In 1963, accompanied by a newsreel photographer and a Catholic priest, Piero Paolo Pasolini traveled to Palestine to investigate the possibility of filming his biblical epic The Gospel According to Matthew in its approximate historical locations.
EN
Oswald Stack: When you made Sopralluoghi in Palestina did you envisage showing it in public, or was it initially conceived as a private research film?
Pier Paolo Pasolini: It came about very casually, and in fact I never took any part in the camera set-ups or the shooting or anything else. When we went to the Middle East there was a cameraman with us who was sent along by the production company. I never suggested a thing to him, because I wasn't thinking of using the material to make a film, I just wanted some documentation which would help me set The Gospel. When I got back to Rome the producer asked me to put together some of the footage and put a commentary on it so it could be shown to a few distributors and Christian Democrat bosses to help the producers. I didn't even control the montage. I had it put together by someone and then just looked over it, but I left everything, including some very ugly cuts which this person had made – who anyway wasn't even a qualified editor. I had it put on in a dubbing-room and improvised a commentary, so altogether the whole film is rather improvised.
Oswald Stack in conversation with Pier Paolo Pasolini1
“To return to Vangelo and the Sopralluoghi, the former is the product of the latter's provisionality, since it narrates the failure to discover required locations in Palestine, the historical biblical site, for the filming of the Gospel. This failure, which precedes and foreshadows the technical ‘failure’ experienced during the filming of Vangelo [...], can be seen as a founding trauma of the literal - what is present and identical can no longer faithfully or literally represent what is past - and leads to the important discovery of the ‘analogous method’ - what is present and different can represent analogously what is past. It is no coincidence that this point marks the end of the non-problematic, or naïve, transitions from treatment to screenplay to film.”
R.S.C. Gordon2
