What to Feed Yourself for Holy Week
A small media guide
Greetings! I will be writing something for free and paid subscribers to mark the week, but meanwhile, here’s an exclusive for my paid readers in which I gather together some of what I’ve been reading, listening to, and watching to get myself in the proper mood. If in the process I introduce someone to a new favorite something, my work here is done.
What I’m Watching
This week I watched Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Gospel According to St. Matthew for the first time. This 1964 Italian neo-realist classic is considered by some to be the best life of Christ put to film. I haven’t quite seen enough of them to form a definite opinion, but all I can say is this would be difficult to top. I’m starting to develop a “deeply screwed-up auteur” thesis of the life of Jesus movie, that a director has to be not quite sane or normal to really do the story justice. (Pasolini was a gay Marxist atheist—yes, really, all the things—who was one of these guys always at loggerheads with the church while thinking Jesus was a pretty cool dude. Much of his other work is obscene in the extreme. He was murdered under mysterious circumstances, some thinking a crime syndicate like the Mafia pushed a male prostitute into taking the fall. A colorful life, to say the least.)
This piece was shot in black and white on a very low budget in rural Italy, using non-actors, with no extra dialogue except what’s in the text of the gospel. A critic noted that so far from constricting Pasolini’s cinematic imagination, it actually freed him up to paint with silent imagery and music. From the first appearance of the girlish Virgin Mary, one corner of her lips quirking up like the Mona Lisa, you know you’re watching something special. This is a film-length stress test of the British actor Michael Kitchen’s criticism of a wordy script, “I could do that with a look.” With such spare dialogue, much of its power rests in significant looks, the more impressive because the camera is lingering on the faces of people unused to a camera.
