Face to Face with Pasolini’s “The Gospel According to Matthew”
The face signifies in the fact of summoning… in its nudity or its destitution, in everything that is precarious in questioning, in all the hazards of mortality… — (Emmanuel Levinas, “Time and the other”)
The film opens from Mary’s face — made of china, beset by a heavy brow. The first shot frames the essence of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s The Gospel According to Matthew. For Joseph is fleeing from Mary’s face, from the infinity that has opened there. He has turned from her face, from her stomach that is swelling — that at first is beneath the frame, and then seen, set against the crumbling arch of her country home — and taken the road, flanked by low walls, to a nearby village.
We will understand that infinity is always opened by the Other’s face if we follow the thought of the French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas. He tells us:
From the beginning there is a face to face steadfast in its exposure to invisible death, to a mysterious forsakenness. Beyond the visibility of whatever is unveiled, and prior to any knowledge about death, mortality lies in the Other. (“Ethics and First Philosophy”)
For Levinas, the primary encounter is face to face; it is the encounter that structures our being. We live our lives in our opening to the Other, to the infinity of death that we find in their face. Hence the movement from existence to ethics: it is from this elementary aspect of being that all the ethical demands of our lives emerge. How we respond to the Other — how we are always-already responding to the face of the Other, even before we are aware of it — is the sine qua non of our existence.
Joseph has failed, ethically, in his fleeing from Mary, from her pregnancy. So, the radiant face of the angel appears to him as he lies, slumped against a village house, and cajoles him with the truth — that Mary is pregnant with the son of God. His face changes, and he returns, and Mary’s face changes too, and Pasolini has set out the two themes that he will return to again and again in this film.
The first is the face to face encounter. For most of the first half of the film, the story is entirely told through faces and their reactions to one another. The wonderful faces of his non-professional cast, drawn from the south of Italy. Farmers, their wives and children whose faces open to Jesus and his miracles as he moves through the land, the tumble of olive terrace and old houses that stand in — in many cases convincingly — for Israel-Palestine. The acceptance of his holy status is written as these faces crease in smiles. The dialogue — drawn verbatim from the Gospel — punctures these face to face encounters, supports them rather than scripts them. The relation between faces does not only stage the story — it is the story.
The second theme is the infinite, for the infinite that has opened in Mary’s face from the beginning of the film, the infinite that Joseph flees from, is not just the infinite of death that opens in all our faces. Instead, it is the infinite that claims to go beyond death, the transcendental infinity of the one who says he is the son of God.
I read, however, a profound ambivalence on the part of Pasolini regarding Jesus if we read the film along these two lines, and bear in mind Levinas.
Firstly, the casting of Jesus runs completely contrary to every other choice of actor in the film. Elsewhere the faces are lined, full of stories, heavy with hauteur or ardour. Jesus, by contrast, is smooth, pale, the knitted monobrow doing nothing to dispel the impression that we have seen his face a thousand times before in paintings. His face never opens: it remains closed, impassive. It is this impassivity that casts a harsh light on his more tyrannical demands — that of loving him more than a father, a brother, or a sister. The coolness of his face, its refusal to open, speaks of a profound failure of intersubjectivity. A failure of ethics.
Secondly, it is the film’s shift, in its latter half, to a tireless (and tiresome) series of harangues to crowds. A uni-directional speaking to a faceless mass takes the place of the earlier, miraculous face to face encounters. Speech that seems to fail to become language, in Levinas’ definition, because it fails to enter into a relation with the Other.
How to read this shift? I think we can understand it through Levinas. For he tells us that death is the limit of virility, the failure of the ability to be able. Death is the moment of the total passivity of the ego, its impossibility. By this stage in the film, however, Jesus has decided to die, has publicly said that he will be killed, and that it is in his resurrection that the proof of his holiness will be found. He has declared that his ego will come into its fullest state when every other ego ceases to be. That his ability to be able will continue — grow — at the moment of his death. It is through death that Jesus says he will mark his virility, stake his final claim to his supernature.
It is interesting to contrast this with what Levinas says about heroes:
Prior to death there is always a last chance; this is what heroes seize, not death. The hero is the one who always glimpses a last chance, the one who obstinately finds chances. (“Time and the other”)
Jesus is not, therefore, heroic, in Levinas’ terms. He rejects every chance to stay alive, to fight death. He agitates for it and is profoundly angry that his nature is being ignored by the crowds to whom he speaks. He has told anyone who listens that he is opening a relationship to Mystery, in Levinas’ term — to the absolute alterity of the Other, to death. Yet he has been ignored, and this is how we should read his repetition of, “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!” It is the lament of someone who has signposted the coming of Mystery and its consequences, but has not been heard. The faces of the crowd have not come face to face with Jesus as — earlier in the film — the leper and the lame had. But whose fault is this? I, along with Pasolini, remain ambivalent.
In the end — in the film’s end — it is the face to face interaction that properly marks the conclusion of the story. It reaches its zenith in the miraculous encounter between Mary, aged and grief-worn, and the angel who brings the news of Jesus’ resurrection. The final shot of the film, of Jesus’ flat face, is strangely anticlimactic after the joy of his mother, of the peasants running through the fields, bounding towards the distant, faceless figure of Jesus, non-diegetic Gospel underneath the jubilant music. It is as if Pasolini, having made his statement regarding the power of the encounter with the face, bows to convention in finishing with a shot of the face of Jesus speaking his message, but cannot find the heart to make him seem sympathetic.
The failure to convincingly communicate with the face of the film’s main character — when every other face has spontaneously communicated the power of interaction and relation — suggests to me a deep scepticism about the claim by Jesus to be divine. It as if, in marking his face as exceptional by its unreality, Pasolini has cast doubt on Jesus’ claim to remain virile beyond death, to fill and grow his ego beyond his crucifixion, to maintain his ability to be able beyond the point at which every other of us melts into total passivity.
In the end, Pasolini presents us a face of Jesus that is never nude, nor destitute; that presents no precarity or hazards; and forever fails, in its arrogance, to speak to us of mortality.
