The Gospel According to St. Matthew

Pier Paolo Pasolini's The Gospel According to St. Matthew (Italian: Il Vangelo secondo Matteo) won the Special Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival in 1964, along with the OCIC Prize from the International Catholic Organization for Cinema, an unusual honour for a director who was an atheist and a Marxist. It was his third feature, after Accattone (1961) and Mamma Roma (1962), and no screen adaptation of the Christian gospel has bettered it.

The screenplay uses only Matthew's text, in a literal Italian translation from the Latin Vulgate. Pasolini added no dialogue and no dramatisation beyond what the gospel itself provides. Almost the entire cast are non-professionals from the southern Italian regions where he shot, among them his own mother, Susanna Pasolini, who plays Mary in her later years. The cinematographer was Tonino Delli Colli, who would also shoot Pasolini's Salò a decade later.

The locations are the rocky landscapes of Basilicata, Puglia and Calabria. Pasolini chose them to avoid the Holy Land settings and Italian Renaissance imagery that then dominated the way cinema pictured Christ. The score sets Bach's St Matthew Passion beside Mozart's Mass in C Minor, Odetta's recordings of African American spirituals, and Luis Bacalov's original orchestrations, and the mixture sounds less strange on screen than it does on paper. Sight & Sound's 2022 critics' poll placed the film on its Greatest Films of All Time list.