" A VISIT TO PALESTINE " "Look at that panorama!" "What luck." "I think we're about 50 km from Tel Aviv." "All morning we had been driving through countryside like Italy's very modern, industrialised, then, out of nowhere, this vision." "This is, after all, what I was hoping to find." "A biblical world, archaic." "St. John the Baptist referred to this scene in the Jordan when preaching, he rebukes the Scribes and the Pharisees who come to him; and reminds them of their responsibility." ""He will clear his threshing floor, and gather his wheat into the granary;..."" ""...but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire"." "This is that scene." "Nearby, is a long, narrow stretch of the border between Israel and Jordan." "And so, although Galilee is still far away Galilee is part of Israel, the Arab world is very close." "And so we find this landscape typical of the archaic Arab world." "This sun and this straw are perfect elements for depicting an evangelic parable." "Nothing would have to be changed here:" "...that tent, this heap of wheat the gestures of this old farmer." "This is the Gospel passage that refers to the Mount of Transfiguration, Tabor." "Six days after, Jesus took with him Peter and James and his brother John and led them up a high mountain, by themselves." "To the right, we have Lake Tiberias." "At this point my hopes were still strong." "I thought that Israel, the places where Christ preached could be the perfect setting for my film, without any changes." "But, already at this point I started to suspect that there was something too modern, too industrialised in this landscape." "In fact, in a few minutes as you follow our Fiat's route as it took us towards Nazareth towards the heart of Galilee, towards Lake Tiberias you'll see a landscape contaminated by the present." "The small white working class houses, factories, et cetera." "My hopes had already begun to wane with the realisation that certain things were not totally as I had imagined them for the setting of my film." "Look here." "These are Israeli houses that you could easily find in the Roman countryside or in Switzerland; dominated by the supreme vision of Mount Tabor which is similar to Soratte." "When we arrived on the banks of Lake Tiberias the heat was terrible, inexorable." "And as I will tell you shortly, in person, from the screen my first impression was one of great modesty of great smallness, of great humility." "Here, we are halfway up the Mount of the Beatitudes." "The multitude probably gathered here, to listen to Christ and up there, where you see that small Church with that black dome Christ probably sat there as he talked to the multitude." "A frighteningly desolate area, barren it seems like one of the most forsaken places of Calabria or Puglia." "And down there, is Lake Tiberias, serene under the sun." "What struck me most was the extreme smallness, the poverty the humility of this place." "I had imagined the Mount of the Beatitudes as one of the most fabulous places in my film part of the spectacular panorama that Palestine would have given me instead I was struck by its incredible smallness, by its humility." "A great lesson in humility." "After all, everything that Christ had done and said, four small Gospels a sermon in a small land a small region made up of four barren hills; a mountain, Calvary, where he was killed it all fits in the palm of a hand." "In this place, according to the Gospel of St. John Christ invested Peter with his lofty mission." ""Peter, on this rock...", et cetera." "Today it is St. Peter and Paul and Don Andrea is celebrating Mass." "There is a small church on the banks of Lake Tiberias kept by I don't know which order..." "Visiting the holy places with Don Andrea has been a great experience for me." "First, for what he has told me and explained to me from a philological point of view and, more importantly, a historical one." "And then for the experience gained from his reactions perfect reactions which give me, with great accuracy an idea of what to expect from the Catholic public that will see my film." "Don Andrea's reactions were clear to me, because as you will hear from his accent, he is from Veneto and so we had very similar childhoods." "My childhood experience with Venetian liturgical Catholicism is similar to his, so I found in him certain reactions from my childhood." "Now we are going to Capernaum." "Another pleasant surprise." "Although, one of the last." "Because, from here the world becomes more and more modern therefore, not usable for my film as I have it in mind, now." "But this arid, desert landscape of the banks of Lake Tiberias gives you an idea of the place where Christ went to meditate and weep." "I'm a little discouraged, Don Andrea because if I were to write some verses, and I will probably write some Capernaum is a sublime place, in its smallness, extreme poverty and absolute lack of scenography." "I am a little intimidated of making a film:" "...there is no backdrop for the scenes I will shoot." "Why?" "Do you think that the whole of evangelical history is made of such small things, paltry, no scenography, stark, sultry, consumed by the sun?" "Evidently, this is also true." "No doubt." "I would say that the specific purpose should be this:" "...to condense, absorb the spirit of this situation." "Then, possibly, relive it, rebuild it, invent it, perhaps in another setting, in another place." "But these scenes took place here, in these places this land was walked upon, this is the sea." "The synagogue is here..." "here are all of the mountains where Jesus walked and talked." "It is a sort of geography of Palestine a geography of the Holy Land." "And as you walk here you must think, reflect, meditate to absorb the spirit." "Only then can you also reinvent it in another place re-imagine it, adapt it to your responsiveness to your imagination." "And then it will become something new because we cannot speak of a photography of these places." "It would be completely out of place." "As far as I am concerned, I think I have completely transformed my imagination of the holy places." "More than adapting the places to my mind's eye I'll have to adapt my mind's eye to the places." "Still on the banks of Lake Tiberias this small lake that the ancient Jews called "a sea" and which I imagined precisely as an immense sea." "Instead, the modernity of Israel's social structure is clear here the real wealth of this nation." "I say this because, if I should decide to shoot the film there I imagine it would be difficult to find extras:" "...everyone has a job, their jobs pay well and above all, they are ideal jobs." "Now we are going to the opposite shore of Lake Tiberias." "Don Andrea, I must confess our presence here so harsh, so physical before the harsh reality of the Jordan, touching the plants leaning against the trees embarrasses me, I almost have a sense of disrespectfulness." "Do you know who comes to mind?" "My great Italian brothers of other centuries the painters, Pollaiolo, and others who depicted the baptism of Christ." "They had to imagine the Jordan for themselves." "For them, it was far away beyond the seas and the mountains, unreachable." "For me, it is here." "Now I am embarrassed, in an aesthetic sense." "But in terms of the Christian, religious sanctity what might you tell me, with cool detachment?" "I can tell you that the Jordan is the historical and religious reference point for all Jewish history because the Old Testament begins with the Jews crossing the Jordan and ends with the baptism of John the Baptist who invites the Jews to receive the baptism in the Jordan to prepare themselves for the coming of the Messiah." "As the Jordan crosses all of Palestine in yet a larger sense it crosses all of history north to south, and more crucially, the entire history of the Jews which has its religious reference in the Jordan in preparation for the New Testament." "It is a very small river." "Any comparison must be made with great tact it must be set in the history and in the religion of the Jews." "It cannot be compared to the Nile or to the Ganges." "A small, paltry thing..." "Yes, a poor, humble, desperate little green river." "Always the same." "Here we are in a kibbutz on the border with Jordan exactly opposite Capernaum, which is way down there." "This is the place where Christ retreated in meditation where the multitude followed him, where the miracle of the bread occurred and the miracle of the swine thrown headlong down to the water..." "From those mountains, up there where once the town or small city of Gádara or Gadára rose now it hosts Syrian soldiers who more often than not shoot down at the Jews that are here on this stretch of plain to work." "As you can see, these mountains are very similar to those surrounding Crotone, I don't know if you know them between Cutro and Crotone, on the banks of the Ionian Sea." "And these olive groves are exactly like the olive groves of Puglia around Taranto, around Bari." "We are moving towards Nazareth, as we leave Galilee to the north." "This is the territory of the Arabs who remained in Israeli territory:" "...the Druses." "Here is another lovely moment in our journey:" "...this landscape from 2000, 3000, 5000 years ago; the donkeys from the Bible, the little girl from the Bible." "The Arab lumpenproletariat is the only thing that has remained truly ancient, archaic." "While, I repeat, Israeli society is very modern and this is also reflected in faces and in clothing." "Imagine the landscape, the people, and their work a little like this at the time Christ began to preach and appeared in the countryside on the way to Capernaum." "The first men to hear him must have been in this pose and similar to these people." "And these are the Druse villages." "An Arab population but, as you will see, often very similar to European lumpenproletarian populations." "This, they say, is because they are a cross between the Arabs and the crusaders." "Many cities and towns in which Christ's miracles will take place in my film like:" "Casting out demons, healing lepers, healing the blind places where Christ performs miracles will be a little like these which, as I said, are very similar to certain places in Puglia." "I don't know, Massafra or old Bari are a lot like this." "Come over here!" "The problem of the extras would be almost irresolvable because, as I said, the Jews could not be used and, see the faces of the Arabs?" "Faces that have not been touched by the preaching of Christ." "They are pre-Christian faces, pagan." "Indifferent, happy, savage." "Still continuing towards Nazareth, we pass through zones "colonised" by Jews." "The kibbutz, with their silos, their institutional look reshape the landscape with absolute modernity." "All of these trees are all from reforestation." "I stopped in this kibbutz to chat with the inabitants about their problems." "...they receive friends, closed groups of friends." "This is how they organise their evenings." " You have a child." "How old?" " Two." "Do you think that your maternal relationship with your child is happy, good, productive or are you unappy about something in this type of upbringing?" "I think that this is a fundamental question." "I think any mother would be unappy about something in this method." "I think this is perhaps the most complete, most correct method in the world for bringing up a child." "Instinctively, I have a lot of objections every mother wants to educate her child, raise her child see him eat, take care of him." "With this method this is impossible." "But on a more intellectual level I am highly convinced that it is a much better way of raising children better than all of the others." " You are also a daughter, you have only been a mother for a short time." "This is your mother." "I would like to ask your mother, who helps in raising her grandchild about the differences between how she raised you, her grown daughter and how her daughter is raising her grandchild." "I find it to be a much more complete system in which a mother's love for her child is in no way diminished because when the mother is with her child she doesn't have to think about anything else, just the child." "And she puts her family worries aside her problems, her daily worries and thinks only of her child." "In this way, the child absorbs the best part of his mother's love, his father's love." "Coming to Israel, the most striking thing are the kibbutz." "Can you tell me, in a few words, what a kibbutz is?" " To sum it up in a few words is very difficult." " Try!" "I think it is a group of people with the same political ideas and with the same ideals from a social standpoint who live together, they have the same goals in life." "And each one interprets this goal a little differently than the others." "This, in spiritual terms, but in organisational terms?" "How is a kibbutz organised?" "Could you explain, Mr. Luzzati?" "From a collectivist point of view..." "That is, the work and all of the other things are handled collectively and democratically." "The work is organised, there is a social and democratic organisation of all of the committees." "The work committee, the office, the social committee." "And even the types of work are organised from a democratic standpoint, that is to say, there is a supervisor and then the various types of work." "Here in Baram there is a very large orchard, which is the main type of work." "Then we have fish nurseries, not right here, but farther away in the Okulé valley, where we raise carp." "We have many acres of carp, we produce 150 metric tons a year." "Here in the kibbutz we have quite a large chicken farm stables, also quite large a flock of sheep which is a lot of work." "Wait, maybe I can remember some verses that I wrote during that memorable journey." ""Perhaps here, there was something, but you..."" ""...in disappearing, made what little there was..."" ""...of your world down here disappear..."" ""..." "leaving it as if consumed by your fire"." "In reality, here in this countryside, in these villages, owing to other civilisations which took the place of still others after Christ's preaching everything seems burnt." "Burnt in material and in spirit." "An enormous piece of wreckage:" "This is what the Arab world is lumpenproletarian to Israel." "What did Don Andrea and I talk about in this spot?" "We probably had one of our usual discussions in which I tended to see the world in Christ's times a little like what was before my eyes here." "A rather wretched world, pastoral, archaic, shattered." "While Don Andrea always tended to see even in the settings that surrounded Christ a certain dignity." "Probably "dignity" as it appears to us in the modern world." "We did not always agree on this point." "I tended to see the villages like these, here:" "...villages of poverty stricken people." "While Don Andrea told me that in Hebrew times, the villages ...must have been more decorous than these." "Here, this was the backdrop for the wedding at Cana." "We are travelling towards Nazareth with a few out-of-the way stops." "The village that we saw before was at the foot of Mount Tabor." "Here, this is a group of possible candidates for a miracle wretched, ragged people, waiting for nothing, if not a miracle." "I'm sure you've understood that at this point in our journey the problem I'd set for myself, as the goal of my research was to find villages, places, faces that could replace modern villages, places, faces." "I know that Nazareth is a very modern city and so I could never use it to depict ancient Nazareth." "Here it is." "No further comment is needed to explain why it is totally unusable for our film." "So far I have found nothing in Israel that could replace Nazareth in both a philological and poetic sense." "Either there is too much poverty, as in the Druse and Arab villages or too much colour, as in these working-class quarters of Nazareth." "Or else, it is excessively modern, as you saw earlier in the sight of Nazareth:" "Skyscrapers won'thy of a large neo-capitalistic city." "Here, as always, I was looking for faces, details clothing styles." "Speaking of clothing, the costumes for the film are a big problem." "We move south, towards the desert, towards Beersheba or Be'er Sheva." "This desert, which, we can say is being conquered day by day by the Israelis is still inabited by tribes of Bedouins." "Here there are." "There is little to say about these images." "They speak for themselves." "Rather than a real study, it has been an interlude in our journey." "Because, as you can see none of this material can be used." "These are the same faces that we also saw in the Druse villages gentle, beautiful, happy yet a bit sombre, a bit mournful." "They are full of a savage pre-Christian gentleness:" "...Christ's preaching has not been heard here, not even from afar." "The images are stupendous and probably very faithful to the images that we evoke when we think of the Jews that crossed the desert." "We are on the banks of the Dead Sea." "There it is, down there." "This was the only landscape seen during my travels which in some way contradicted my essential experience during this journey; the only one that counts among its characteristics the impression of grandeur." "All of the rest is sublime and solemn in it's humbleness and smallness but never grandiose, never cyclopean." "If not terrifying." "There, where I am, under that obelisk of sorts is the only sliver of shade in the entire area." "An immense lunar landscape." "The only one who was not traumatised by this atrocious panorama was Don Andrea, with his absolute, extreme mental order." "Here, I was looking for a landscape to use for the 40 days that Christ spent in the desert." "It was here, more or less that Christ came." "To tell the truth the precise spot is in the part..." "But the characteristics are extremely similar." "Another short stop in our journey." "A very colourful, folkloristic stop." "Here are mountains very similar to those where Christ probably retreated to meditate and where Satan tempted him." "Here, where Sodom and Gomorrah rose we find large industrial plants." "The only real problem if I must shoot the film in Italy instead of in these areas is to reconstruct this desert." "I will certainly never achieve this sense of immensity." "I know of places fairly similar at the top of Etna but the immensity of these horizons can never be achieved." "And now, finally, we go towards Jerusalem the central and most thrilling point in our journey." "Don Andrea and I summarised our itinerary." "Up there, Galilee." "We came down, to the south and arrived at Beersheba." "Now we are going back up and towards Jerusalem." "We are going precisely towards the Israeli part of Jerusalem, which the border divides into two parts." "The most interesting places for my film are in the Jordanian section." "Here is the typical Israeli landscape that brings together some extremely archaic, even biblical elements remnants of the long Arab political dominion with industrial areas, that account for the larger part that are absolutely modern, the patrimony of the new state of Israel." "The landscape doesn't seem very different from the typical landscape of southern Italy." "Here we could very well be in Puglia." "Here also, in Puglia or in Calabria, or Sicily." "This is Jerusalem." "Mr. Pasolini you have before you the border fence between Israel and Jordan." "From here you can see the area crucial to the last days of the passion and the life of Jesus." "The Mount of Olives, the Kidron valley, with Gethsemane the ancient foundation of the Temple, Zion." "Now you have visited all of Palestine and Israel perhaps you will go on to Jordan." "What are your impressions of this land, of these places where Jesus walked and talked?" "If I have understood correctly, this fence not only divides Israel from Jordan that is, dividing our journey in half but it also divides the studies for our film in half." "We have seen the places where Jesus preached and we are about to see the places of his passion." "As regards the places where he preached we have already said a lot." "I cannot say I am disappointed, it would be absolutely absurd." "Perhaps from a practical point of view, yes, I am disappointed." "I found nothing that I can use for the film:" "...neither landscape nor characters." "The landscape is made up of four barren hillsides and the characters are Jews with extremely modern faces which show all of the contemporary culture from Romanticism on they are deeply scarred by it and have lost all of the "archaic" aspects that I would like for my film." "What most intrigues me is this panorama that Christ should have chosen such an arid place so bare, so lacking in every amenity." "Four barren hillsides, the bed of a lake gloomy heat and nothing else." "All of this can be reconstructed elsewhere." "Mr. Pasolini, you talk about practical disappointment." "We might think that, at Jesus' time Galilee was different, that Palestine prior to the Arab invasions, was a bit more florid, richer." "And what about your spiritual impressions of the setting?" "You see, for the two of us, the word "spiritual" has different meanings." "When you say "spiritual" you mean, above all, religious intimate and religious." "For me "spiritual" corresponds to aesthetics." "In coming here, when I experienced a practical disappointment it was of no importance." "But, a profound aesthetic revelation corresponds to this practical disappointment." "And, this aesthetic revelation is much more important because it unfolded in a field that I thought was completely mine." "My idea that the smaller and more humble things are... the deeper and more beautiful they are, has had a thorough shaking this thing is still truer than I imagined." "So, the idea of these four barren hillsides of Christ's preaching has become an aesthetic idea and thus, spiritual." "I'll let you read one of St. Paul's thoughts which I think perfectly matches this thought of yours." "Here is the border fence Don Andrea mentioned a little earlier." "From this point, Jordanian Jerusalem extends." "Jerusalem is a place like no other in Israel." "It is a world within a world." "And, if earlier the stylistic inspirations for my film were of a certain nature which, more or less confusedly I have spoken about till now seeing Jerusalem has suggested other possibilities to me thanks to these different aspects." "Jerusalem is grandiose, undoubtedly." "There is something historically sublime in her appearance." "And it is evident that when Jerusalem appears in the film it cannot but instil the film with a different stylistic identity." "Jerusalem appears in the story told by Matthew at the moment in which Christ's preaching, till now solely religious not by Christ's direct will nor that of the apostles but due to objectively historical events becomes a public and political fact as well as a religious one." "Obviously, this will not be said explicitly in the film it would be absurd; but it will be said implicitly and this will take place through a stylistic change in the story." "Whereas before everything was pure, simple articulated with extreme absoluteness the arrival in Jerusalem will mark a new turn in the film." "There will be a sense of grandeur in the film." "This is how Christ probably entered into Jerusalem." "Here we are in Jordan." "There is the joy and vivacity of poor, lumpenproletarian places." "Here, a new entrance of Christ into Jerusalem." "The happy trot of a donkey." "But, evidently surrounded by the grandeur of the multitude albeit humble, the grandeur of a capital it was the centre of commerce and public, political, social life of that entire part of the world." "So, at this point in the film, I must alter the register of my inspiration." "This is the door through which Christ entered." "Called, I believe, the Sun Gate." "Up there, the Garden of Gethsemane from which Christ saw Jerusalem at his feet." "I don't remember the name of this church, nor its function." "I could use the help of Don Andrea in remembering the details of what we are seeing in this moment of the film." "Don Andrea's mind, so orderly, so precise where everything comes together with utmost simplicity while I am continuously ruffled by historical perspectives and breakdowns in Don Andrea's mind everything was straightforward as on the "facade" of eternity." "Here, I believe, we go down towards the pool of Siloam one of the most beautiful spots that I have seen around Jerusalem." "I don't even remember the name of this church or what it commemorates." "Here we are in the Gehenna valley, I believe." "This was more or less the view of Jerusalem from another perspective, but rather similar to that which Christ and Satan saw from the Pinnacle of the temple." "The Wailing Wall." "These are places and characters that will probably return through a stylistic reworking in the film." "This is the Garden of Gethsemane." "It is hard to improvise here or in a dubbing room where I anxiously strive to remember the names of the places to relay the emotion of this moment to you." "Here, the olive trees excruciating in their naturalness." "We are in the heart of Jerusalem, the road that leads to the Sepulchre." "We continue down the Arabian kasbah streets stratified, as you see, Crusaders and Normans, around toward the Church of the Holy Sepulchre." "Don Andrea, behind us is a few square metres of rock." "Calvary is about 5 o 6 metres from Christ's tomb." "The same sizes, the same dimensions, small and humble, in all of the Gospel." "And, on these, small dimensions, like an enormous hawk, an enormous eagle an architectural structure is set with many layers of history and its complications, et cetera." "And I don't mean the rather embarrassing venal part the fact that here there are Catholics, Copts... no." "From a cultural and historical point of view what effect does this elaboration of the word of Christ have on you as it dominates his humility with such grandeur?" "The word of Jesus was elaborated here." "Each generation which has come has taken it, meditated on it reassessed it, reconstructed it, thought it through trying to leave some external element, something visible to strike its own generation and others." "I feel this atmosphere strongly in a historical sense." "Successions of races, civilisations, people who have come who have brought something, who have taken from the word of Jesus who have brought forth something and tried to honour it in a way deserving of the Lord's word." "Leaving aside this sort of architectural cultural monstrum if I were to return my inspiration to those few square meters of bare land burnt and rocky that were once here would you approve or disapprove?" "I would see no problem and I believe you to be fully authorised." "This is the Gate of Damascus." "The area around of the Gate of Damascus." "Here, there is material to see, to observe, and then use for example in the scene when the Magi arrive before going to Bethlehem and ask for news from the people." "The market where they arrive could be like this one." "Except for the European clothes, the others must have remained more or less the same." "Some details might be useful to me as a memo a vague suggestion." "Some moments, when the multitude gathers around Christ waiting for a miracle." "The moment in which, for example, Christ suffers in seeing so much superstition in the crowd and he retreats to the other side of the lake, but they follow him." "The multitude that surrounded him waiting for miracles probably talked while they waited and ate some sweets like this old woman." "Let's go on to Bethlehem." "At the end of our journey let's go to what is, instead, the beginning of the story." "A tragic panorama, as you can see burnt by the sun, abandoned." "This grotto, which despite its rather modern shape must be very similar to the one where Christ was born." "I wanted to stop there, for a little field visit." "Now, of course, poor Arabs live in it poor ragged people, desirous of the miracle of a coin." "Continuing towards Don Andrea showed me that verse written by St. Paul which he had mentioned in Jerusalem." "Here it is:" "..."But God chose..."" ""...what is foolish in the world to shame the wise;..."" ""..." "God chose..."" ""...what is weak in the world to shame the strong"." ""God chose what is low and despised in the world..."" ""...even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are"." "And here is Bethlehem." "Not such an extremely modern neo-capitalistic city like Nazareth or like the Israeli Jerusalem, but a large, modern city full of cars, telephone poles." "And here, again, the eternal problem of my search surfaces which, at the end of the journey, has become a sort of obsession:" "...that of finding a Bethlehem that is the surrogate of Bethlehem of finding a little city, a village which has maintained its integrity through the millennia." "Truthfully, I have found very little in this sense either in Israel or in Jordan." "Yes, the biblical world appears, but it resurfaces like wreckage." "This is the square where the typical big church has been built to commemorate the grotto where Christ was born." "Here:" "Through that little door you enter the bowels of the earth and come to the grotto which tradition says is that where Christ was born." "Near the places of Act I, his birth, in the life of Christ this is the place of the supreme act." "A stupendous little Romanesque church commemorates the Ascension the most sublime moment of the entire evangelical story the moment in which Christ leaves us alone to search for him."