The old town of the southern Italian Matera As far as the cityscape, but also the location in the barren landscape is concerned, it is amazingly similar to the historic Jerusalem. Mel Gibson shot his “Passion of the Christ” here in 2004, two years ago Garth Davis filmed “The Life of Mary Magdalene” in Matera, and Pier Paolo Pasolini in particular used the city as the setting for his Gospel of Matthew in 1964. In 2019 Matera was European Capital of Culture and invited the Swiss theater and filmmaker Milo Rau to realize a project there. The result is a film with the title “The New Gospel”.
Christoph Leibold: What attracted you to deal with the story of Jesus anew, beyond the fact that it is naturally linked to a cinematic tradition of Matera?
Milo Rau: This tradition was actually a reason. It was actually a coincidence that they called me at the end of 2017. I immediately said: “I’ll do a Jesus film!” Then I went there and had already spoken on the phone to some people from the Pasolini and Mel Gibson films, some of whom I knew from before. And they said: “Yes, that’s great, we’d love to take part!” And when I was there and came out of town and visited the refugee camps there, I suddenly realized that it is no longer enough to just make a passion film today. The current situation has to play a role in the really bottom of today’s society, namely these rightsless, illegal refugees who are exploited on the tomato plantations by the mafia and the big corporations. And so I came to this mixed form of amateur actors, activists who play along and, on the other hand, the actors from the great previous films by Gibson or by Pier Paolo Pasolini.
For example, you have the Jesus actor by Pasolini with you, who as an old man now plays John the Baptist and, so to speak, gives his heir in the role of Jesus the blessing. And this Jesus and his disciples are played by migrants from Africa who work as harvest workers there under, one must say, slave-like conditions. So the new thing about your New Gospel is that you cast this Jesus figure against the iconographic appearance that many people associate with her, because it is now a black Jesus. If I assume that you didn’t do that purely for the sake of doing things differently – what do you associate with this statement?
For me, when we saw the conditions, the desire and will actually combined, not only to film the scriptures as scriptures, but actually the content of the Bible. The story of Jesus in the Gospel is actually the story of a leader of the landless at the time on the periphery of the Roman Empire, the scattered people who no longer have a place, who come together to start a spiritual, but also a social revolutionary uprising. And then I was looking for someone who had this authority, this charisma.
That’s how I came across Yvan Sagnet, the best-known activist there is in Italy for the rights of those without rights, and asked him if he wanted to participate. And he said yes. So we started to work together. That was a long way. We then, like Jesus himself – this is what the film tells us – started to look for activists, i.e. apostles, in the camps. Quite a few are Muslims, some are Catholics, others are atheists. And on the other hand there was of course – the film also depicts this – the desire to translate this revolt completely, i.e. not just to make a Jesus film, but to start a movement, the revolt of dignity. And a movement for workers’ rights has really emerged in the south of Italy, which has since achieved some success.
The film is, as you suggested, a kind of hybrid. There are Passion feature film scenes in historicizing costumes, but there are also making-of scenes and documentary passages that show this current struggle of migrants for their rights and dignity. And sometimes, in the passion scenes, you can also see the tourists in Matera in the year of the European Capital of Culture standing by and filming with their cell phones. This mixing of the game plot and the present – what can it do if these levels of action are superimposed?
It is basically a dialectical intermingling of various levels that mirror each other. There are often tough contradictions. Poverty on the one hand. Then this rather exhibitionistic tourist view on the other side and the wealth of this city, which in Pasolini’s time was still an expression of poverty. Today it is one of the richest places in the world. Matera is in the hands of rich people, tourists and so on. And that there is actually the greatest poverty all around, the misery of Europe, we of course reflect these contradictions in the film. We also reflect on what it means to make a Jesus film, i.e. at the same time in dialogue with these previous films, which we often cite through the actors, but also through the topics that we take up differently; and on the other hand, of course, through the actual economic violence that prevails there, which is also racist violence. This simultaneity of Realpolitik at the time of Jesus and Realpolitik today was almost shocking to me. We actually had to change very little about the Bible to make it completely understandable.
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