2 Pasolini. 2021. Germany. Directed by Andrei Ujică. DCP. In Italian; English subtitles. 11 min.
Sopralluoghi in Palestina per il vangelo secondo Matteo (Location Hunting in Palestine). 1965. Italy. Directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini. DCP courtesy Viggo. In Italian; English subtitles. 55 min.
Andrei Ujică uses a Tupac Shakur song and Pier Paolo Pasolini’s documentary Sopralluoghi in Palestina (Location Hunting in Palestine) (put together as research for Pasolini’s 1964 film The Gospel According to St. Matthew) to interrogate the making and remaking of history. In his journey to the Holy Land in search of “authentic” locations for his Biblical epic, Pasolini, a heterodox Marxist Catholic, was bound to find a modern landscape inhospitable to the historical presence of Christ. And yet, precisely because he ended up filming instead in southern Italy only two years after Vatican II—a seismic moment of modern Catholic self-reckoning—Pasolini’s true masterpiece is a deeply personal confrontation with ideas of liberation theology, light/faith and dark/blindness, and the role of the artist in aesthetics and spirituality. The montagist Ujică deposits several elements of violent beauty into this dialectic: Christ’s jeremiad against the Pharisees and scribes, images of a tempest-tossed sea from a pair of films by Dominique Pipat, and Tupac’s prophetic “Hit ’Em Up,” which, with lyrics like “Who shot me? But you punks didn’t finish / Now you ’bout to feel the wrath of a menace,” evokes another defiant proto-revolutionary cut down in the prime of youth.