirituals, and other musical sources rejects a single period-authentic sound in favor of emotional and ideological resonance. These decisions create a biblical epic that feels materially poor, politically alert, and formally modern.
Trivia
- Enrique Irazoqui was a Spanish economics student and political activist when Pasolini cast him as Jesus.
- Pasolini’s mother, Susanna, plays the older Mary.
- Criterion lists Tonino Delli Colli as cinematographer.
- The film adheres unusually closely to the Gospel of Matthew while using an eclectic modern soundtrack.
- The Crucifixion and Resurrection provide the direct origin-event connection to Easter.
Legacy
The Gospel According to Matthew is widely regarded as one of cinema’s major treatments of Jesus precisely because it came from a filmmaker whose Marxism, sexuality, and fraught relationship with Catholic Italy made pious convention impossible. The film has endured across ideological lines: religious viewers have admired its seriousness toward scripture, while secular critics have responded to its political anger, faces, landscapes, and stripped-down realism. Pasolini’s refusal of glossy biblical spectacle influenced later filmmakers seeking to represent sacred material through physical immediacy rather than monumental sets. Within a holiday collection, its Easter status should remain conceptually precise. This is not a movie about an Easter observance; it dramatizes the events that Christian Easter commemorates. That origin-event relationship gives it enormous cultural relevance while keeping the distinction between ritual and source narrative clear.