ZAMEK Culture Centre

HOMMAGE: PASOLINI. Five masterpiecies of Pier Paolo Pasolini | 16-22.06.2025

One of the greatest and most original biblical epics in film history. Riding the wave of the spiritual renewal of the Catholic Church and the Second Vatican Council, Pasolini searches for the seeds of social radicalism in the Gospel. Was Jesus the first communist? Was Christianity the first praise of communal life? This ascetic and majestic black-and-white film does not provide straightforward answers to these questions but constitutes an intense journey to the past: to the ancient world of the first monotheistic religions and to a pre-modern epoch. According to Pasolini, such an interpretation of Christ’s life had to be shot in Italy, since after journeying through Palestine and Israel, the director deemed those lands to have lost their archaic purity. The Gospel According to St. Matthew is told through imagery and Scripture, but also through music. The eclectically curated compositions – from Bach and Mozart to Russian music and the blues – enrichens the expressive force of this revolutionary, but at the same time traditional, biographical epic. [Sebastian Smoliński]

 The Gospel According to St. Matthew, Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1964