Categories: uncategorized
Tags: pretentious waffle, faith, cinema
Date: 30 December 2005 19:23:00
I watched Pasolini's The Gospel According To St Matthew, with a packet of hobnobs and a dog. We (ie. me and the dog) saw King of Kings last week and watching Pasolini's version of the Christ story, I'm unusually frightened by his Salome. Far from the lascivious, murderous "child of adultery" of King of Kings, Pasolini's Salome cuts an unexpectedly modest, prepubescent figure, and does a prim, folkish dance, in medieval dress. She could have stepped straight from a 14th-century picture, but her dance, her prettily-bunned hair and the garland of flowers she carries like symbols of a pastoral landscape are all the more deadly for their good manners. Nasty things happen in such landscapes.
Ostwalt: "It functions as the stage on which Christian resurrections occur..,. but this landscape also has a power more properly associated with "pagan" religions. As in the religious myths of agricultural societies, dead things immersed in the soil come back to life."
Then there's BC Southam on the reference in The Waste Land to the "effigy of the head of the god... thrown into the sea as a symbol of the death of the powers of nature... carried by the current to Byblos, retrieved and worshipped as a symbol of the god reborn."
Eliot's hanged god just wouldn't stay hanged, either, nor buried. Clearly these are literary references and I do not suggest that this is where Pasolini's coming from, but they have in common with Salome's dance a particularly vivid crystallisation of archetype. One might almost prefer Hollywood's Salome: at least she's only after blood for drama's sake, whereas this young lady's childlike dance is chilling on a far baser level. How many times has it been danced before, one wonders, and for what harvests?
I asked the dog what she reckoned to all this but she'd run off with the Hobnobs.