Libertarian Christianity and redemption in Roberto Rossellini and Pier Paolo Pasolini

Abstract

This article attempts to link literature and cinema through the concept of resistance, developed by Alfredo Bosi in the literary field, as a form of opposition to any type of violence and exploitation. For Bosi, this ethical concept is the unbreakable link that unites a writer to his or her historical moment. In Stromboli land of God (1949-50) and Francis, God’s Jester (1950), Rossellini turns to the sacred to reaffirm the forces of life in a world that had just emerged from the Second World War. In his film adaptation of the Gospel according to Saint Matthew (1964), Pier Paolo Pasolini uses the Scriptures as an instrument of opposition to a form of capitalism based only on technique, on utilitarian thinking and on increasingly exacerbated forms of consumption.