The Gospel According to St. Matthew · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

The Gospel According to St. Matthew may be the most rigorous exercise in perception-image that postwar cinema produced — all the more striking because its director invented the concept. Pasolini's theory of free indirect discourse holds that the camera can inhabit a collective subjectivity, perceiving neither from outside nor from any single consciousness but from within the social body itself. Tonino Delli Colli's handheld camera enacts this: it searches the crowds of Galilean poor, zooms into weathered peasant faces with an urgency that reads less like documentary observation than spiritual hunger, sharing the community's angle of wonder on the man at its center. Against this restless register, Pasolini and Delli Colli compose passages of strict frontality and stillness modeled on early Renaissance painting — a mise-en-scène that suspends motion to hold the sacred at arm's length, as a fact to be reckoned with rather than consumed. The collision of these two visual languages — vérité search and iconic stillness — produces, in the close-ups of Christ turning to face us during the Beatitudes, something closer to an affection-image: feeling given before action, demand before narrative. The direct ancestor is Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc, which Pasolini studied closely; Dreyer had already established the unadorned face drawn from a verbatim primary text as a vehicle for spiritual confrontation — the close-up as document. Pasolini inherits both the formal method and the ethical commitment, transposing Dreyer's medieval transcript into Matthew's Gospel and Dreyer's studio whiteness into the eroded stone of southern Italy.