Translation as De-canonization: Matthew's Gospel According to Pasolini - filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini - Critical Essay

Cross Currents, Wntr, 2002 by George Aichele

To the memory of Paul Hessert

The technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition....And in permitting the reproduction to meet the beholder or listener in his own particular situation, it reactivates the object reproduced. (1)

The canon of scriptures was created by the emerging, imperial Christian Church, beginning in the fourth century C.E., in order to secure and defend property of the Church -- the scriptures and the story that they told -- against its enemies: heretics, Jews, and pagans. The canon was used by the Church, the new Israel, to establish its claim to partake in the continuation of God's covenant with the old Israel (promises made and fulfilled in the Old and New Testaments). It is thus a profoundly ideological device. The semiotic operation of the canon was supposed to control the understanding of the included texts, to establish an authorized and complete intertextual network that would enable the Bible (in the right hands) to speak for itself.

That the canon has never worked very well is made clear by a long history of theological disputes, heresy trials, and religious wars. However, this Christian canon of scriptures barely functions at all in the world today. The semiotic machine that is the Bible has broken down. The meaning and authority of the biblical texts are in jeopardy, and each of them sinks or floats in contemporary secular culture like any other non-canonical text. One measure of the mordant status of the biblical canon is the freedom with which popular mass media translate and recycle formerly canonical texts, freeing them from traditional theological hermeneutics. (2) Texts that include language, themes, and images from the Bible appear in countless other books, as well as movies and other works of popular culture. Each of these new texts offers a rewriting of the Bible that in turn implies a different reading, a reading that liberates the biblical text from its canonical context. This production of non-canonical biblical texts can be painful and violent and sometimes even dangerous.

Pier Paolo Pasolini's film, The Gospel According to St. Matthew, (3) an example of this rewriting. Unlike most other "Jesus films," which draw upon implicit canonical understandings of the narrative material (often in the form of sentimental piety) in order to freely rearrange the texts, Pasolini does not play fast and loose with the text of Matthew's gospel. Instead, he simply lifts the entire story of Matthew out of the Bible, and while this might seem quite respectful of the gospel text itself, it is not at all respectful of the canon. Pasolini's Matthew de-sanctifies the biblical Matthew by quoting it whole, and as though it were isolated from the rest of the Bible. Indeed, the title of the English version of the movie unfortunately, and against Pasolini's own wishes, (4) introduces the word "Saint" that does not appear in the Italian title, Il Vangelo Secondo Matteo. Matthew can only be a saint according to the canon.

Pasolini's film "translates" the gospel, moving it from one "location" to another. It offers an instance of what Roman Jakobson calls intersemiotic translation -- that is, a "transmutation" or "interpretation of verbal signs by means of signs of nonverbal sign systems." (5) The nonverbal sign system is here constituted by the medium of cinema, but since cinema is not a purely nonverbal medium, Pasolini's movie is not a purely intersemiotic translation. The film also translates the written Italian words of the already-translated gospel into the spoken Italian words of the movie's actors, in a nearly word by word representation of dialogue from Matthew's story. Furthermore, for those (including myself) who do not know Italian, the English subtitles also translate -- interlingually, in Jakobson's terminology -- the spoken Italian words of the actors into written English words.

This film thus offers a curious instance of what Walter Benjamin calls "literal translation." Indeed, Benjamin's ideal of literal translation is the interlinear translation of the scriptures, in which two texts stand alongside one another, word by word. (6) In Pasolini's Matthew, this interlinearity is most fully realized in the (often nearly illegible) written subtitles that appear on screen at the same time as the Italian words are spoken. (In the dubbed version of the movie, of course, this problem does not occur.) These two texts barely touch one another, like "a tangent touches a circle...at the infinitely small point of the sense," (7) and they make manifest the intersemiotic tension between the respective media.

Pasolini's Matthew is also what Benjamin calls a mechanical reproduction of a work of art. (8) In it, the verbal signs consist of the printed text of an Italian translation of Matthew's gospel, which is itself a mechanical reproduction of a handwritten manuscript. (9) The written text of a book is passive and the reader treats it however she will, but the moving picture dominates the viewer for the moment, and she must either let it have its way, or reject it altogether. (10) The text that forms the subtitles for the English translation of Pasolini's film is both written text and moving image at once, and thus it is not "scripture." Pasolini has created a non-scriptural gospel of Matthew. Whenever it mentions "the scriptures," the movie necessarily refers to a different medium. In addition, when the subtitles fail, the viewer who knows no Italian is presented with "a language completely devoid of any kind of meaning function,...pure signifier,...paradoxical in the extreme." (11) Insofar as the movie frees Ma tthew's text from meaning -- from "the scriptures" -- it liberates Matthew from canonical control.