TH
# 57 • APRIL 5 , 2015
# 57 •APRIL 5
TH
2015
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ITALIAN CINEMA:
EASTER IN THE ITALIAN
MOVIES
By Edoardo Peretti
In a country like Italy, whose
culture and imagination were
and are directly or indirectly
strongly characterized by Catholicism, some way also present in writers and directors
who do not believe in God, Easter, the most important Christian holiday, has not had the
same luck of representation as
Christmas has.
the stories of the life of Christ.
They represent a lush and typical subgenre of the American
cinema in the fifties and sixties,
and occasionally even after:
for example with Scorsese in
“The Last Temptation of Christ”
or with Mel Gibson’s “The Passion”. Mythological tales, grandiloquent and a bit pompous,
to be honest.
Indeed, Christmas is present in
many works, even as a “McGuffin” (a plot device in the form of
some goal, desired object, or
other motivator that the protagonist pursues, often with little
or no narrative explanation) to
talk about something else, and
often regarding its more material and less religious connotation (for instance, the classic
example of the Christmas dinner). It is way more rare to find
a movie set during an Easter
lunch, or that tells the celebrations and rites of this day.
A different approach, however,
is given by the Italian movies,
even if they are not numerous:
of course the mythology remains, but the key is mostly
more habitual and realistic,
less overtly epic: as if at the
center there was Christ as a
man, not as a divinity.
No coincidence that the most
important Italian movie of this
kind is “Il Vangelo secondo
Matteo” (The Gospel According to St. Matthew), directed
in 1964 by Pier Paolo Pasolini,
the thinker-director who has
always supported a “free-range” Catholicism, not very different from the secular one from
rural areas, with a sacredness
without superstructures which has at its center the human
experience. The Christ of The
Gospel According to St. Matthew told by Pasolini is there-
Still, things are different when
it comes to describing the stories of the Gospel on which
the essence of Easter is based:
12 | WE THE ITALIANS
WE THE ITALIANS | 13
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