Pasolini's brilliant Passion play presents the Messiah as emerging from the landscape, and out of Marxist ideology
This brilliant and entirely unforgiving neorealist Passion play from 1964 – revived now as part of a retrospective for the director Pier Paolo Pasolini – looks as if it has been hacked from some stark rockface. It is made in black and white, and uses non-professionals, including the director's mother, Susanna Pasolini, as the older Mary, mother of Christ. The musical score switches sharply from Bach's St Matthew Passion to classic blues. Enrique Irazoqui's Jesus is eerily, almost disturbingly self-possessed, emerging from the landscape like Bergman's Death in The Seventh Seal. His rhetoric is ceaseless and fluent, and his sermonising is persistently presented as a kind of dreamlike montage of inspired insights and mysterious aperçus, with Pasolini's camera jump-cutting from Jesus's face at different places and times. This really is raw film-making, in a political...
This brilliant and entirely unforgiving neorealist Passion play from 1964 – revived now as part of a retrospective for the director Pier Paolo Pasolini – looks as if it has been hacked from some stark rockface. It is made in black and white, and uses non-professionals, including the director's mother, Susanna Pasolini, as the older Mary, mother of Christ. The musical score switches sharply from Bach's St Matthew Passion to classic blues. Enrique Irazoqui's Jesus is eerily, almost disturbingly self-possessed, emerging from the landscape like Bergman's Death in The Seventh Seal. His rhetoric is ceaseless and fluent, and his sermonising is persistently presented as a kind of dreamlike montage of inspired insights and mysterious aperçus, with Pasolini's camera jump-cutting from Jesus's face at different places and times. This really is raw film-making, in a political...
- 3/1/2013
- by Peter Bradshaw
- The Guardian - Film News
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